Mark 10:11-12: No Divorce and Remarriage?

This was felt to be a hard saying by the disciples who first heard it; it is no less a hard saying for many of their present-day successors.

Jesus was asked to give a ruling on a point of law which was debated in the Jewish schools. In Deuteronomy 24:1-4 there is a law which says in effect, "When a man divorces his wife because he has found `some indecency' in her, and she is then married to someone else who divorces her in his turn, her former husband may not take her back to be his wife again." This, forbidding a man who has divorced his wife to marry her again after she has lived with a second husband, does not lay down the procedure for divorce; it assumes this procedure as already in being. Nowhere in the Old Testament law is there an explicit command about the divorce procedure, but in this context it is implied that to divorce a woman a man had to make a written declaration that she was no longer his wife: "he writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house" (Deut 24:1). Elsewhere in the Old Testament divorce is disparaged as something unworthy: " `I hate divorce,' says the LORD God of Israel," according to the prophet Malachi (Mal 2:16).

But in Deuteronomy 24 it is assumed that a man may divorce his wife, and that he may do so on account of "something indecent" or "something shameful" (NEB) that he has found in her. The interpreters of the law around the time of our Lord, who were concerned not only with deciding what it meant but with applying it to contemporary life, paid special attention to this phrase. What, they asked, might be indicated by this indecency or unseemliness which justified a man in divorcing his wife?

There were two main schools of thought: one which interpreted it stringently, another which interpreted it more broadly. The former school, which followed the direction of Shammai, a leading rabbi who lived a generation or so before Jesus, said that a man was authorized to divorce his wife if he married her on the understanding that she was a virgin and then discovered that she was not. There was, in fact, an enactment covering this eventuality in the law of Deuteronomy (Deut 22:13-21), and the consequences could be very serious for the bride if the evidence was interpreted to mean that she had had illicit sexual relations before marriage. This, then, was one school's understanding of "some indecency."

The other school, following the lead of Shammai's contemporary Hillel, held that "something indecent" might include more or less anything which her husband found offensive. She could cease to "find favor in his eyes" for a variety of reasons--if she served up badly cooked food, for example, or even (one rabbi said) because he found her less beautiful than some other woman. It should be emphasized that the rabbis who gave these literal interpretations were not moved by a desire to make divorce easy; they were concerned to state what they believed to be the meaning of a particular Scripture.

It was against this background that Jesus was invited to say what he thought. The Pharisees who put the question to him were themselves divided over the matter. In Matthew's account of the incident, they asked him, "Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?" (Mt 19:3 RSV). If his answer was yes, they would want to know for what cause or causes, in his judgment, divorce was permissible. He gave them his answer and then, in private, expanded it for the benefit of his disciples who had heard it.

As usual, he bypassed the traditional interpretation of the rabbinical schools and appealed to the Scriptures. "What did Moses command you?" he asked. "Moses," they replied (referring to Deut 24:1 RSV), "allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to put her away." They rightly said "Moses allowed," not "Moses commanded"; the enactment to which they referred, as we have seen, took for granted the existing divorce procedure and wove it into a commandment relating to a further contingency. But Jesus told them that it was "because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law." Then, as with the sabbath law, so with the marriage law, he went back to first principles. "At the beginning of creation," he said, "God `made them male and female.' `For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.' So they are no longer two but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate" (Mk 10:2-9).

Jesus reminds them of the biblical account of the institution of marriage. The marriage law must conform with the purpose for which marriage was instituted by God. It was instituted to create a new unity of two persons, and no provision was made for the dissolving of that unity. Jesus does not idealize marriage. He does not say that every marriage is made in heaven; he says that marriage itself is made in heaven--that is, instituted by God. To the question "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" his answer, in effect, is "No; not for any cause."
There is a feature of Jesus' answer to the Pharisees that could easily be overlooked. The stringent interpretation of the school of Shammai and the "liberal" interpretation of the school of Hillel were both given from the husband's point of view. In the stringent interpretation it was the bride's virginity that had to be above suspicion; the bridegroom's chastity before marriage did not enter into the picture. As for the "liberal" interpretation, it was liberal in the husband's interest, in that it permitted him to divorce his wife for a variety of reasons; so far as the wife's interest was concerned, it was most illiberal, for she had little opportunity of redress if her husband decided to divorce her within the meaning of the law as "liberally" interpreted. What was true of these interpretations was true of the original legislation which they undertook to expound: it was because of the hardness of men's hearts that divorce was conceded. The law was unequally balanced to the disadvantage of women, and Jesus' ruling, with its appeal to the Creator's intention, had the effect of redressing this unequal balance. It is not surprising that women regularly recognized in Jesus one who was their friend and champion.

We may observe in passing that, in referring to the creation ordinance, Jesus combined a text from the creation narrative of Genesis 1 with one from the narrative of Genesis 2. In Genesis 1:27, when "God created man in his own image," the "man" whom he so created was humanity, comprising both sexes: "male and female he created them." And in Genesis 2:24, after the story of the formation of Eve from Adam's side, the narrator adds: "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh." That may be the narrator's comment on the story, but Jesus quotes it as the word of God. It is by God's ordinance that the two become one; men are given no authority to modify that ordinance.

When the disciples asked Jesus to clarify his ruling, he reworded it in the two statements quoted at the head of this section. The second of the two statements refers to a situation not contemplated in the Old Testament law, which made no provision for a wife to divorce her husband and marry another man. It has therefore been thought that this second statement is a corollary added to Jesus' original ruling when Christianity had made its way into the Gentile world. In a number of Gentile law codes it was possible for a wife to initiate divorce proceedings, as it was not under Jewish law. But at the time when Jesus spoke there was a recent cause celebre in his own country, to which he could well have referred.

Less than ten years before, Herodias, a granddaughter of Herod the Great, who had been married to her uncle Herod Philip and lived with him in Rome, fell in love with another uncle, Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea, when he paid a visit to Rome. In order to marry Antipas (as Antipas also desired), she divorced her first husband. She did so under Roman law, since she was a Roman citizen (like all members of the Herod family). For a woman to marry her uncle was not a breach of Jewish law, as it was commonly interpreted at that time, but it was certainly a breach of Jewish law for her to marry her husband's brother. John the Baptist was imprisoned by Herod Antipas for insisting that it was unlawful for him to be married to his brother's wife. Jesus named no names, but any reference at that time, either in Galilee or in Perea, to a woman divorcing her husband and marrying someone else was bound to make hearers think of Herodias. If the suggestion that she was living in adultery came to her ears, Jesus would incur her mortal resentment as surely as John the Baptist had done.

But it was his words about divorce and remarriage on a man's part that his disciples found hard to take. Could a man not get rid of his wife for any cause? It seemed not, according to the plain understanding of what Jesus said. No wonder then that in the course of time the hardness of men's hearts modified his ruling, as earlier it had modified the Creator's original intention.

In Matthew's version of this interchange, Jesus' ruling is amplified by the addition of a few words: "anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery" (Mt 19:9). The same exception appears in another occurrence of his ruling in this Gospel, in the Sermon on the Mount: "Anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery" (Mt 5:32). The ruling in this latter form appears also in Luke 16:18, but without the exceptive clause; the exceptive clause is found in Matthew's Gospel only, and found twice over.

What is to be made of the exceptive clause? Is it an addition reflecting the hardness of men's hearts? Or is it an expansion stating the obvious--that if something is done which by its very nature dissolves the marriage bond, then the bond is dissolved? Is it an attempt to conform Jesus' ruling to Shammai's interpretation--that if the bride is found to have had an illicit sexual relation before her marriage, her husband is entitled to put her away? All these suggestions have been ventilated. Most probable is the view that the exceptive clause is designed to adapt the ruling to the circumstances of the Gentile mission. If this is so, the term "marital unfaithfulness" or "unchastity" (RSV) has a technical sense, referring to sexual unions that, while they might be sanctioned by use and wont in some parts of the Gentile world, were forbidden by the marriage law of Israel. It is a matter of history that the church's traditional marriage law, with its list of relationships within which marriage might not take place, was based on that of Israel. What was to be done if two people, married within such forbidden degrees, were converted from paganism to Christianity? In this situation the marriage might be dissolved.

Certainly the Gentile mission introduced problems that were not present in the context of Jesus' ministry. One of these problems cropped up in Paul's mission field, and Paul introduced his own "exceptive clause" to take care of it, although in general he took over Jesus' prohibition of divorce among his followers. Some of Paul's converts put to him the case of a man or woman, converted from paganism to Christianity, whose wife or husband walked out because of the partner's conversion and refused to continue the marriage relationship. In such a situation, said Paul, let the non-Christian partner go; do not have recourse to law or any other means to compel him or her to return. The deserted spouse is no longer bound by the marriage tie which has been broken in this way. Otherwise, he said, "To the married I give this command (not I but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband. But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife" (1 Cor 7:10-11).

Plainly Paul, a considerable time before Mark's Gospel was written, knew what Jesus had laid down on the subject of marriage and divorce, and knew it in the same sense as Mark's account. Like his Master, Paul treated women as persons and not as part of their husbands' property. But the disciples who first heard Jesus' ruling on the subject found it revolutionary, and not altogether welcome; it took them some time to reconcile themselves to it.
Is it wise to take Jesus' rulings on this or other practical issues and give them legislative force? Perhaps not. The trouble is that, if they are given legislative force, exceptive clauses are bound to be added to cover special cases, and arguments will be prolonged about the various situations which are, or are not, included in the terms of those exceptive clauses. It is better, probably, to let his words stand in their uncompromising rigor as the ideal at which his followers ought to aim. Legislation has to make provision for the hardness of men's hearts, but Jesus showed a more excellent way than the way of legislation and supplies the power to change the human heart and make his ideal a practical possibility.