FIVE HUSBANDS AND TWO MEN: Christian Divorce and Re-Marriage? (Part 4 of 18)

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?

It is also very unlikely that all five previous marriages had been dissolved on account of fornication on the part of all the men or her.  If that Samaritan woman were such a morally loose woman, who would lose marriage after marriage because of a hopeless weakness between her legs, would she have been seeking marriage with men as the means for satisfying her unrestrained passions?  A fornicator of that supposed kind would have been on the streets, rather than keep keeping herself for lawful husbands. In fact, in Jewish and Samaritan societies, whose laws were very similar, the cost of adultery was not divorce; it was death, by stoning (John 8:4-5).  She would not have been alive to marry the next husband if a previous marriage had been broken by adultery, unless the husband in question was a kind-hearted Joseph who was not going to “make her a publick example” from which she was sure to never recover (Matthew 1:19).

That Samaritan was a self-respecting woman, who had become so embarrassed by her unfortunate lot with men that she would no longer go to the public well when other women usually did, early in the morning or in the cool of the evening (Genesis 24:11).  She was a cheerful and charitable woman; approachable and very religious; well versed in the scriptures of her context.   To go to the well by herself in the hot afternoon also meant that she was hardworking.  She was noble, and apparently well-respected, such that at her mere announcement, the men of her town would stream out to see the wonder to which she invited them at the feet of the New Man she had met at the well.  Great influence.

Was such a woman a serial fornicator?  Or could her noble life have been consecutively attracting fornicating men?  Did she lose all previous marriages because she or they were fornicators?  Did she divorce them because of their adulteries?  It is more likely that they divorced her – but was that because she was the morally guilty one?  The probability in either case is very slim, therefore, the argument is very unlikely.

The Greek word translated “fornication” in those passages is porneia, referring to harlotry (including adultery and incest), and figuratively designating idolatry.  The implication is that porneia referred not just to the act or an instance but to a lifestyle of sexual immorality that amounts to harlotry.  Does that describe those men or the woman?  The men would have been Samaritan Hoseas to have been willing to marry such a loose Gomer, if she were.  Or she would have been the remarkable ‘Hosea’ to have been willing to stay with men of that morally decrepit sort whose looseness drove her out of her faithful life one after the other (Hosea 1:2).

That Samaritan lady was an honourable woman who had been unlucky with marriage (although radical ‘deliverance preachers’ are bound to have approached it differently, understandably attributing her lot to demonic interferences or a foundational curse).  A woman of such reckless infidelity would have earned herself an unattractive name in her little community, enough to scare away self-respecting men.  Besides, if any man knew that she was that kind of person before he married her, would he divorce her for what he knew about her before he came for her?  It is unlikely that the lawful dissolution of her previous marriages had been based on that condition.  There might have been other grounds of disagreement, of which one cannot entirely guess, as the passage does not say.  Jesus did not address the reasons for the failure of the previous marriages, but technically conceded to the legitimacy of the marriage and re-marriages as well as their dissolutions.

9. Was it Her Temperament?

To have had five marriages, and got a sixth man, that woman must have been very attractive, whatever her charms or attractions were: physical beauty, material resources, and so on.  To have had five consecutive divorces might suggest a blame in her; something in her that none of the five men could stand, despite her beauties; something for which a sixth man was yet to make up his mind despite her moving in with him.  Or was her relationship with Man No 6 a protest against tradition and vengeance against men?  Was it a resolution to have nothing more to do with marriage (but romance only) after five men had broken her heart?

Her discussion with Jesus reveals something of her personality: she was a woman with little inhibitions in engaging men publicly in that society where a woman should be seen but not heard; a culture where the woman was apparently not significant even as datum in the common census of thousands who had eaten bread and fish (Mark 6:44).  In such a society, this Samaritan woman could engage a man to a debate at a public place, then run into town and call the men of her city (not fellow women or children) to follow her, to see her new Wonder Man (John 4:28-29).  She was probably ‘too audacious’ a female in her ‘men’s world.’

Maybe, despite her beauty or other attractions, traditional Samaritan men could not stand her nerves with men, her apparent forwardness, her inability to be silent in the presence of men, her ‘confrontational’ temperaments.  Maybe the pains she had had with some men made her that way with all men, where she chose to be silent no more before men who often sought to take advantage of her.

Take this: she meets a stranger at a public well who politely requests a drink from her, she fires Him with a sentimental and racist question: “How could you, a Jew, request water from a Samaritan? Since when did Jews and Samaritans become friends?”  Maybe she was only amazed at Jesus’ request.  Maybe, she was ready to fight at short notice, rebuffing His endearments.  It took a patient Jesus to have endured the conversation with her, during which time she kept trying to prove her point about the parallel nobility of her race, her culture, and her ancestry with that of the Jews.  She is the one woman recorded in the entire Bible to have engaged Jesus in the longest conversation/debate.

Her approach was not immediately supplicatory.  Maybe those were some of her culturally unacceptable ‘male-dominative’ tendencies in that patriarchal culture, which became her undoing in marriage after marriage.  Maybe in all those cases, she lacked the traditional wisdom of home-building of which Solomon spoke, but plucked down each new house “with her hands” (Proverbs 14:1).  If these suppositions are true, one wonders the violence she might have suffered from her men, apart from the emotional and mental traumas.  Still, the Master saw a treasure in her.

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

• A link to the e-book version of these posts shall be provided in the last three ‘Parts’ of this series.
• A collection of all remarks to these posts (received online/offline) shall be the last ‘Part’ of the series.