Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

No one can honor God externally while remaining far from God in one’s heart. In essence Jesus did nothing in the first antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount but set before the eyes of his audience this basic knowledge of the Torah about the indivisibility of the human. Certainly in doing so he was being provocative and speaking with the utmost radicality. But for him it was about the Torah of Sinai.

Divorce Is Forbidden

In very similar fashion Jesus provokes his audience in the third antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount. The antithesis form is secondary here.²⁷ Also, the clause that permits divorce in the case of adultery was added by Matthew or the tradition before him. Originally the prohibition of divorce was probably worded something like this: “Anyone who divorces his wife causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery” (Matt 5:32).²⁸

What is he saying? We can only understand it if we are familiar with divorce law in Palestinian Judaism. Divorce was permitted—for the man. He was allowed to divorce his wife by appealing to Deuteronomy 24:1, should it be that “she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her.” In light of that very loose formula it was relatively easy for a man, at least as far as the law was concerned, to dissolve his marriage to his wife. He only had to utter the formula of divorce, “You are no longer my wife, and I am no longer your husband,”²⁹ and hand her the writ of divorce. The marriage was at an end. But only the husband could do it. A wife could not dismiss her husband from their marriage.

Other parts of Palestinian-Jewish marriage law based on the Torah also show how unequally the wife was treated under the law. Thus a man who had intercourse with another woman by no means violated his own marriage; at most, if the other woman was married, he committed adultery against her husband. It was a different matter for the wife! In committing adultery she violated her own marriage. Here it is quite clear that the wife was not regarded as a partner but as part of her husband’s property; he had an almost material right to treat her as he wanted. By committing adultery a wife diminished her husband’s property; he, in contrast, by committing adultery could at most diminish the value of another man’s property.

Only when we consider this social background can we understand why Jesus formulates his prohibition of divorce altogether in terms of the husband. The wife had no right in any case to divorce her husband, so Jesus speaks to the man. He puts this before his eyes: anyone who divorces his wife may force her to seek another husband because otherwise she cannot exist economically. So with the new husband she violates her first marriage, and her first husband is guilty of it because, in sending her away, he has driven her into that situation. But the new husband is also committing adultery, namely, against the first marriage from which the wife had been dismissed. To us the prohibition of divorce in its Matthean version seems extremely complicated and awkward, but Jesus had to speak that way against the background of the Palestinian-Jewish marriage law then in force. But this is by no means an adequate explanation of Jesus’ harsh prohibition.

We first have to be clear about what it means for Jesus to declare that divorcing a wife or marrying a divorced woman is adultery. According to the Torah, adultery was a capital crime deserving punishment, in fact, the penalty of death (Lev 20:10; Deut 22:22-27). But that means that Jesus calls something the Torah presumes permissible a capital crime. That was, obviously, a massive provocation.

But the provocation was all the greater because Jesus clothes what he says about divorce in the form of a legal decree. There are such decrees in the Torah, with the form “Anyone who does X shall be held guilty of Y” (e.g., Lev 17:3-4; Num 35:16-21). In legal statements of this sort the first clause is the “definition of the deed” and the subsequent clause is the “determination of the legal consequences.” Jesus’ prohibition of divorce follows this model exactly. First, in the initial clause, the action is defined: “Anyone who divorces his wife.…” In the subsequent clause this action is further defined as a serious sin, namely, causing adultery: “…causes her to commit adultery.” In this case the “determination of the legal consequences” need not be articulated because everyone knew it: if adultery was proved, the punishment was death by stoning.