FIVE HUSBANDS AND TWO MEN: Christian Divorce and Re-Marriage? (Part 6 of 18)

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 ‘lie with’ them.  It becomes uncleanness (`ervah) when the act is a perversion of the proper order.  Apparently and contextually, the word referred to sexual “uncleanness” or immoralities such as incest, adultery, bestiality, and other such acts by which the conjugal bond was breached or the land defiled.

To ‘lie with,’ in Hebrew parlance, is the same as the English euphemism, to “sleep with.” Unduly ‘uncovering’ someone’s nakedness (which is uncleanness), is a discreet metaphor for sexual transgressions.  We find `ervah translated not only as nakedness but also as uncleanness in such passages as Deuteronomy 23:14, which says the camp should be holy so that God would “see no unclean [`ervah] thing [or nakedness] in thee.”  It is translated as “shame” in 1 Samuel 20:4.

Here is the point: when it says in Deuteronomy 24:1 that the husband might put away the wife if he “found some uncleanness in her,” the reference was not to “every cause,” as the liberal Hillel school taught, but to conjugal unchastity, as explainable by the idea of nakedness, uncleanness, and shame in `ervah.  The Greek porneia in the New Testament, translated narrowly as “fornication” in Matthew 5:32 and 19:9, addressed sexual immoralities in the same general sense as the Hebrew `ervah.

15. What does Fornication Mean?

In those New Testament passages, since the subject of discourse was a man and his wife, the reference couldn’t have been to fornication in the restricted English language sense, referring to sex between two persons not married to each other, or where one of them is married to someone else.  Some have argued, however, that the word indeed referred to fornication – as the ground for divorce; such fornication as was committed before the partners were married.  If that were the case, then many marriages should break up, as several spouses were practising sinners before they got born again or got married.  It is a preposterous interpretation, that divorce could be permitted based on sexual sins committed before the partners got married or got saved.

Others say that Jesus was referring to pre-marital sex either with whom one was engaged to be married to, or to another person before the marriage to their partner, because engagement was as good as marriage.  They cite Mary and Joseph.  Even then, that passage referred to Mary as “wife,” not as fiancée (Matthew 1:18-24).  If engagement equals marriage, and therefore sex between an engaged person and another partner is “adultery”; if fiancés and fiancées were as good as husband and wife and sex with another was adultery, then engaged couples can sleep with themselves with no fear of religious sanctions, since engagement equals marriage.

In the context of Deuteronomy 24:1 to which Jesus and the Pharisees were alluding in their discourse on the subject, Jesus’ exception clause tagged “fornication” by some translations and “sexual immorality” by others, referred generally to sexual aberrations and marital unchastities.  God makes a case in Jeremiah 3:8, which would appear to clarify the meaning further.  There, God said that He had “divorced faithless Israel because of her adultery” through her idolatries (New Living Translation).

According to the New King James Version: “backsliding Israel had committed adultery, I had put her away AND given her a certificate of divorce.”   Four things or stages are presented here:

1) backsliding – the fall from a previous commitment and intimacy (emotional separation; a state of the heart),

2) adultery (the sin; the anti-matrimonial act resulting from or being the physical expression of the backslidden heart),

3) a putting away (voluntary or enforced physical separation) on grounds of the adultery +

4) a certificate of divorce (legal documentation) = proper (or complete) divorce.

The four progressive stages may be further presented as:

i) emotional disconnection, leading to

ii) inappropriate physical actions, leading to

iii) physical distancing between the parties as an outward expression of the disconnection of hearts, resulting finally in

iv) formalization of the severance by legal documentation.

In other words, adultery is ground for divorce; divorce that is complete when physical separation is backed with the legal document of the certificate of divorce.  So, if not checked early and properly, when hearts begin to disconnect, the emotional divide between the parties could lead to marital abominations, resulting eventually in further physical separations that could end in apartness formalized by the process and document of divorce.  But why would the loving God describe Himself invariably as a Divorcee (while He still woos her to return) (v.14)?  Besides, does taking her back not contradict the condition of no-return for such a departed wife, as stated in the laws of Moses (Deuteronomy 24:2-4)?  That is the distance between His ideal and feeble mortals, allowed for their ‘hardness of the hearts.’

When Jesus stated that a husband or the wife might put away the other for “sexual immorality,” He sided somewhat with the Shammai school, although some readers are persuaded that He took no side in the debate.  All the same, some Bible scholars think that His response nevertheless sided with the woman in that patriarchal society where a man could find frivolous reasons for sending a woman out of the house when she had done nothing that infringed on the marital covenant.  The various perspectives to porneia highlight some of the universal intricacies of language translation.  The point, however, is that the marriage covenant could be breached by a lifestyle of sexual unchastities amounting somewhat to a kind of harlotry, or by gross sexual acts such as incest, bestiality, etc. in the general context of Deuteronomy 24 the clarification of which was the essence of the discourse between Jesus and the Pharisees.

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

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