For once, a topic not on the Holy Spirit!

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Here's an excerpt from an article about divorce and remarriage by a Biblical scholar. Recent Jewish research has given us quite a good understanding of what Jesus meant in his instructions on divorce. Check it out!

What God Has Joined Together
B Y D A V I D I N S T O N E - B R E W E R

Thanks to recent research in ancient Judaism, we have a
better understanding of the Pharisees’ question of Jesus,
“Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?”
We fi nd Jesus and Paul were in perfect agreement. They
both forbid divorce unless it is based on biblical grounds.

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The treasures found by Indiana Jones are boring compared to the fabulous discoveries made by two elderly widowed sisters in the 1890s, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson. After unexciting marriages to Scottish lawyers, during which they passed the time by learning ancient languages, they decided to set out on adventures in the Middle East. Their knowledge of Syriac, Aramaic, and other languages helped them gain entrance to St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai where they found more valuable manuscripts than the monks knew what to do with. The butter dish at one meal turned out to be fashioned from a fi fth-century Syriac Gospel!

Such discoveries spurred them to seek out other neglected manuscripts, and after following several leads they went to an old synagogue in Cairo where they found a Geniza (a rubbish room for sacred manuscripts) that had not been cleared out for a thousand years. They gained permission to take the oldest manuscripts to Cambridge University, where they arrived in several tea chests —so many, that scholars have only recently finished the work of identifying and cataloging them all. Their hoard included a copy of the Damascus Document, later also found at Qumran, where we fi nd the sect’s views on marriage, as well as a wealth of early Jewish marriage contracts which list the biblical grounds for divorce. These and other such discoveries have now enabled us to understand the question that the Pharisees asked Jesus about divorce, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?” (Matthew 19:3).

Another example of heroic scholarship is Jacob Neusner, who set himself the monumental work of analyzing ancient rabbinic literature, as found in the Talmuds and Midrashim, in the light of modern textual criticism. Several decades and over a thousand books later (yes, he has personally written and edited over a thousand books), his painstaking and laboriously detailed work has given scholars the tools and confidence to identify the earliest traditions within this literature. Many traditions date back to New Testament times and these have now enabled us to understand the answer that Jesus gave to the Pharisees’ question about divorce.

Before these discoveries, there were two main ways to understand Jesus’ teaching on divorce. The traditional church teaching, still followed by the Catholic Church, is that Jesus allowed divorce for only one cause, adultery, and that he only allowed remarriage after the death of a partner. This creates a contradiction with the Apostle Paul, who specifi cally allowed divorce only if it was carried out by a nonbeliever. Most Protestants have “solved” this by maintaining the traditional understanding of Jesus but adding Paul’s teaching as a second route to divorce. The second main interpretation, which was favored by many scholars, was that Jesus totally disallowed divorce and that the New Testament church added these two exceptions for practical reasons. The great regret, by almost all theologians, was that the church had not also added divorce for abuse and abandonment. Many modern interpreters have attempted, with varying success, to argue that biblical teaching implied that divorce was allowed for these additional grounds, while others, notably Luther, allowed divorce in such circumstances for reasons of common sense.

Thanks to recent research in ancient Judaism, we now have a better understanding of Pharisaic thinking than did the second-century church whose interpretation of Jesus’ teaching on divorce became the traditional doctrine. When the Pharisees asked Jesus “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?” the early church thought that the question meant “Is divorce ever lawful?” We now know that Jewish rabbis at the time of Jesus were debating a new and very popular form of divorce called the “Any Cause” divorce, which implies that their question to Jesus should be understood as “Is it lawful to use the Any Cause divorce?”

J E S U S A N D T H E D I V O R C E D E B A T E
Hillelite Pharisees invented this new form of divorce by dividing up the scriptural phrase “a cause of indecency” (translated as “something objectionable” in the NRSV), which is the ground for divorce in Deuteronomy 24:1. They said that this phrase included two grounds for divorce: “indecency” (i.e., adultery) and “a cause” (i.e., any cause). They emphasized their conclusion that “a cause” meant “any cause” by saying that you could divorce a wife even if she burned a single meal. This was, unsurprisingly, considered controversial, and early rabbinic traditions record the debate that they had with their rivals, the Shammaite Pharisees. The Shammaites agreed that “indecency” meant “adultery” but argued that “a cause of indecency” should be regarded as a single phrase and should not be divided up to produce an extra ground for divorce. They said that the whole phrase meant “nothing except adultery.”

In this rabbinic debate we find the origins of two phrases used by Matthew when he recorded the Pharisees’ debate with Jesus. They asked him about the new Hillelite “Any Cause” divorce, and he replied with the Shammaite slogan, “nothing except adultery.” This does not mean that Jesus was a Shammaite, but he agreed with them (as most modern exegetes would) that you should not artificially divide up a phrase in order to create a new ground for divorce. These terms and the whole debate were very familiar to Jesus and the listening crowd, for whom this was an important and practical area of theology. Mark does not bother to include these two terms in his account because his readers would have mentally inserted them in any case. Mark records the question in an abbreviated way, which was probably the way it was originally expressed: “Is it lawful to divorce your wife?” (Mark 10:2). This abbreviated version is like the question “Is it lawful for a sixteen-year-old to drink?” to which any modern reader would mentally append the words “alcoholic beverages.” These additional words are unnecessary because without them the question is absurd—one would die without anything to drink. In the same way, Mark’s readers would mentally append “for Any Cause,” because it was absurd to ask if divorce itself was legal—divorce was legislated in the Law of Moses as in all other ancient law codes.

If Jesus was being asked about the new Any Cause divorce and if he answered with the well-known phrase “nothing except adultery,” what did he mean? Unless Jesus was trying to deliberately mislead his listeners, he presumably meant the same thing that others in the crowd would have meant when they used this phrase in this context. When the Pharisees used this phrase in the divorce debate, they meant that the words “a cause of indecency” in Deuteronomy 24:1 mean “nothing but adultery.” They did not mean that there are “no grounds for divorce except adultery,” which is how we have traditionally understood these words when spoken by Jesus. They believed that Scripture also allowed divorce for neglect and infertility. Infertility was a ground for divorce because the command to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:22, 28) made it the duty of every Jewish male to marry and have children. Jesus specifically ruled out this ground for divorce by stating (contrary to Hillelite and Shammaite teaching) that marriage and procreation were optional (Matthew 19:12). But Jesus was silent about the grounds for divorce based on neglect.

Neglect was the normal ground for divorce before the Any Cause divorce was invented and before the increase of adultery in “this generation” (Mark 8:38; Matthew 12:38; 16:4; cf. m. Sot. 9:9), which was probably due to the presence of Roman soldiers in the first century. Neglect was defined on the basis of Exodus 21:7-11, where a slave wife is guaranteed “food, clothing, and love” and allowed her freedom from the marriage if these are neglected. It was assumed that if the lowest of society had these rights, the rest of society certainly shared them. Therefore anyone (man or woman) who suffered neglect could demand a divorce. In contrast to divorces for adultery or for Any Cause that could only be brought by a man (since they were based on Deuteronomy 24:1 that refers only to men), divorces for neglect could be brought by a woman. Men had to provide the food and wool, or money to buy these, while women had to prepare them by cooking, sewing, and weaving. The rabbis defined the minimum owed by each spouse and even the minimum amount of lovemaking that could be cited as neglect. They debated about these details, but no rabbi ever questioned the validity of divorce for neglect. Evidence for the general application of this law is found in surviving marriage certificates (which often list the possible grounds for divorce) and divorce certificates.

Why was Jesus silent about the most important ground for divorce? Did his silence imply that he disagreed with it, or that he agreed with it? Arguments from silence are notoriously difficult: Jesus was silent about the law that rebellious teenagers should be stoned (Deuteronomy 21:18-21), but he was equally silent about the laws against rape. However, his silence in this case is difficult to ignore, because Jesus chose to be vocal about so many aspects concerning
divorce. He was asked a simple question about his views on the Any Cause divorce, and yet his reply (Matthew 19:4-12) concerned many other matters: he criticized polygamy (which all Jews except the Qumran sect affirmed);10 he denied that divorce was compulsory for adultery (which all Jews affirmed);11 he denied that procreation was a commandment (which all Jews except perhaps the Qumran sect affirmed); and he emphasized forgiveness for broken marriage
vows rather than divorce.12 Jesus was clearly keen to highlight all the aspects where he disagreed with current Jewish theology on divorce and marriage, even if they were tangential to the question he had been asked. His silence on divorce for neglect is therefore deafening. As far as we know, there was no branch of Judaism that denied the provisions of neglect in Exodus 21:10-11, and yet Jesus did not mention any disagreement with it. The natural conclusion is
that Jesus agreed with the provisions of this law and its application.

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To read more, email me at de_trashcan@yahoo.com.sg and I'll send you the full article. =)