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.