What does the Torah say husbands owe their wives?

Buried in the case law of Exodus 21 is a verse that most people have never heard, establishing enforceable legal rights for wives three millennia before any modern legal code:

שְׁאֵרָהּ כְּסוּתָהּ וְעֹנָתָהּ לֹא יִגְרָע

"Her food, her clothing, and her conjugal rights he shall not diminish." — Exodus 21:10

Three entitlements, stated plainly. She'er (שְׁאֵר, H7607) is food or sustenance. Kesut (כְּסוּת, H3682) is clothing. And 'onah (עֹנָה, H5772) — conjugal rights — is a word that appears only this one time in the entire Hebrew Bible. The ancient translators knew exactly what it meant: the Septuagint renders it homilia (ὁμιλία, "conjugal intercourse").

All three obligations fall on the husband — the Hebrew syntax is unambiguous. And the law does not merely suggest that husbands should be kind. The very next verse states the consequence for failure: "she shall go out free, without payment" (Exodus 21:11). This is not moral exhortation. It is a legal mechanism for the wife's release. The Torah gave her grounds to leave.

Deuteronomy 24:5 makes the positive side of this obligation explicit. When a man takes a new wife, Torah exempts him from military service for a full year so that "he shall be free for his home one year and shall bring happiness to his wife" (שָׂמַח, simach, H8055, Piel — "gladden"). The husband owes his wife not just material provision but active, deliberate happiness.

Then Paul does something striking in 1 Corinthians 7. He takes the Torah's one-directional legal floor and makes it symmetrical:

"Let the husband render to the wife the obligation due, and likewise also the wife to the husband." — 1 Corinthians 7:3

The word he uses — opheilē (ὀφειλή, G3782) — is the standard Greek word for a financial debt. Paul is not speaking metaphorically. And he uses homoiōs (ὁμοίως, G3668, "in the same manner") twice in verses 3–4, so the symmetry is structural and deliberate. The Torah set a minimum floor for what husbands owe wives. Paul took that floor and extended it to both parties.

For the full analysis of the Zelophehad daughters' inheritance case and the complete legal provisions table, see Men and Women Under Torah, section "Provisions for Women."