Sunday, August 27, 2023

John W. Welch on πορνεία

  

. . . the Sermon on the Mount takes the marriage relationship very seriously, as did the Temple. Indeed, the theme of dealing with issues of martial infidelity was very familiar to the Temple with the cult itself providing an elaborate ritual for proving the guilty of innocence of a wife suspected of adultery. In Numbers 5, the well-known temple ritual of the bitter waters is spelled out. For present purposes it is not necessary to review all the steps involved in proving the guilt or innocence of a wife suspected of adultery, but it is relevant to point out that if a man ever wondered whether his wife was guilty of some porneia that warranted, if not required, him to separate himself from her, the temple cult provided the ritual mechanism for making that determination, and perhaps this explains why Jesus did not define porenia; he took this exception and its provability for granted.

 

The temple procedure was known as “the law in cases of jealousy, when a wife, though under her husband’s authority, goes astray and defiles herself” (Numbers 5:29). The wife may or may not have committed adultery; the jealousy could arise if the husband suspected that she had “gone astray” or acted in any way “unfaithfully against him” (Numbers 5:12). The concern that she might thereby have somehow become “defiled” appears to have presented the greatest problem for the husband, who by continuing living with her, assuming that she had become defiled, would himself then contrast impurity from her. This concern ever defilement seems to be the main concern necessitating the conduct of this divination procedure (the word appears seven times in Numbers 5:11-30, just as the problem of defilement is also the fundamental issue in Deuteronomy 24:4). If the wife is thereby found to be defiled, divorce would certainly be justified in the case of an ordinary husband; it is mandatory in the case of a husband who is a priest.

 

This underlying concern about purity and hence worthiness to enter the Temple seems to stand in much the same way behind Jesus’ statement about the porneia exception for divorce in Matthew 5. Except for the reason of porneia (any kind of unlawful sexual relationship outside of marriage) on the part of the woman (in which case she is already responsible for her defilement), the man “makes her to commit adultery/unfaithfulness” (Matthew 5:32), if he sends her out without justification. Just as a man obeys the commandment against murder by avoiding anger, so he keeps the commandment against adultery not by lusting after other women or by divorcing his wife who is sexually pure, for either will likely lead the man or the woman to further sexual defilement, for example, if a man (Matthew 19:9) or a woman (Mark 10:12) were to remarry after an invalid divorce, essentially being still married. Whatever the practical interpretations of the divorce texts in the Bible might have been, the common similarity between them ties into the concern about purity. By committing adultery, one way or any other, the result is impurity and defilement. Purity in a ritual sense is at stake here, for the dichotomy is either to stand pure in the presence of the Lord or to be cast impure into hell. (John W. Welch, The Sermon on the Mount in the Light of the Temple [Society for Old Testament Study Monographs; London: Routledge, 2009], 95-96)