HistoricalChristian.Faith

Did Moses command divorce, or merely tolerate it? (Deuteronomy 24:1–4)

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: sound — that Deuteronomy 24:1–4 does not command or institute divorce but presupposes an existing practice and regulates it — a concession to “the hardness of your hearts,” not a positive endorsement — is Jesus’ own reading (Matthew 19:8; Mark 10:5), the near-unanimous patristic reading, and the settled verdict of modern Old Testament scholarship. The case-law grammar carries it: verses 1–3 are the “if” (protasis) describing divorce-and-remarriage as a given, and only verse 4 is the “then” (apodosis), whose single law forbids the first husband to take back a wife who has married in between. The one genuinely open residue is not whether Moses commanded it (he did not) but what a concession-to-hardness implies for its permanence under Christ · bears on whether Jesus’ “from the beginning it was not so” abolishes the Mosaic permission or narrows it, and so on the remarriage-or-separation question

The claim

He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.

— Jesus, at Matthew 19:8 (cf. Mark 10:5). The interpretation advanced here is Jesus’ own: the Pharisees call Moses’ bill of divorcement a command (“Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement?” Matthew 19:7), and Jesus corrects the category — Moses did not command but suffered (permitted) it, as a concession to human sin, against a creation norm it never overturned. The claim is thus twofold: (a) Deuteronomy 24:1–4 neither institutes nor endorses divorce, and (b) the toleration is grudging and provisional, subordinate to the “one flesh” of Genesis 2:24.¹

Who advances it

The reading is not a modern reconstruction but the plain sense of the Gospel dialogue, taken up in turn by the fathers who commented on it — Tertullian, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Augustine all treat the Mosaic bill as a permission wrung from Israel’s hardness rather than a divine institution — and it is the consensus of critical Old Testament study, argued in detail from the passage’s legal form by J. Carl Laney, Raymond Westbrook, and William Heth with Gordon Wenham. The rival it displaces — that the verse commands or at least establishes a right of divorce — is the Pharisees’ own assumption, and survives today mostly as a misreading encouraged by the King James rendering of verse 1.

What Deuteronomy 24 actually legislates

The passage is a single sentence of casuistic (“case”) law in the ancient Near-Eastern mould: a string of conditions, then one ruling. In the King James Version the conditional force is obscured, because it renders the first verse as though it were itself the command — “then let him write her a bill of divorcement” — making divorce look prescribed under “justifiable” cause. But the Hebrew (and the Septuagint, and every modern critical version) carries the “if” clause across all of verses 1–3, and reaches its “then” only in verse 4:

[1–3, the condition] When a man hath taken a wife… and hath written her a bill of divorcement… and she is departed… and become another man’s wife, and the latter husband hate her… or if the latter husband die… [4, the law] her former husband, which sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after that she is defiled; for that is abomination before the Lord.

So the bill of divorcement, the wife’s departure, and her second marriage all fall inside the protasis — described as things that happen, not enjoined. The passage’s only actual legislation, the apodosis, is the prohibition of verse 4: a man may not remarry a wife he divorced once she has been married to another. The law is not about divorce at all; it is about restoration of marriage, and it restricts what a divorcing husband may later do. As Laney puts it, “God is in no wise legislating or even sanctioning divorce in this passage”; and the point is a general feature of case law — that Scripture legislates on harlotry, murder, or slavery no more authorizes those things than a law regulating divorce authorizes divorce.²

Read this way, the law is if anything protective and restraining. The written bill formalized what could otherwise be a man’s bare word, gave the dismissed woman a document of her freedom, and — on Augustine’s reading — interposed a deliberate friction against rash separation: the bill “required this intermediate step, that the eagerness for separation might be checked by the writing of this bill and the man might have time to think of the evil of putting away his wife.”³

Jesus reclassifies the “command” as a concession

The Gospel exchange turns on precisely this distinction, and the two accounts stage it from opposite sides. In Matthew the Pharisees escalate the verb, calling the bill a divine command (eneteilato) — and Jesus lowers it to a permission (epetrepsen, “suffered”): “Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives.” In Mark the order is reversed — Jesus asks “What did Moses command you?”, the Pharisees answer that Moses “suffered to write a bill,” and Jesus grants the word back to them: “For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept” — a precept framed to their hardness, not an endorsement of the act.¹ The fathers who expound the verse press the same point. Jerome insists the permission was not God’s but the lawgiver’s, aimed at a lesser evil: Moses “preferred to tolerate discord rather than continue with hatred and murders… consider that God did not allow it because of the hardness of your hearts, but Moses did, so that… it may be a human choice, not a commandment from God.”⁴ Chrysostom reads the appeal to creation as the decisive proof that the Mosaic rule was never the primary will of God: “God by His acts at the beginning ordained the contrary. For… if this were the primary law, and for our good, that other would not have been given at the beginning; God in creating would not have so created.”⁵

“Hardness of heart”: toleration, not approval

That the concession is grudging, not neutral, is written into the phrase Jesus chooses. A law given “because of the hardness of your hearts” (sklerokardia) accommodates a people already bent on the thing it regulates; it meets sin where sin is, to limit its damage. The prophetic verdict on the practice is of a piece — the treacherous divorce of “the wife of thy youth” that Malachi rebukes, whether the disputed verse be rendered “the Lord… saith that he hateth putting away” or, with the ancient versions, “the man who hates and divorces… covers his garment with violence” (Malachi 2:16; the rendering is weighed on the Malachi 2:16 argument page) — either way, God tolerates the bill without ever loving the divorce it records.⁶ Tertullian, answering Marcion’s charge that Christ’s ban contradicts the Creator’s Moses, states the settled shape of the reading: Christ “exculpated rather than abolished the enactment of Moses,” restoring the creation ordinance the concession had bent, so that the permission was always conditional and never a positive good — “so true… is it that divorce ‘was not from the beginning.’”⁷

The rival reading, and why it fails

The one reading that takes Deuteronomy 24 as commanding or instituting divorce is the Pharisees’ — and Jesus rejects it to their faces. It is not, today, an independently advocated thesis so much as a defeater that keeps recurring, and it rests on two mistakes. The first is grammatical: treating verse 1’s “then let him write” (KJV) as the ruling, when the Hebrew makes it one more clause of the condition — the error the Septuagint and the modern versions correct by locating the apodosis in verse 4. The second is a category mistake about case law itself: inferring that because the statute describes a divorce without condemning it on the spot, God thereby approves it. Both collapse once the passage’s legal form is read as form: it presupposes divorce as a social fact, regulates one downstream abuse of it (vindictive reclamation of a remarried wife), and endorses nothing.²

What the concession implies about permanence — the live residue

Granting all this, one question stays genuinely open, and it is where this argument hands off to the others. If the Mosaic permission was a concession to hardness that “from the beginning” had no place, does Christ abolish it outright — so that no divorce dissolves the bond and the innocent may not remarry (the strict line from the Shepherd of Hermas through Augustine) — or does he narrow it to a single ground while leaving a real (if grudging) permission standing (Tertullian’s “exculpated rather than abolished,” and the later Erasmian–Protestant reading)? “Hardness of heart” underdetermines this: a concession can be withdrawn when its cause is healed, or retained as long as the hardness persists. That question is the substance of the remarriage-or-separation argument and turns also on what the Matthean exception is doing; the concession-versus-command finding constrains it (Deuteronomy 24 gives no independent warrant for divorce beyond what Christ allows) without settling it. It connects, too, to the scope question the same verse provokes — how broadly to read the “some uncleanness” (‘erwat dabar) of verse 1 — weighed on the Shammai–Hillel argument, with which this page shares its proof-text.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. Nearly all of it. The concession-not-command reading is Jesus’ explicit correction of the Pharisees, stated twice and from both directions (Matthew’s “command” → “suffered”; Mark’s “command?” → “suffered” → “he wrote you this precept”); it is the way the commenting fathers took it; and it is independently secured by the passage’s legal grammar, on which modern scholarship is effectively unanimous — verses 1–3 condition, verse 4 alone commands, and the one command is a restriction. The supporting props converge rather than strain: the protective function of the written bill, Augustine’s “check” on rash separation, Malachi’s “I hate putting away.”

What is imprecise or unsettled. Two cautions, neither of which touches the core. First, “concession, not command” must not be inflated into “Deuteronomy 24 disapproves of every divorce” as a matter of its own text: the chapter is silent on the morality of the divorce it presupposes and speaks only to the remarriage case — the disapproval is supplied by Jesus and Malachi, read back onto it, and is a theological judgment about the practice, not an exegetical datum of verse 4. Second, the reading does not by itself decide the permanence question (does the concession lapse under Christ or merely contract?), which is the real doctrinal battleground and is weighed elsewhere. Within its own scope — command versus concession — the verdict is not in serious doubt.

Assessment

Sound. That Deuteronomy 24:1–4 neither commands nor institutes divorce, but presupposes it and legislates only against one abuse — a concession to hardness of heart rather than a positive right — holds up on every line of evidence: it is Jesus’ own reading (Matthew 19:8; Mark 10:5), the patristic consensus, and the near-unanimous verdict of critical study of the passage’s case-law form. The rival “command/institution” reading is the Pharisees’ assumption, rebutted in the text and resting on a King-James mistranslation and a category mistake about case law. What remains genuinely contested is a downstream question this finding does not resolve — whether “from the beginning it was not so” withdraws the Mosaic permission altogether or only narrows it — and that is weighed on the remarriage-or-separation and Shammai–Hillel pages, with which this argument shares Moses’ bill as its common ground.

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