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I don't believe so. Let's start with the basic Old Testament verse on the subject, Deuteronomy 24:1-4, which says,
The certificate of divorce was largely a way of protecting the woman. Under the code of Hammurabi, a woman's first husband could come back and re-claim her if her second husband died or divorced her, but this passage in Deuteronomy forbade him to do so. Divorce's main purpose was to permit re-marriage so that a woman would not starve or be forced into prostitution.
The problem is the word "objectionable". The Hebrew can be translated as "sexual immorality," so here the basis for divorce is sexual infidelity. It can also mean the same as the English word. So which is the correct meaning in this passage?
Before continuing, I should also mention Exodus 21
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While this law initially covered a slave wife in a polygamous marriage, over time the rabbis decided that it also covered wives who were free and marriages that were monogamous. The rabbis decided that this law gave a wife rights to food and clothing (and shelter and so on), as well as sexual intimacy and affection. So if a wife was abused, neglected or abandoned, she has the right to a divorce and subsequent remarriage.
A few decades before Jesus was born, two rabbis, Hillel and Shammai, debated Deuteronomy 24. Hillel noted the text said a man could divorce his wife for "a cause of sexual immorality." Since rabbis believed that every word in Scripture was there for a reason, Hillel decided that this word "cause" must refer to other grounds for divorce besides sexual immorality. Hillel believed a man could leave his wife for any reason: wearing her hair unbound, burning the toast or renting two consecutive chick flicks from Netflix.
Shammai, on the other hand, thought that Deut. 24 only referred to sexual immorality, and that this "any cause" divorce was wrong.
Hillel's "any cause" divorce was popular among Jewish men. It was much easier to get, though more expensive. It is almost certainly what Joseph was thinking of when he considered divorcing Mary "quietly" in Matthew 1:19 -- "quietly" being a technical term. He would graciously refuse to charge her with her infidelity, and get an "any cause" divorce even though he’d still have to pay the bride price.
So apparently, when Jesus mentions divorce in Matthew 19, he is stating his position on the Shammai/Hillel debate. He is not talking about the legitimacy of divorce in general. No rabbi would have asked, "Is it ever lawful for someone to divorce?"; it would have been like asking, "Is it lawful to do what Moses said in the law?"
Jesus sided with Shammai on the interpretation of Deuteronomy 24:1. But Jesus and Paul (and Shammai) would have shared the rabbinic understanding that divorce is regrettable but permissible when the vow of fidelity, provision, or love has been broken and there is no repentance. This would include abuse and abandonment.
Last edited Tue Feb 4, 2014, 08:48 AM - Edit history (1)
With the odds tilted in the house's favor.
Let me make an historical aside, and tell you of two essentially contemporary annulment fights, those of Henry VIII of England, and his sister Margaret.
Henry and Margaret's father, Henry VII, arranged a political marriage between his eldest son, Arthur, and Catherine of Aragon. A few months after the wedding, Arthur died. The king wanted both to maintain the political alliance with Spain and to keep the dowry that Catherine brought (over a million in today's currency, which would have had to be repaid out of the Privy Purse). So he decided to marry his second son, Henry, to Catherine.
There was a problem: Under Church marriage law, one cannot marry one's deceased spouse's sibling. However, this could be gotten round with a dispensation. So King Henry went to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Warham, to get a dispensation. Warham was then in a political fight with the King and refused to grant the dispensation; but Henry twisted his arm, and Warham gave in. Henry then applied to the Vatican for their approval -- Pope Julius II rubber stamped the dispensation and the fullness of time Henry and Catherine were married.
Twenty-some years later, it was obvious that Catherine, now in menopause, was not going to give Henry the son he so desperately craved. (If you want to know why Henry wanted a son, I can post on it. It wasn't just male chauvinism; there were solid political reasons. However, an explanation would involve quite a bit of English political history.) The incest that Henry was committing was preying on his mind -- that he had fallen in love with the young and beautiful Anne Boleyn was, of course, quite irrelevant.
Recall that Henry VII had pressured Archbishop Warham to get the dispensation for his son's betrothal to Catherine. Another thing in Church marriage law is that if any party to the marriage is acting under duress, the marriage is void. So Henry VIII requested an annulment on the grounds that the dispensation was improperly given.
However, Catherine did not want her marriage annulled. She claimed that she loved Henry; a dubious claim at best, since Henry did not treat her well. It is far more likely that Catherine did not want her daughter Mary to lose her place as Henry's only legitimate child. After all, should Henry remarry and have a son, this son would take precedence over Mary as Henry's heir. (One of the great "what if"s of English history is "what if Mary had been a boy?"
So, Catherine counter-attacked on two fronts: One based in Church marriage law, and the other purely political. In Church marriage law, in order for a marriage to be valid, two things must happen. The first is an exchange of vows before witnesses, and there was no question that this had happened when Catherine married Arthur. The second is that the marriage must be consummated. Catherine claimed that she and Arthur had never consummated their marriage. Thus, the dispensation was irrelevant, and her marriage to Henry was, in fact, her first marriage.
Now, this claim should have gone nowhere. First, Church marriage law makes the presumption that a married couple will have intercourse unless it can be proven otherwise. Second, under Church marriage law, the burden of proof would have been on Catherine, and the operative word there is "proof". I'm sure that 16th century divorce lawyers and judges knew just as well as their 21st century counterparts that all parties in a divorce probably lie. Catherine's unsupported word should not have sufficed, and at the time she made this claim, she was not a virgo intacta. Thus, she had no support whatsoever for her claim.
Another thing in Church marriage law is that dubious claims about the validity of the marriage are to be dismissed in favor of the validity of the marriage.
However, her other point of attack depended on her nephew Charles -- King of Spain, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Naples -- to oppose the annulment. Charles disliked Henry both personally and politically, since Charles and Henry had entered an alliance against France which Henry broke at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and Charles felt that Henry had betrayed him. In 1527, Naples and the Papal States had a war, which the Pope lost. Some of Charles' troops sacked Rome. Pope Clement did not want a rerun of that war, so he took Catherine's claim of non-consummation seriously. There were Papal Delegates, special commissions of enquiry and so on. Basically, Clement was stalling.
Finally, when Henry discovered that Anne Boleyn was pregnant, he forced Clement's hand. He pushed through some laws in Parliament, one saying that marriage questions could be settled locally, another saying that all English clergy owed their first allegiance to the crown and a third saying that the Peter's Pence collection (an annual collection in each parish going directly to the Vatican) and the Annates (essentially a tax on Church properties that also went to the Vatican) should go to the Exchequer instead of to Rome. Clement was Not Amused, and decreed against Henry's annulment.
Thus, the actual reason for Clement's action was politics and money.
Now, on to Margaret. Henry VII married her off to King James IV of Scotland. For some reason, James invaded England in 1513, and was met by English troops at the Battle of Flodden. Flodden was an overwhelming victory for the English, and James was killed in the battle. His body was seen by quite a few people, both English and Scots, who knew him at least by sight; he was buried on the battlefield.
James' son became king as James V, but since he was only two, a council of regency was set up. Margaret was one of the regents, and another was Archibald Douglas, the Earl of Angus. In order to solidify his political position, Angus persuaded Margaret to marry him.
Well, it was not a happy marriage. To give just one example, in 1520, Angus attempted to enter Edinburgh at the head of some troops, and was taken under fire by artillery and infantry under the personal command of his wife.
In 1527, Margaret seized on an unfounded rumor that James IV had not died at Flodden, but had regained consciousness, dug himself out of his grave, and recovered from his wounds. However, James had not returned to Scotland, but rather made a secret pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Nevertheless, James was supposed to return to Scotland at any moment. This rumor, of course, is just as credible as the one that Elvis Presley is still alive.
Margaret sent in a petition to Pope Clement for an annulment of her marriage on the grounds that her first husband was actually still alive. Cardinal Beaton, the Archbishop of St Andrews, who loathed Angus as much as Margaret did, supported the petition. Angus, who also wanted out of the marriage, raised no objection -- indeed, he suggested that a better ground for the annulment might be that he had been betrothed as a young man.
In any case, Margaret got her annulment, realized that her first husband was dead, and so promptly married someone else.
So, Henry VIII was denied an annulment even though he had solid grounds, and Margaret was granted one on flimsy grounds. It was all political in both cases.
