Can a marriage be ended?
One of the most searched questions put to this collection, and the collection does not answer it once. In composition order you can watch the answer tighten, and watch an exception appear.
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IIIc. 700-587 BCEDeuteronomy · Chapter 24
1 When a man takes a wife and marries her, then it shall be, if she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some unseemly thing in her, that he shall write her a certificate of divorce, put it in her hand, and send her out of his house.
4 her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife after she is defiled; for that would be an abomination to Yahweh. You shall not cause the land to sin, which Yahweh your God gives you for an inheritance.
The law does not institute divorce; it assumes it and regulates one consequence of it. The certificate exists already, and the rule is only that a man may not take back a wife who has married again.
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V539 - c. 400 BCEMalachi · Chapter 2
14 Yet you say, ‘Why?’ Because Yahweh has been witness between you and the wife of your youth, against whom you have dealt treacherously, though she is your companion and the wife of your covenant.
16 One who hates and divorces”, says Yahweh, the God of Israel, “covers his garment with violence!” says Yahweh of Armies. “Therefore pay attention to your spirit, that you don’t be unfaithful.
Persian-period Jerusalem, and the tone has changed entirely: the wife is a party to a covenant God witnessed, and the man dismissing her is dealing treacherously. The Hebrew of verse 16 is difficult and translations differ sharply; the World English Bible's is printed here.
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VIc. 400-200 BCEEzra · Chapter 10
10 Ezra the priest stood up and said to them, “You have trespassed, and have married foreign women, increasing the guilt of Israel.
11 Now therefore make confession to Yahweh, the God of your fathers and do his pleasure. Separate yourselves from the peoples of the land and from the foreign women.”
The hardest passage in the thread, and it goes the other way: here the returning community is told to dismiss foreign wives, and does. Divorce is not merely permitted but commanded, for the sake of a boundary the same period was drawing everywhere else.
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IXc. 50-110 CE1 Corinthians · Chapter 7
10 But to the married I command—not I, but the Lord—that the wife not leave her husband
12 But to the rest I—not the Lord—say, if any brother has an unbelieving wife, and she is content to live with him, let him not leave her.
15 Yet if the unbeliever departs, let there be separation. The brother or the sister is not under bondage in such cases, but God has called us in peace.
The earliest written record of Jesus's ruling is not in a gospel. Paul quotes it in the 50s, some twenty years before Mark, and does something unusual: he marks which of his instructions he has from the Lord and which are his own, then gives a case the ruling does not cover.
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IXc. 50-110 CEMark · Chapter 10
2 Pharisees came to him testing him, and asked him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”
5 But Jesus said to them, “For your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment.
9 What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.”
The earliest gospel. The ruling is absolute, and the argument for it is that the Deuteronomy provision was a concession to hardness of heart rather than the intention.
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IXc. 50-110 CEMatthew · Chapter 19
3 Pharisees came to him, testing him and saying, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason?”
8 He said to them, “Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it has not been so.
9 I tell you that whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery; and he who marries her when she is divorced commits adultery.”
The same scene, written later and following Mark closely — with two changes. The question becomes whether a man may divorce 'for any reason', which is what the rabbinic schools were arguing about, and the ruling acquires an exception.
The exception clause is the thing to look at. Mark's version has no exception in it; Matthew, writing later and with Mark in front of him, has one. Whether that is an explanatory addition, a saying Mark left out, or a ruling made by a later community is argued and not settled. What composition order does is put the two versions in the sequence they were written in, so that the difference between them is a thing you notice rather than a thing you have to be told. And the earliest witness of all is not a gospel: Paul is quoting the ruling in the 50s, and marking off which part of his advice he has from the Lord and which part is his own.
The passages above are the text, reproduced exactly and checked against the same files the reader uses; every reference is verified when the site is built. The commentary between them is editorial, written for this volume.