After being asked whether an adulterous woman should be stoned, “Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.”
What he wrote on the ground is not known, but it has been a long Christian tradition to take a guess.
Augustine describes God writing the Law on the tables of stone for hard hearts, and perhaps the Lord is writing here on the ground to produce mercy and softened hearts.
Jerome thought he could be writing the names of the accusers in the earth according to a prophecy in Jer 17:13 about Israel forsaking the fountain of living waters.
Calvin said Jesus was ignoring the Pharisees, showing their unworthiness to be heard by writing on the ground.
Another theory is that he was writing the commandments or a missed technicality in Leviticus 20.
According to Clarke, there are manuscripts that add “their sins” to describe what Jesus wrote. Despite it not being part of the Bible, this aligns with the most popular preaching which is that Jesus wrote the sins of the accusers to convict them.
Yet even though John 8:9 speaks of the accusers being convicted, it does not say it was due to what was written on the ground.
After the first time Jesus wrote on the ground, the Pharisees merely “continued asking him” as if he had not heard them (John 8:7).
John 8:9 says they were convicted “by their own conscience”, not something written, and that only after they “heard” what Jesus said, not what he wrote.
The text does not indicate anyone reading anything on the ground! For all we know Jesus could have been writing Mary’s recipe for angel food cake.
The conviction came after they heard the amazing response of John 8:8 that upheld the law in justice and mercy: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”
When reading the Bible, don’t get so distracted at what is not recorded that you miss what is said for you to hear. Faith and understanding are not built upon what we don’t know, but by hearing the word of God (Rom 10:17).
For Your Edification,
Justin “no stones” Johnson