Deuteronomy 22:18

And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him;

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

22:13-30 These and the like regulations might be needful then, and yet it is not necessary that we should curiously examine respecting them. The laws relate to the seventh commandment, laying a restraint upon fleshly lusts which war against the soul.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

Compare Numbers 15:38 and its note.

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

13-30. If a man take a wife, &c.—The regulations that follow might be imperatively needful in the then situation of the Israelites; and yet, it is not necessary that we should curiously and impertinently inquire into them. So far was it from being unworthy of God to leave such things upon record, that the enactments must heighten our admiration of His wisdom and goodness in the management of a people so perverse and so given to irregular passions. Nor is it a better argument that the Scriptures were not written by inspiration of God to object that this passage, and others of a like nature, tend to corrupt the imagination and will be abused by evil-disposed readers, than it is to say that the sun was not created by God, because its light may be abused by wicked men as an assistant in committing crimes which they have meditated [Horne].

Matthew Poole's Commentary

Either,

1. By the following mulct. Or,

2. By severe reproofs, which that word oft signifies. Or,

3. By stripes, as is expressed, Deu 25:2,3. Which is not strange, considering how precious a thing one’s good name is, of which he endeavoured to deprive his wife.

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

And the elders of that city shall take the man, and chastise him. Not with words, but blows. Jarchi interprets it of beating, and so does the Talmud (x); and both the Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan render it,"shall beat him;''

that is, with the beating or scourging of forty stripes, save one.

(x) T. Bab. Cetubot, fol. 46. 1.

Geneva Study Bible

And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him;

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

18. chastise him] According to Josephus, IV. Antt. viii. 23, he received 39 stripes; see on Deuteronomy 25:3. But the vb probably means merely to rebuke, cp. Deuteronomy 21:18.

Deuteronomy 22:18

Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament

The elders, as the magistrates of the place, were then to send for the man who had so calumniated his young wife, and to chastise him (יסּר, as in Deuteronomy 21:18, used to denote bodily chastisement, thought the limitation of the number of strokes to forty save one, may have been a later institution of the schools); and in addition to this they were to impose a fine upon him of 100 shekels of silver, which he was to pay to the father of the young wife for his malicious calumniation of an Israelitish maiden, - twice as much as the seducer of a virgin was to pay to her father for the reproach brought upon him by the humiliation of his daughter (Deuteronomy 22:29); and lastly, they were to deprive the man of the right of divorce from his wife.