Yes.
Thou shalt not commit adultery. Exodus 20:14, Deuteronomy 5:18 Abstain from ... fornication. Acts 15:20 It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you. 1 Corinthians 5:1 The body is not for fornication. 1 Corinthians 6:13 Flee fornication. 1 Corinthians 6:18 Neither let us commit fornication. 1 Corinthians 10:8 And lest, when I come again, my God will humble me among you, and that I shall bewail many which have sinned already, and have not repented of the uncleanness and fornication and lasciviousness which they have committed. 2 Corinthians 12:21 Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, ... they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. Galatians 5:19-21 But fornication, ... let it not be once named among you. Ephesians 5:3 Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, ..., For which things' sake the wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience. Colossians 3:5-6 Ye should abstain from fornication. 1Thessalonians 4:3 Whoremongers and adulterers God will judge. Hebrews 13:4 Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire. Jude 7
Cited passages
“You shall not commit adultery.
“You shall not commit adultery.
but that we write to them that they abstain from the pollution of idols, from sexual immorality, from what is strangled, and from blood.
It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and such sexual immorality as is not even named among the Gentiles, that one has his father’s wife.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward reconciliation
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The legal and apostolic consensus against extramarital sex is overwhelming and unbroken across the canon. The Decalogue forbids adultery (Exod 20:14; Deut 5:18), and the New Testament condemns porneia (fornication) repeatedly and emphatically — the Apostolic Decree (Acts 15:20), the Corinthian correspondence (1 Cor 5:1; 6:13, 18; 10:8; 2 Cor 12:21), the vice lists of Galatians 5:19-21, Ephesians 5:3, and Colossians 3:5-6, the exhortation of 1 Thessalonians 4:3, and the warnings of Hebrews 13:4 and Jude 7. Against this uniform standard stands Hosea 1:2, where YHWH commands the prophet to "take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms," and Hosea 3:1, where he commands Hosea to "love a woman beloved of her friend, yet an adulteress."
The harmonization is well grounded and widely held: Hosea 1 and 3 are prophetic sign-acts, not endorsements of sexual immorality. Stuart (WBC Hosea), Garrett (NAC), and Dearman (NICOT) all read the marriage to Gomer as a divinely commanded living parable of Israel's covenant infidelity to YHWH. The genre is well attested. Isaiah walks naked and barefoot three years as a sign against Egypt (Isa 20:2-4); Ezekiel lies bound on his side 390 days and bakes bread over dung as a siege-enactment (Ezek 4); Jeremiah wears a wooden yoke (Jer 27) and buries a loincloth (Jer 13). Such acts are meaningful precisely as embodied prophecy, carrying rhetorical force that ordinary speech could not. Andersen and Freedman (AB Hosea) lay out the symbolic structure exhaustively, and on this reading Hosea is not himself committing adultery; he is marrying a woman of promiscuous character as a public, walking metaphor for YHWH's bond with faithless Israel. The blanket prohibitions on porneia therefore stand untouched: a unique, divinely commissioned symbolic marriage is not a general license, and the SAB's flat "fornication is OK when God commands it" badly misstates the genre.
What the sign-act reading does not fully dissolve is the divine-command problem. The command in 1:2 is not "marry a once-promiscuous woman now reformed"; it is to take a "wife of whoredoms" because "the land hath committed great whoredom." Hosea 3:1 commands love for a woman who is presently an adulteress, and 3:2 has the prophet acquiring her for fifteen pieces of silver and a quantity of barley — language of purchase that gives the transaction a morally untidy texture. Heschel (The Prophets) and Brueggemann (The Prophetic Imagination) both observe that the sign-acts characteristically implicate the prophet in conduct that stretches or contravenes ordinary ethical categories; that strain is part of their rhetorical power, not an accident. So even granting that this is not garden-variety fornication, the texts do depict God commanding behavior — marriage to and continued love of a sexually unfaithful partner — that his law elsewhere condemns, and doing so for a higher pedagogical purpose.
Weighing it: the apologetic reading correctly resolves the surface charge. The sign-act genre is real, the symbolic intent of Hosea is explicit, and nothing in the prophet's marriage licenses general sexual license; the SAB framing is blunt to the point of distortion. But the residual point is genuine and is itself a theologically interesting concession: the harmonization works only by affirming that God may suspend or override the ordinary application of his own moral commands when a greater revelatory purpose is in view. That is a coherent position with deep roots (compare the binding of Isaac, Gen 22), but it is not nothing — it concedes that the divine command and the divine law are, in this instance, in real if explicable tension.
Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonized — the sign-act genre defeats the crude reading, but a real divine-command tension remains.
Sources for this reading