If any of your women is guilty of unnatural offence, bring four of your witnesses to give evidence; if they testify against them, retain them in the houses until death overtakes them or God provides some other way for them. 15 And as for the two of you who are guilty thereof, punish them both. And if they repent and improve, then let them be. Lo! Allah is ever relenting, Merciful. 16 God shall turn only towards those who do evil in ignorance, then shortly repent; God will return towards those; God is All-knowing, All-wise. 17 But God shall not turn towards those who do evil deeds until, when one of them is visited by death, he says, 'Indeed now I repent,' neither to those who die disbelieving; for them We have prepared a painful chastisement. 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 And if you wish to change one wife for another and you have given her heaps of treasure, do not take back anything from it; will you take it back by slander and open sin? 20 And how could you take it (back) while you have gone in unto each other, and they have taken from you a firm and strong covenant? 21 And marry not women whom your fathers married, except what has already passed; indeed it was shameful and most hateful, and an evil way. 22