The Divorce Hoax
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: Christianity, Divorce, Marriage, Life, Feminism

“God hates divorce” is said to be Malachi 2:16, but the phrase is a phantom of translation.

It’s not in the Bible. Jack Collins, a conservative Christian scholar, notes traditional commentators haven’t liked to talk about it, as this “weakens the Biblical testimony against divorce.”

The scholars knew the line was false, but didn’t want to “weaken” the divorce ban? That’s an admission the other references weren’t too strong.

As Malachi 2:16 is the most recognized anti-divorce teaching in the Bible, it serves as a useful portal into the deception. Because of modern Bible scholarship, some translations have already begun to shift.

“The man who hates and divorces his wife,” says the LORD, the God of Israel, “does violence to the one he should protect . . .” (NIV)

The Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation, has for Malachi 2:16: “But if, since you hate her, you should send her away . . .” (NETS)

Then from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Latin Vulgate, there are many other possibilities. Russell Fuller, in a 1991 study, notes many versions “support the act of divorce.”

One of the dirty secrets you learn in Bible scholarship is there’s often multiple versions of biblical passages. A reading of Malachi 2:16 from the Dead Sea Scrolls is: “If, having hated, divorce! says the Lord the God of Israel . . .”

Divorce is always legal in the Bible.

In the Old Testament law for the Jews, divorce is fine. There’s no investigation or penalties. Two procedures for it are noted in Deuteronomy 24:1–4:

If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, and if after she leaves his house she becomes the wife of another man, and her second husband dislikes her and writes her a certificate of divorce . . .

What these “displeasing” or “indecent” female features are no one can say exactly. It’s not adultery, as that would be a capital crime. An additional procedure is noted in Exodus 21:7–11. If a wife had been a slave but a man finds himself unwilling to provide for her, she can be divorced.

Divorce is required in the regular problem of intermarriages. In Ezra 10:1–44 and Nehemiah 13:23–31, non-Jewish spouses are made to divorce.

Christian people are never prompted to follow Jewish law, but you’d have no reason for thinking God hates divorce.

And you might start to feel like you’ve been lied to?

That’s how I was. Then I started to feel worse, because I realized I’d been part of a system that was deeply injurious to oppressed humans.

Many women, for example, who clearly should have been fleeing abusive husbands were prompted to stay with them because of the supposed anti-divorce teachings. A 2009 column by Chuck Colson, the Christian commentator, discussing the problem, profiles a woman who sought help from a pastor, and shortly afterward was killed.

This was not an unusual event in the Evangelical world. Women are told to ‘submit’ — to their own deaths.

Christianity invented a whole realm of rituals involving marriage, then tries to use them to govern people.

Iin the Bible, there’s no wedding rituals, and clerics aren’t empowered to “perform” them.

Clerics like to say that marriages are “covenants” — another hoax. Nowhere in the Bible is marriage between humans called a “covenant.” Does Solomon make “covenants” with his 700 wives (1 Ki 11:3)?

Did Abraham have a ‘covenant’ with Sarah his wife, or Hagar his slave when he had sex with her? No. He has a ‘covenant’ with God.

Christians call spouses “covenant partners,” etc. But only once, as far as I can tell, is a covenant made between two humans: David and Jonathan in 1 Samuel 18:3 & 23:18.

The Jesus teachings don’t seem to insist on male-female sacred dyads, i.e. “Christian marriage.”

Jesus seems to like his followers to all be together. “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them,” he says in Matthew 18:20.

Love is never seen as confined to or structured by male-female pairings. “Love one another,” Jesus says in John 13:34. He never pairs people off, never oversees marriage, never ’performs’ them.

This isn’t a marriage-centered, child-focused religion. This isn’t a divine effort to get people coupled, popping out kids. There is one “family of God.” All Christians are seen as ‘one body’, as in 1 Corinthians 12:13, or Romans 12:5.

Jesus teachings seem to be, unexpectedly, a prompt to a kind of group consciousness. The word often translated as ‘fellowship’, koinónia, is a usual Greek term for spousal relationships.

“All the believers were together and had everything in common,” as Acts 2:44 says. This is not how Christians live today.

One disciple, Peter, is married, but we only know because Jesus liked his mother-in-law.

“We have left everything to follow you!” Peter says in Matthew 19:27. One would have to include his wife. Certainly, Peter is never told to “work on” his marriage, or anything like that.

Jesus seems, actually, to divorce his followers from their Jewish spouses. Note Luke 18:29–30:

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus said to them, “no one who has left home or wife or brothers or sisters or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive many times as much in this age, and in the age to come eternal life.”

He tells them to avoid making vows and committing to obligations, as in Matthew 5:33–37. This is a prohibition on “Christian marriage” as usually practiced.

Jesus says there’s no marriage in the Kingdom (Mt 22:30), which is the vision of the new world he wants to bring into being.

Jesus does talk about “divorce” in some of his dialogues, and on these few remarks he’s said by Christianity to create a new rule against divorce for all humans. Lets’ take a look at that hoax?

The Bible is the sacred literature of a Temple-based system of priests.

For Christianity, it was something different: a sex manual, to be interpreted by the clerics, who are the sex police.

Though Jesus is viewed by Christianity as the sex police, in the gospel narratives he’s understood to be a prophet, and to speak like a prophet (cf. Mk 6:4, 15; 8:28; 14:65; cf. 13:22; Mt 21:11; 21:46; Lk 7:16; 7:39; 13:33; 24:19; Acts 3:22; 7:37).

And prophets, as it turns out, talk about marriage all the time — as a way of discussing relationships between deities and human communities. The deity is a ‘husband’, and the humans are a ‘female’. The term “baal,” the regular address for a deity, is simply the word for ‘husband’.

Christians know that the Jesus community is seen as the “bride of Christ,” just as Israel was YHWH’s bride. Less understood is that all nations were seen as married to “sons of God,” also called “gods” (cf. Deut 32:8, etc.).

The narrative of the Bible is that YHWH, the Father, is married to the ‘woman’ Israel, as His ‘sons’ have ‘brides’, and havoc ensues as the ‘sons’ lunge for Israel — the usual Biblical problem of sons trying to take the father’s woman. And from Israel — the true divine son is born who inherits everything.

There’s a lot of marriage and divorce talk by prophets. As in Ezekiel 16, Israel is seen as a “woman” who married YHWH at Mount Sinai. They fight over ‘adultery’ — with other gods! God tried to be close, like a ‘husband’.

“In that day,” declares the LORD, “you will call me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call me ‘my master.’ — Hosea 2:16

But it never takes, and God ‘divorces’ Israel (Jer 3:8, etc.).

For more, check out Sharon Moughtin-Mumby’s Sexual and Marital Metaphors in Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah and Ezekiel (2008).

When Jesus arrives, he’s seen as a ‘Bridegroom’ (Jn 3:29, etc.).

He is a deity looking for a marriage to a human community.

Jesus sees Israel — from a divine, prophetic perspective — as a divorced woman! This is the context of many of his divorce sayings. The subject the messiah speaks of here is God’s ex-wife. ‘She’ is husbandless, the prey of many ‘men’ (nations) trying to co-opt her. This is the story of Israel.

Christian readers have badly misread many passages employing this prophetic idea of marriage as a divine covenant. Like John 4:17–19, when Jesus is talking with the Samaritan Woman, and says she has had five husbands, and lives with another man. Note her reply:

“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet.”

His references to her five marriages alerts her to a shift in context. He is speaking in a prophetic mode.

As Brant Pitre discusses, Jesus is speaking of the people of Samaria having worshipped five deities — the story of 2 Kings 17:13–34. The fifth ‘man’ she’s “living with” would be YHWH.

Try to get Jesus’ divorce sayings to work as sexual rules?

First notice the manuscript versions of Jesus’ divorce sayings are highly unstable, and bear the marks of clerics trying to edit out the weirdness.

Just Mark 10:8 alone — as Alan H. Cadwallader discusses in a 2019 paper, “What’s a Single Man Blathering about? Jesus on Marriage” — exists in eight different manuscript versions.

But as they are presented, how do the ‘marriage laws’ seem to work? Take Jesus’ speech in Mark 10:10–12.

Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.”

Jesus suggests wives can initiate divorce, except this is not possible in Old Testament marriage law. Then the violation works differently for each sex. As David Parker writes in The Living Text of the Gospels (1997): “For a woman it is remarriage; for a man it is the prior step of divorce. Is there any possible sense to this?”

Then please recall the Bible assumes polygamy. If Jesus is saying that divorcing one wife and marrying another is bad, this would only be a prompt to marry both women — like Jacob marries Leah and then Rachel.

If Jesus is saying a divorced person has to be re-classified as an adulterer, then a procedure that was legal in Jewish law has become a capital crime (cf. Lev 20:10; Deut 22:22).

Likewise with Matthew 5:32, where “anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” So a re-married man dies? Or maybe Christians made a mistake in reading this text.

The real Christian message is to avoid human marriage. Paul encourages, in 1 Corinthians 7:8, that Christians be free!

Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do.

Paul here is dealing with the problem that many of Christian converts would have Jewish spouses who are initiating divorce.

“But if the unbeliever leaves, let it be so,” Paul says. “The brother or the sister is not bound in such circumstances; God has called us to live in peace.”

Let the spouse go, he says. The marriage is not important.

This is never framed as rules, however. “I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you,” he writes in 7:35. It’s advice.

Let’s catch up to the actual Jesus teachings?

“Love one another” is the instruction to Gentile people, repeated in 1 John five times (3:11, 3:23, 4:7, 4:11, 4:12; cf. 2 Jn 6).

Maybe loving one another — is worth trying?