FIVE HUSBANDS AND TWO MEN: Christian Divorce and Re-Marriage? (Part 3 of 18)

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.