TEXT [Commentary]

9. Jesus’ remarks on divorce (10:1-12; cf. Matt 19:1-12)

1 Then Jesus left Capernaum and went down to the region of Judea and into the area east of the Jordan River. Once again crowds gathered around him, and as usual he was teaching them.

2 Some Pharisees came and tried to trap him with this question: “Should a man be allowed to divorce his wife?”

3 Jesus answered them with a question: “What did Moses say in the law about divorce?”

4 “Well, he permitted it,” they replied. “He said a man can give his wife a written notice of divorce and send her away.”[*]

5 But Jesus responded, “He wrote this commandment only as a concession to your hard hearts. 6 But ‘God made them male and female’[*] from the beginning of creation. 7 ‘This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife,[*] 8 and the two are united into one.’[*] Since they are no longer two but one, 9 let no one split apart what God has joined together.”

10 Later, when he was alone with his disciples in the house, they brought up the subject again. 11 He told them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries someone else commits adultery against her. 12 And if a woman divorces her husband and marries someone else, she commits adultery.”

NOTES

10:1 Judea. Jesus left the region of Galilee, where most of his ministry had taken place, and moved in the direction of Jerusalem. This placed him in an area where John the Baptist had also worked.

crowds gathered . . . he was teaching them. Jesus’ remarks were made in a public setting, in contrast to his earlier teaching of the disciples. The parallel passage in Matt 19:1-12 is more detailed.

10:2 tried to trap him. The narrative remark makes it clear that these Pharisees were not interested in the answer for its informational value. They were hoping to use it against Jesus. Perhaps they could catch Jesus in a remark that would get him in trouble with Herod Antipas, as John the Baptist had been (Hurtado 1989:160).

Should a man be allowed to divorce his wife? The question was a source of dispute in Judaism. Some argued that a man could divorce a woman for any act, even one as trivial as a badly cooked meal. Others held the view that immorality was the only legitimate cause for divorce (m. Gittin 9.1-3, 10 gives examples of writs of divorce). In ancient Judaism, only a man could get a divorce, while in the Gentile world, either party could seek one. Divorce was important, for it allowed a woman to retain her dowry when leaving the marriage unless she had been sexually unfaithful (Hurtado 1989:167; Hanson and Oakman 1998:37-43). The dowry was in part intended to be passed to any children of the couple. Divorce also gave a woman the right to seek a new husband.

10:3 What did Moses say in the law about divorce? Jesus drew the discussion back to Scripture, working behind the tradition to the sacred text.

10:4 he permitted it. . . . He said a man could give his wife a written notice of divorce and send her away. The reply, which is discussed in detail in the Jewish tradition of the Mishnah in m. Gittin, addresses the right to divorce but is silent as to the situations that permit it. Jewish writs of divorce broke the marriage bond and came with the right to remarry. The reply looks back to Deut 24:1-4, where a writ is permitted upon having discovered “something wrong with her.” The meaning of this phrase was debated among the rabbis.

10:5 as a concession to your hard hearts. In the Gr., the phrase about hard hearts is moved forward, so that it is emphasized (“for your hard hearts Moses wrote this command”). It refers to human stubbornness (Deut 10:16; Jer 4:4; Sir 16:10) and sin as the cause of divorce. In Deuteronomy, the context is to love God with a whole heart, not in stubbornness.

10:6 God made them male and female. Jesus cites Gen 1:27 and makes the point that at the creation, man and woman were intended to work side by side.

10:8 the two are united into one. Genesis 2:24 makes it clear that God’s design was for marriage to be a relationship of oneness, with husband and wife forming a unit. The NLT brings out this sense by its rendering of the literal “the two shall become one flesh.” Although some might read Jesus’ refusal to engage Deut 24 as a rejection of the law, the use of Genesis shows his respect for the law alongside a recognition that some laws exist because people fall short of righteousness.

Since they are no longer two but one. Here is the key idea. Marriage makes a unit put together before God and by God (see 10:9—God has joined them together).

10:9 let no one split apart what God has joined together. This order is reversed in the Gr.: “what God has joined together no man should split apart.” The verb for God’s “yoking [the two] together” makes the union a sacred act, not one of merely human choice (suzeugnumi [TG4801, ZG5183]; BDAG 954).

10:10 he was alone with his disciples. The final remarks about marriage belong to an elaboration the disciples had requested. His attention to adultery shows how seriously Jesus took the marriage commitment and union. Such comments for the sake of the disciples are common in Mark (4:1-12, 33-34; 7:17-23; 9:28-29).

10:12 And if a woman divorces her husband and marries someone else, she commits adultery. Textual variants make the issue one of a woman’s desertion and remarriage, but they are less well supported by the manuscript evidence.

COMMENTARY [Text]

In these verses, Jesus shows little patience with the view that one could get a divorce for just about any reason. In fact, Jesus noted that divorce, even on the narrow grounds allowed by Moses, was only tolerated, not recommended. Jesus never gave acceptable grounds for divorce. Rather, he said that God’s intent was that the marriage union should make a new kind of unit that would remain together. Even the exceptions given in Matthew on the basis of sexual immorality do not contradict the desire that marriage be maintained, although they recognize that this may not always be possible.

Marriage was designed to be permanent. God is responsible for the union, and those in the union are accountable to God for their commitment to it. Relational commitments to God and to each other govern ethics, not figuring out what a person can get by with. The effect of Jesus’ remarks was that women, who tended to be treated as property in marriage, should be seen as equal partners, since marriage is a male-female unit with no special preference given to men (Hurtado 1989:160-161).

Jesus said, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries someone else commits adultery against her” (10:11). He thereby applied the standard that the marriage commitment was to be permanent. Thus, divorce that leads to remarriage is adultery, for the first bond is still in place. Mark presents the remark without qualification, while Matthew notes sexual immorality as an exception. The remark is in the context of marriage as a divine design, as an ideal that should especially be followed in a community that says it honors God. The act violates the seventh commandment (Exod 20:14). Another key point is that the violation is against the spouse, giving the woman an ethical right in the marriage. The same is true in the next verse about the man. In Judaism, adultery was understood as a violation against the other husband, not against one’s wife (Cranfield 1959:321; Hooker 1991:236). Relational sensitivity to the bond between the partners is the key point here, not the statement of the law.

Jesus then added, “and if a woman divorces her husband and marries someone else, she commits adultery” (10:12). The key to this statement is that what is true for the man is also true for the woman. Since only Mark has this, some scholars suggest that Mark added it to address a Gentile reality that did not apply in Judaism. However, this assumes that Jesus was not aware of or concerned about Gentile practice and that he would limit himself to dominant Jewish concerns on such a question, not to mention the recent public example of Herodias, in which a prominent Jewish woman did undertake such an initiative (Evans 2001:85-86). Jesus’ independent handling of several issues in Judaism makes such assumptions questionable. Jesus made it clear that the same ethical standard applied to both genders. In a Jewish culture that normally saw divorce as a right controlled and determined only by men, this was a significant recognition of the woman’s ethical responsibility (for evidence that Jewish women could act in limited circumstances, see m. Ketubbot 7.10; Evans 2001:85).

This passage has had a significant impact on the discussion of marriage in the church. Jesus states clearly that by divine design, marriage is to be for life; he affirms reluctance to divorce because of its ethical consequences. It was permitted by Moses as a concession to hardheartedness, not as a right to be pursued. The relational equality of the man and woman and their shared ethical responsibility show that Jesus’ concern was not to issue a new law, but to affirm the integrity of the relational bond and the mutual responsibility of the divinely designed oneness that marriage forms. As to the contemporary application of such standards in a culture where divorce and remarriage are common, the words of France (2002:394) state the balance well:

The practical application of this teaching in a society in which both adultery and divorce are common and legally permissible cannot be straightforward. But Mark’s Jesus offers no direct guidance on the problem, simply a clear, unequivocal, and utterly uncompromising principle that marriage is permanent and divorce (together with the resultant remarriage) is wrong. Whatever the other considerations which pastoral concern may bring to bear, some of them no doubt on values drawn from Jesus’ teaching on other subjects, no approach can claim his support which does not take as its guiding principle the understanding of marriage set forth in vv. 9 and 11-12.