Divorce in the time of Jesus.

The Christian view of marriage has come to be widely accepted by the majority, even in these permissive days. Marriage is regarded as the perfect union of body, mind and spirit between a man and a woman.

But things were very much different in the age that Paul wrote his letters which have become two thirds of our New Testament scriptures.

Paul was a Jew and the Jews had a low view of women. Morning prayers for a Jew had a sentence in which a Jewish man gave thanks that God had not made him “a Gentile, a slave or a woman.”

In Jewish law a woman was not a person, but a thing. She had no legal rights whatsoever; she was absolutely her husband’s possession to do with as he willed.

In theory the Jew had the highest ideal of marriage. The Rabbis taught: “Every Jew must surrender his life rather than commit idolatry, murder or adultery.” Another recorded teaching: “The very altar sheds tears when a man divorces the wife of his youth.” But in the era when Paul lived and wrote, Divorce had become sadly easy.

The law for a divorce is summarized in Deuteronomy 24:1. “When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, he writes her a bill of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house.”

So what is “indecency”?

Stricter Rabbis taught that the phrase meant adultery and adultery alone was the grounds for a divorce, and there was no other. The more liberal Rabbis taught a much wider cause that could lead to divorce. A man could divorce his wife if she put too much salt in his dinner. It could be that she did not cover her head in public, or she could end the marriage by speaking to another man outside the home. Also, if she spoke disrespectfully of her husband’s parents in her husband’s hearing, she could be put out of the marriage, to name just a few.

The twist is that the woman had no rights of divorce at all, except if the husband became a leper or an apostate or engaged in a disgusting trade.

The process of divorce was simple and easy. Mosaic Law said that a man who wished a divorce had to hand his wife a bill of divorce and a letter of dismissal. This was a “deed of liberation, that thou mayest marry whatsoever man thou wilt.” This had to be written correctly by a Rabbi, and handed to the wife in the presence of two witnesses and the divorce was complete. The only other event was her dowry must be returned.

You can see how the teachings of Saul turned Paul caused major rethinking about the place and role of woman and marriage. When a Jew became a Christian it was a completely different view of the role of both the woman and the child.

A child's life in the time of Jesus

Having wondered about and curious about the world that Jesus and Paul lived in and what it was like, I have gathered the following items.
Let me begin with one of the strangest in my estimation.

There was for the Romans practice and law, (patria potestas), the father’s power. With this power a Roman father had absolute power over all members of his family. This allowed him to sell any member of his family as slaves, he could make any member of the family work in the fields and do so in chains if he chose, and he could punish even to the death penalty and do it legally.

This power extended over a child’s total life span, and did so as long as the father lived. Therefore a Roman son never came of age to be his own man. This held true if the son rose to political heights, received honors, was vastly rich, he was still under his father’s power.

This power of the father was seldom carried to extreme because public opinion would have not have allowed it. Paul would have been very much aware of this as he wrote in Ephesians 6:1 “Children, obey your parents, as Christian children should.”

There was also the custom of child exposure. When a child was born, it was placed at its father’s feet, and if the father stooped and lifted the child, it was accepted and kept. If he walked away, it meant the child was to be quite literally be thrown out.

Barkley quotes a letter written in 1 B.C. from a man called Hilarion to his wife Alis. “….when you have a child, if it is a boy, let it live; if it is a girl throw it out.”

Unwanted children were commonly left in the Roman forum, and became the property of anyone who cared to pick them up. Girls were most often left, picked up, and raised to be sold as slaves or to stock the brothels of Rome.

The philosopher Seneca writes. “We slaughter a fierce ox; we strangle a mad dog; we plunge the knife into sickly cattle; children who are born weakly and deformed we down.”

It was against this practice that Paul wrote as he did, and if you ever consider what Christianity did for the world, point to the status of woman and children.

(This taken from Barkley,1976, pages 174-177)

Paul writes that children should obey their parents and to honor their parents. He says this is the fist commandment. I believe he said this as the first commandment the children were to memorize. The way to honor one’s parents was to obey them, respect them, and not cause them regret, pain or sorrow.

The other side of the coin is that father’s are not to “provoke their children to wrath”. Then as now, Mom’s were often more tender hearted than fathers, who are more often inclined to each for the belt.

Paul comments on this in Colossians 3:21. “Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.” Criticism over done, and unreasonable discipline can break a man’s or child’s spirit.

This could very well have been Saul who became Paul experience. He could have well had a harsh child hood upbringing and one that was the most demanding in his Jewish culture. Paul was raised to be a Pharisee, the strictest of all the Orthodox Jewish life styles.

We need to remember that times change. A mother says I was never allowed to do that when I was a child, and the daughter answers: ”That was then and I am now.”

We can have such control that it deforms a child, mostly by stunted growth of spirit. It means the child is not trusted and it also means the parents do not trust their upbringing.

We as parents can forget the duty of encouragement. A child’s best effort recognized and praised can well plant the germ that can flower into a life skill or direction.