Selections from Chapter 5: (Click here for full text)

 Divorce on Demand?

A man in Dubai divorced his wife in 2001 by a totally new method – he sent her a text message on her phone. She had failed to turned up on time to cook his tea, so he texted her: "You’re late. I divorce you." This was the third time he’d told her he would divorce her and according to Islamic law if a man tells his wife "I divorce you" three times, this is all that is needed: the wife is legally divorced when she receives that third message. The woman in Dubai could not believe that she could be divorced by a text message so she took it to the Muslim court, but the court upheld the man’s right. Any Muslim man is allowed to divorce his wife in this way without needing to show that she has done anything wrong. A Muslim woman, however, is not allowed to divorce her husband at all.

Jewish men are also able to get a divorce quite easily without needing to cite any grounds. Instead of saying ‘I divorce you’ three times, a Jewish man has to write out a divorce certificate, give it to his wife and as soon as she receives it, she is legally divorced. As in Islamic law, only men can initiate divorce and it is a groundless divorce because the man does not have to show that his wife has done anything wrong. The groundless divorce also means that the woman cannot defend herself.

Although the divorce certificate is part of the law of Moses in Deut.24.1, this groundless divorce for ‘men-only’ did not become available until about the time of Jesus’ birth. Before this, both Jewish men and women could divorce partners who broke their marriage obligations, as defined in the Old Testament. We also saw in chapter 3 that the OT only allowed the innocent partner to initiate a divorce. If a woman did not feed, clothe or share conjugal love with her husband faithfully, he could divorce her and, likewise, if a man did not give his wife money for food or clothing and did not share conjugal love with her then she could divorce him. These grounds for divorce (based on Ex.21.10–11) were in use until about ad 70, but by the time that Jesus was preaching, in about ad 30, they were already being used only rarely. During Jesus’ lifetime the new groundless divorce gradually grew in popularity until, by about the end of the 1^st century, it had totally replaced divorces based on OT grounds.

This new type of divorce was invented by a rabbi called Hillel (who lived a few decades before Jesus) and was called the "Any Cause" divorce after the phrase which inspired it in Deuteronomy 24.1 where a man divorced his wife for "a cause of sexual immorality".

Hillel asked the question: Why did Moses use the phrase "cause of sexual immorality" when he could simply have said "sexual immorality"? Hillel reasoned that the seemingly superfluous word "cause" must refer to another, different, ground for divorce and since this other ground is simply called a "cause", he concluded that it meant "Any Cause".

More in this chapter...

What should divorcees do if they have already remarried – should they get divorced from their new partner and remarry their former spouse? Jesus does not tell them, or, if he did, the Gospels do not record it. Fortunately for us, Paul does cover this type of problem as we shall see in chapter 10.

We would also like to know what Jesus thought about other Biblical grounds for divorce. We know that he rejected the new non-Biblical "Any Cause" divorces and that he accepted divorce for adultery, as in Dt.24.1, but we do not know what he thought about the three grounds for divorce in Ex.21.10–11 because no-one asked him about this text – or if they did, the Gospel writers did not think his teaching on this was significant enough to include in their short account. I would guess that for these grounds, like adultery, he would counsel forgiveness rather than divorce, unless they were sinning hard-heartedly, but again, we have to look to Paul in chapters 6 & 8 to fill in this gap in our knowledge.

We might also ask, "How did the church misunderstand Jesus’ teaching for so long? How come no-one remembered about "Any Cause" divorces?" We will look at this in chapter 12.

We found in this chapter that Jesus laid the foundations for a new approach to divorce. He did not replace the Old Testament, or rewrite it, but he emphasised its principles and compassion, saying that the injured partner should forgive the partner who breaks their marriage vows and then repents and that you should only divorce a partner who sins in a hard-hearted way, i.e. one who breaks their vows stubbornly and unrepentantly.