4:15-16: what the text actually prescribes, and it is neither stoning nor execution

Two verses joined by a single "and," one continuous procedure

The و ("and") opening 4:16 explicitly links the two verses as a single continuous procedure, applied to two configurations. The four-witness condition set in 4:15 therefore logically extends to the case in 4:16: neither case is judged without this same evidentiary lock, already extremely difficult to meet in practice.

For women: no legal penalty, but protection against a real social risk

The text prescribes, for the woman in this case, no penal sanction whatsoever. The only instruction is: "confine them to their homes rather than casting them out." This is not a punishment — it is a protection, addressed to the family, against a very real risk in a society where the woman structurally depends on the household for her subsistence: that of being expelled by her own family, out of fear of public opinion or perceived damage to honor. The text anticipates this reflex and explicitly forbids it, opening only a legitimate way out: "until death claims them, or God opens a way for them" — a marriage, a change of circumstance, left to providence, never to hasty expulsion.

For men: the same level of legal gravity, but not the same social risk to cover

The masculine dual used in 4:16 (اللذان, "the two [men]") targets, in continuity with the subject opened in 4:15, an act of the same nature, between two men, established under the same evidentiary conditions. Here, the only sanction prescribed is فَآذُوهُمَا, from the root أذى, whose invariant, verified across 24 occurrences in the corpus, is "to cause minor harm, to reproach, a real but minor wrong that never reaches the register of destruction" (the same word used in 2:222 for menstrual discomfort). Concretely: a rebuke, a word of reproach, an expressed social discomfort — never an execution, never the act of hurling someone from a height.

Why does the text not provide, for the man, the same protective clause against expulsion as for the woman? Because the risk is simply not symmetrical. In a default social structure, casting a woman out of the household exposes her to an immediate and concrete vulnerability, which therefore had to be explicitly prevented. Casting a man out of the household does not carry the same weight: it is neither a typical social risk nor a comparable threat to subsistence, in a structure where the man otherwise bears the financial responsibility (as established in 4:34 and 4:11). The absence of a parallel clause is therefore not a difference in the severity of the sanction — it is identical, a mere verbal reproach in both cases — but a difference in the ancillary risk each configuration presented, one that only the woman's case required neutralizing explicitly.

What unites the two verses, despite their nuances

In both cases, this is never a matter brought before a tribunal, a public authority, or a judicial body: it is a matter handled within the family, with an evidentiary lock nearly impossible to meet (four witnesses to a private act), and an exit systematically opened through repentance: "but if they turn back and reform, leave them be." No capital punishment, no mutilation, no public execution appears in this text, for either case.

The contrast with زنى (fornication) is decisive here. For fornication (24:2), the text provides an explicit, quantified, and public legal penalty: one hundred lashes, carried out "before a group of believers" — and 4:25 adjusts this penalty according to status: half, i.e. fifty lashes, for a woman bound by pledge rather than protected by a full marriage contract. In both cases, a legal penalty exists, it is quantified, and its execution is public.

Nothing of the sort exists in 4:15-16. No number of lashes, no execution before witnesses, no codified legal penalty: only a protective confinement without punishment for the woman, and a minor verbal reproach for the man, both confined to the family sphere. The difference in treatment between زنى (a public, quantified legal penalty) and the case of 4:15-16 (total absence of legal penalty) is itself a fact of the text, not an interpretation: it shows that the lawgiver clearly distinguishes the two situations, and never transposed onto the second the punitive regime prescribed for the first.