na'aph

The lexica converge tightly: BDB, HALOT, and DCH define נאף as intercourse involving a married or betrothed woman and a man not her husband, with DCH and TDOT noting the metaphorical extension to covenant unfaithfulness toward YHWH. Freedman and Willoughby (TDOT IX) stress that נאף is strictly juridical whereas זנה is the broader, often metaphorical term, a distinction Phyllis Bird made standard. The defining feature is the gender asymmetry of the legal category (Tigay): the operative variable is the woman's marital status, the married man's involvement with an unattached woman not being נאף per se. The root is strikingly isolated, with no Akkadian cognate (Akkadian law uses nâku, "have intercourse," with adultery supplied by the object's status), so Hebrew is unusual in encoding the adulterous nature in the verb itself. Comparative law drives the main debate: Westbrook reads Lev 20:10 and Deut 22:22 as rhetorical ceilings within a unified ANE tradition where the husband retained discretion; Phillips reads the death penalty as a mandatory crime against the covenant community with the husband's discretion withdrawn; McKeating distinguishes code from praxis. The prophets (Hosea first, then Jeremiah and Ezekiel) exploit the term's legal precision to brand idolatry and foreign alliance as capital covenant betrayal, gendering the metaphor exclusively feminine; this prophetic rhetoric is the focus of an extensive feminist critique (Setel, Weems, Exum, Linda Day, Baumann). Proverbs and Job, by contrast, treat adultery prudentially as self-destructive folly punished by the human husband, not by God (Fox).