Deuteronomy 24

If a man put away his wife because she did not any longer please him, and she became the wife of another man, by whom also she was put away, or from whom she was severed by his death, the first husband might not remarry her, for that would be an abomination in the eyes of the Lord, and would bring sin on the land. This is not a law sanctioning or regulating divorce; that is simply assumed as what might occur, and what is here regulated is the treatment by the first husband of a woman who has been divorced a second time.

1-4. These verses should be read as one continuous sentence, thus: “If a man hath taken a wife, and married her, and it come to pass that she doth not find favor in his eyes, because of some uncleanness in her, and he hath written her a bill of divorcement, and given it in her hand, and sent her out of his house; and if she hath departed out of his house, and hath gone and become another man’s; and if the latter husband hate her, and write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house; or if the latter husband who took her to be his wife die: her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife,” etc. W. L. A.—In the Hebrew these four verses form but one period, the first part of which extends to the end of verse 3. A right of divorce is not here introduced, but there is only mentioned what was the custom as Moses found it. He let the practice continue, and suffered the putting away by reason of the hardness of their hearts, while in the history of the creation he had taught the indissolubility of the bond (Gen. 2:24). Gurl.—This regulation is remarkable alike for its concessive and its restrictive character. It assumes the prevalence of divorce—a fact also recognized in a number of other laws of this and the Levitical code (Lev. 21:7; De. 22:19, 29). It assumes that it was carried on with some degree of formality. And such a custom, with the form it took of giving a “bill of divorce-ment,” this law does not forbid; neither does it command it. Herein our Lord corrected the Pharisees’ false quotation of the Pentateuch, changing their “Why did Moses command?” into “Moses suffered.” In its restrictions, on the other hand, the law assumes the sacredness of the marital tie and provides against an obvious tendency to break and renew it at will. Its sole prohibition, however, is of the remarriage of divorced persons after a second marriage had been entered upon by the former wife. This, as the words “after that she has been defiled” (cf. Nu. 5:20) indicate, it looked upon as a form of adultery and not to be tolerated. The law tends directly to the preservation of the original tie; and, in case it is severed, plainly encourages a single life in view of a possible later reunion. E. C. B.

The Mosaic legislation permitted a certain liberty of divorce; but our Lord only brought into clear relief, and made emphatic for all time, its determining ethical principle, when he declared that the Mosaic permission was an unwilling concession to the “hardness” of the people’s heart; that “from the beginning” marriage was not so contemplated and constituted, that man may not “put asunder what God hath joined together;” that divorce is permissible only “for the cause of fornication;” that separation for any other cause is an incentive to adultery, and that whoever contracts marriage with the guilty party commits adultery. Behrends.