Divorce and Cruelty

In his exhaustive study of Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible: The Social and Literary Context , David Instone-Brewer notes that “Cruelty and humiliation were . . . recognized as grounds for divorce and are related to emotional neglect in the Mishnah” (107). Both husbands and wives could be charged with humiliating and abusing a spouse. After specifying some cases, Instone-Brewer writes, “These acts of cruelty, which individually seem so petty, can mount up to an intolerable marriage. The grounds for divorce are not specified, except to say that some of them involve breaking the laws of Israel and Jewish custom. It seems likely that these acts of cruelty were considered as part of emotional neglect, and that they justified divorce in these cases by extrapolating from the obligations of Exodus 21:10-11” (109), obligations summed up as “emotional” and “material” obligations.

How did Jesus stand on the issue?

Instone-Brewer notes that any arguments are arguments from silence, since Jesus never addressed these grounds for divorce specifically. But he suggests that the fact that Jesus was silent on the subject has some weight: “there was no group in first-century Judaism that rejected the grounds for divorce in Exodus 21:10-11 . . . . If Jesus had wanted to teach a rejection of the grounds for divorce in Exodus 21:10-11, he would have had to say so very clearly, and if he said nothing about them, it would have been assumed that, like all other Jews, he accepted them” (185).

Exodus 21:10-11 is, Instone-Brewer argues, behind Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 7. Verses 1-9 dealt with the emotional and sexual obligations of the parties in marriage, and the following verses with the material obligations. This leads him to this conclusion: “By reminding believers about their obligations of material and emotional support, it is clear that Paul regarded these obligations as part of their marriage vows, in the way that all other Jews did, and therefore he regarded their neglect as grounds for divorce” (212).