God And Divorce

So what else was Jesus addressing here? Before I can answer that, we must first clear up what He actually said. Jesus spoke Hebrew, but our New Testament was translated from the Greek. There are places in the New Testament when the translation of certain words changed the meaning of what was being said and this is one of those cases. Our bibles read as follows: "I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery." Based on this translation you would believe that anyone who gets divorce except for marital unfaithfulness (sexual immorality) and remarried would be committing adultery. Based on what we had already discussed, this could not be totally accurate. The mistranslation of the word “and” between the two words unfaithfulness and marries changes the verse completely and thus have caused many good people to believe they are living in sin for getting a justified divorce and remarrying. So how should the verse read according to the Hebrew – which was the language Jesus spoke? It should read "I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, in order to marry another woman commits adultery." And when you tie in what is recorded in Luke 16:18, the one who marries the divorce woman would also be committing adultery. So what Jesus was saying was that if a man gives a certificate of divorce to his wife in order to marry someone else, that man when he remarries is committing adultery and the man who marries his divorced wife would be committing adultery. The reason for this is that the divorce was invalid because the husband did not have a valid reason to get the divorce in the first place. He wanted to marry someone else so he divorced his first wife to marry the second. In this case Jesus said the man would be committing adultery after he married his second wife.

Now, why did Jesus answer in the Pharisees question in this manner? They ask could a man get divorced for any reason which included getting a divorce so that he could marry someone else. In His response, Jesus was addressing a debate that had been going on since before he was born. A few decades before Jesus was born, the two most famous rabbis, Hillel and Shammai, (each having their own schools and followers) debated the interpretation of Deuteronomy 24. Hillel noted the text said a man could divorce his wife for "a cause of sexual immorality." Since rabbis believed that every word in Scripture was there for a reason, Hillel decided that this word "cause" must refer to another ground for divorce besides sexual immorality and interpreted it to mean “any cause”. Hillel believed a man could leave his wife for any reason: from her wearing her hair unbound to burning the bread to not looking good when the man came home from the fields. Shammai, on the other hand, thought that Deut. 24 only referred to sexual immorality, and that this "any cause" divorce was wrong. As you can imagine, Hillel’s "any cause" divorce was very popular among Jewish men. It was much easier to get, though it was more expensive. It is possible that this is what Joseph was thinking of when he considered divorcing Mary "quietly" in Matthew 1:19, “quietly" being a technical term. By Joseph doing this quietly, he would graciously refuse to charge her with infidelity, and get an "any cause" divorce even though he’d still have to pay the bridal inheritance.