Month: May 2025

16. Revision or Reinstatement?

Some Bible teachers are of the view that, in answering the Pharisees on the question of divorce, Jesus re-instituted the ‘original order,’ for the two to be one flesh without the option of divorce at all.  The evidence of Scripture, however, is that He revised the old order, and that was not the only instance of His doing so. In His first sermon, generally called the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), for example, Jesus declared several times, “It hath been said … But I say; …. It hath been said … But I say ….”

For instance, whereas the traditional ‘definition’ of adultery was a sexual act between a married person and someone who is not their spouse, Jesus revised it to include lustful looks and thoughts (Matthew 5:27-28).  Murder used to be defined as the act of killing somebody, but Jesus revised the concept to include causeless anger with a brother (Matthew 5:21-22).  An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth: that used to be the law, the Scripture; but Jesus revised that, too, saying, “But I say unto you … resist not evil” (Matthew 5:38-39).  In Matthew chapter 5 alone, that revisionary phrase, “But I say unto you …,” occurs as many as six times

Read more

14. What “Uncleanness”?

The Hebrew word rendered as “uncleanness” in that passage is `ervah, which is sometimes translated euphemistically as “nakedness” and sometimes as “uncleanness.”  In Leviticus 18:6-19, the word occurs repeatedly, warning that one should not (sexually) ‘uncover’ the “nakedness” (`ervah) of one’s daughter or daughter-in-law or stepmother or aunt or granddaughter, etc.  The figurative usage of that word as a reference to sexual uncleanness is clearer in such passages as Leviticus 20:17, which states that “a man” should not uncover or “see” the nakedness (`ervah) of his sister, his daughter, or his niece.  Leviticus 20:18 uses the word in a way that more clearly connects the reference to sexual relations: “if a man shall lie with a woman … and shall uncover her nakedness…” – `ervah.  People uncover their nakedness or that of their partner to

Read more

10. Was it a Parable?

If the encounter with the woman of Samaria had been a parable, we might have had theological pathways to ease the puzzle, but it was a real-life encounter with an actual woman who had had FIVE HUSBANDS – one, two, three, four, and five!  It was a real encounter with an actual woman at an authentic location witnessed by all twelve disciples of Jesus as well as the villagers, especially the men whom she invited to “come see.” 

If the story had been of a man who had had five wives, we might also have bothered differently, even in that New Testament passage.  What did Jesus mean in Matthew 5:32 about legitimate divorce strictly on grounds of fornication, that did not seem to apply in John 4:18 with the Samaritan woman and her five legitimate ex-husbands and five apparently legitimate divorces from each of them?

If it had been a disciple or a Pharisee who had called those men “husbands,” one would have

Read more

8. Was it Fornication?

If consecutive deaths was not the likely cause for the termination of each of the five previous marriages, was it fornication, as apparently provided for by Jesus in His discourse with the Pharisees who had asked if it was okay for a husband to “put away his wife for every cause” (Matthew 19:3)?  Did someone commit fornication (or “sexual immorality,” as some Bible translations put it) in all previous marriages, to warrant the lawful divorces that legitimised the subsequent remarriages, according to the apparent terms of Matthew 5:32 and 19:9?

Read more

6. How the Separation?

The passage does not say how the separations with the five ex-husbands came about, and whose fault it was.  Whatever the case, they were consecutive divorces: one, two, three, four, and five.  If any of the previous partings of ways had not been a valid divorce but a mere separation, the subsequent relationship could not have been called a marriage and the man a “husband.”  It had to have taken one legal divorce for the subsequent relationship to be called a marriage, and the partners “husband” and “wife.”  If each of the five ex-men was at one point legitimately a husband, and Jesus called them “husbands,” then Jesus recognised as valid and acceptable both the processes by which each man was engaged to that woman, and those by which he got later divorced from her; He recognized each of the five as valid consecutive marriages and valid consecutive divorces.

If Jesus would say on one hand in Judea that divorce and remarriage was adultery while one partner still lived, except the divorce had been based on “fornication” by one of the parties, then in Samaria seem to endorse divorces and remarriages which did not appear to have been based on the condition declared in Judea, there must be something more to what Jesus had said, than is apparent from a simple reading of what He said.  My worry is, what was or were the legitimate grounds for the Samaritan divorces, as they did not seem to tally either with the exception clause in the related discourse with the Pharisees in Judea or with Paul’s exception clauses based on death or desertion by the unbelieving partner (1 Corinthians 7:15)?

7. Was it Deaths?

In answering the Sadducees during one interrogation, Jesus gave a hypothetical parable about a woman consecutively marrying each of seven brothers after the previous brother had died, from the eldest to the last (Mark 12:19-22).  Was consecutive deaths the reason and license for the Samaritan woman’s marriage to each next man?  Did each of the consecutive husbands die, thus warranting and legitimising her next marriage, and validating the subsequent man’s title as “husband” rather than “adulterer” – and she “no adulteress,” according to Matthew 19:9?

It is very unlikely that consecutive deaths was the cause of all five previous dissolutions of marriage.  No matter her feminine attractions or other qualities, I wonder how many men would so easily have risked marrying a woman with her graveyard of ex-husbands, a woman who ‘killed’ every man that married her!  Even if Man No 2 and Man No 3 had been too romantic or too bewitched to care about the previous graves, I am not sure that Man No 4 and Man No 5 would have followed so quickly in their trail.  Who wants to sign their death warrant in the name of marriage?  “She should keep her witchcraft-beauty and her graves to herself,” they might have sworn.  Such a killer-wife would have earned an unenviable devilish name in her little community, unless she possessed occult powers by which her victims were hypnotised and zombie-ed irresistibly one after the other into their graves through her conjugal sorceries.  But nothing in Jesus’ interaction with her suggested that, otherwise He might also have been casting out those devils from her. It is not impossible, but very unlikely, that death was the cause of all five previous dissolutions of marriage.  In other words, it was not the death of one husband that permitted her recognised marriage to the next man, as apparently prescribed by Jesus in Judea.

From The Preacher’s diary,
July 20, 2021.