Divorce

Divorce is the formal dissolution of a marriage, and Scripture treats it as a real practice to be regulated rather than an ideal to be celebrated. The oldest legal text given on the subject, Deuteronomy 24:1, assumes that a man may send his wife away and requires that he give her a written certificate of divorce; the passage then forbids the first husband from taking her back after she has married another, calling that an abomination (Deuteronomy 24:4). The text does not describe the certificate as a concession granted at Sinai so much as a procedure already in use; the phrase translated "some unseemly thing" (Deuteronomy 24:1) is linguistically obscure, and historically the scope of that phrase became the central dispute between the rabbinic schools, one reading it broadly and another restricting it—the very question the Pharisees put to Jesus in Matthew 19:3.

The prophets use divorce as an image for the covenant. Yahweh asks where the bill of the mother's divorce is (Isaiah 50:1), and Jeremiah cites the Deuteronomistic rule—that a woman sent away who becomes another man's may not be taken back (Jeremiah 3:1, echoing Deuteronomy 24:1–4)—and then declares that Israel has played the prostitute with many lovers, yet is summoned to return. Malachi speaks in the other direction, calling Yahweh the witness between a man and "the wife of your youth," his companion and "the wife of your covenant" (Malachi 2:14), and grounding the oneness of marriage in the offspring God sought (Malachi 2:15). Isaiah 54:4 promises an end to "the reproach of your widowhood," the shame of having been put away.

In the Gospels, Jesus answers the testing question about divorce "for any reason" (Matthew 19:3) by appealing to the creation account—"he who made them from the beginning made them male and female" (Matthew 19:4)—and then states, "whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery" (Matthew 19:9; compare Matthew 5:32). Paul, writing to the married, says he commands "not I, but the Lord—that the wife not leave her husband" (1 Corinthians 7:10). The Greek word behind "sexual immorality" in Matthew is porneia, and how narrowly or broadly that exception is meant to be read is a long-standing exegetical question; the history of the text of Matthew 19:9 is also complicated, since some manuscripts lack the exception clause.

Christian traditions read this material differently. In Catholic teaching, a ratified and consummated sacramental marriage is indissoluble, and separation does not permit remarriage, though a declaration of nullity may find that no marriage existed; in Orthodox practice, the Church's principle of economy allows divorce and remarriage in specified circumstances as an accommodation to human weakness; most Protestant bodies permit divorce and usually remarriage on grounds such as adultery, desertion, or abuse, though they differ sharply among themselves. Jewish tradition, from which the Deuteronomy 24 procedure comes, itself developed divergent legal approaches to the grounds for divorce. Many interpreters read the biblical trajectory as simultaneously upholding the permanence of marriage and restraining the harm of its collapse—one way to read the texts, not the only one, and the traditions do not agree on how that tension should be resolved.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.