If any of your women commit fornication, call in four male witnesses from among yourselves against them; if they testify to their guilt, confine them to the house until death releases them or until God gives them another way out. 15 If any two people commit fornication, punish them. If they repent and reform, let them go. God is All-forgiving and All-merciful. 16 God does accept repentance, but only of those who are guilty of an evil out of ignorance yet quickly repent, and God turns to them again, for God is all-knowing and all-wise. 17 Forgiveness is not for those who continue to do evil deeds until, when death comes upon one of them, he says: "Now I repent!" nor from those who die as deniers of the truth. We have prepared a painful punishment for them. 18 O believers, you are not allowed to take perforce the women (of dead relatives) into your heritage, or tyrannise over them in order to deprive them of what you have given them, unless they are guilty of open adultery. Live with them with tolerance and justice even if you do not care for them. For it may well be you may not like a thing, yet God may have endued it with much goodness. 19 But if you desire to give up a wife and to take another in her stead, do not take away anything of what you have given the first one, however much it may have been. Would you, perchance, take it away by slandering her and thus committing a manifest sin? 20 How shall you take it, when each of you has been privily with the other, and they have taken from you a solemn compact? 21 And do not marry the women who were wedded to your fathers (and grand fathers), except what has already passed; that is indeed an act of shame and great wrong; and an evil way. 22