A married woman betrayed her husband with a robber — and the story that unfolds from this betrayal became a cautionary tale about the entanglement of sin and its consequences. The story appears in multiple collections including the works of Farhi and Eisenstein.
The woman's husband was an honest man, trusting and unsuspecting. The robber was charming, dangerous, and skilled at deception. The affair continued in secret until, as always happens in rabbinic tales, the truth began to surface.
The robber, emboldened by the woman's complicity, devised a plan to steal the husband's wealth. The woman, now trapped between her lover and her husband, found herself cooperating with the theft — not out of greed but out of fear that her affair would be exposed if she refused.
One sin led to the next. The affair led to theft. The theft led to violence. The violence led to ruin. By the end of the story, every person involved — the faithless woman, the robber, and the innocent husband — had been destroyed by a chain of events that began with a single act of betrayal.
The sages used this story to illustrate the principle of aveirah (a transgression) goreret aveirah — "one transgression leads to another" (Pirkei Avot 4:2). Sin is not a single event. It is a cascade. The first sin creates the conditions for the second. The second makes the third inevitable. By the time the sinner realizes how far they have fallen, the damage is irreversible.
The antidote, the sages taught, is to stop at the first sin — to recognize the cascade before it begins. The woman who resists the robber's advances never becomes his accomplice. The chain that is never forged can never drag anyone down.