Mark and Jewish Divorce Laws
Posted: December 19, 2005
A skeptic online has charged the author of Mark's Gospel with the following:
"Mark doesn't know Jewish divorce law.
In Mark 10:11-12, Jesus forbids divorce: He answered, “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."
Verse 12 implies that Mark believed women had a right of divorce in Jewish law. They did not."
Response:
- “The wife's right to sue for divorce was unknown to the Biblical law. There is a germ of this right in Ex. xxi. 11, but it was not until the Mishnah that this right was established. The wife never obtained the right to give her husband a get, but when the court decided that she was entitled to be divorced from him, he was forced to give her a get….” However, “…during the reign of the Herodians, under the influence of Roman practice, cases are recorded in which women sent bills of divorce to their husbands” (Jewish Encyclopedia).
- The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus writes the following in his Antiquities of the Jews 15.7.10: “10. But some time afterward, when Salome happened to quarrel with Costobarus, she sent him a bill of divorce and dissolved her marriage with him, though this was not according to the Jewish laws; for with us it is lawful for a husband to do so; but a wife; if she departs from her husband, cannot of herself be married to another, unless her former husband put her away. However, Salome chose to follow not the law of her country, but the law of her authority, and so renounced her wedlock; and told her brother Herod, that she left her husband out of her good-will to him, because she perceived that he, with Antipater, and Lysimachus, and Dositheus, were raising a sedition against him; as an evidence whereof, she alleged the case of the sons of Babas, that they had been by him preserved alive already for the interval of twelve years; which proved to be true.”
Conclusion:
1. There is no indication that all Jews faithfully followed the Jewish law.
2. There is at least one historical instance in which a Jewish woman chose not to follow Jewish laws, but to divorce her husband instead.
3. Thus, Mark is not necessarily in error by reporting that Jesus said a woman commits adultery by divorcing her husband.