Paul concludes that a
death must take place to free a person from the law. In the illustration the
woman bound to a husband is called an adulteress if she “becomes another man’s”
by marriage. (James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1-8, 36) The only means for a
woman to enjoy a second marriage without being called an adulteress is for the
first husband to die. Paul assumes that death is necessary to release a person
from the martial bond in vv. 203 and that his audience would take this for
granted. He argues from these comments to the need for a death to take
place to free a person from the Mosaic law as well. (Stressed also by
Witherington, Women in Earliest Churches, 62-64. Only a death dissolves
the marital bond) The fact that elsewhere in 1 Cor 7:39 Paul mentions as
normative the wife’s being bound to her husband until he dies demonstrates that
“the metaphorical use [in Rom 7:2-3] does not cancel out the literal
meaning of this law.” (Tomson, “What Did Paul Mean,” 577) Again, Paul
assumes the normativity of this legal principle in order to apply it
metaphorically: A death must take place for the wife to enjoy freedom from her
husband.
What is shocking
about this illustration is that Paul writes this to the Romans. Roman
divorce law allowed either partner to divorce the other (cf. Mark 19:11-12). An
ordinary reader in a Roman context would have found Paul’s premise problematic:
a woman is not bound to her husband as long as he lives, such that
marrying another man would be adulterous. Divorces took place regularly.
According to Hellenistic law, for instance, a woman could simply “leave” her
husband. As Wolff explains, “Both spouses could dissolve the marriage at will
and without formality, by mutual agreement, or by expelling or deserting the
other partner.” (H. J. Wolff, “Hellenistic Private Law,” in Safrai and Stern, Jewish
People I the First Century, 1:540) Although a wife could freely instigate
divorce, if the divorcing woman should later decide to marry another, a second
husband would want to be cautious not to violate the rights of a former
husband. A former husband’s divorce certificate (annulment) would be prudent. A
Greco-Roman parallel in Rom 7:2-3 highlights the differences:
If
on the other hand he [the husband] were dead, she would be free of the charge
[of adultery], for no one exists to suffer the injury of the adultery, and when
a marriage lacks a man, it cannot be insulted. But if on the other hand
the marriage has not been annulled, because the husband is still alive,
then a stranger corrupting the wife has poached on another man’s property.
(Achilles Tatius, Leuc. Clit. 8.10.11-12)
What rendered the woman an adulteress after she had
married another man while her first husband was still alive was that her
original marriage had not been annulled. Without a divorce certificate, a wife
was not necessarily entirely free of the first husband. Another husband could
be stealing the first husband’s property. Precisely that possibility of
annulment or a divorce certificate is what is lacking in Rom 7:2-3. Paul’s
illustration omits precisely what the average Roman header would have
expected. The point would have been clear.
Even the Jews posed two options: either the death
of the husband or the divorce bill would allow a woman to enjoy her
freedom. “She acquires her freedom by a bill of divorce or by the death of her
husband” (m. Qidd, 1:3; cf. Josephus, Ant. 15.7.10 §259). It is no
coincidence that Paul’s language in Rom 7:2-3 is identical to Deut
24:2’s in an immediate context of the issuing of divorce certifications:
([εαν] απελθουσα γενηται ανδρι ετερω)! (In view of 1 Cor 7:10-11, the source
must be the teaching of Jesus). In other words, both Jewish and
Greco-Roman sources regularly identify both the death of her husband and
divorce as means by which a wife enjoys the freedom to marry another. The
wife could apply pressure for her husband to divorce if she had not initiated
it herself. Divorce certificates therefore abounded in this world with their
“freedom” for the wife. The apostle conspicuously does not allow divorce as an
option here, only the death of the husband—and he assumes this in order
to argue another point.
Paul addresses the Roman gentiles as those who know the
law in Rom 7:1, but this is also an aspect of the law that he had apparently been
engaged in teaching, if 1 Cor 7:10-11, 39-40 is any indication. He had been
instructing his gentile converts into a very different approach to marriage as
a lifelong union. Peter Tomson concludes that an “apostolic marriage law” was
widely disseminated in early Christianity. Commentators advocating for
remarriage claim that Paul does not mention here the possibility of divorce
since it simply was not in view. These interpreters overlook that Paul does explicitly
envision a woman married to another man after the first. He then states
that it is not possible for her to avoid the charge of adultery in that
second marriage as long as the first husband remains alive. The Roman
Christ-believing audience would have immediately recognized divorce as an
exception to lifelong marital relationships in their larger world—unless
there has been prior to the contrary. Paul does not go further to mention
divorce simply because, for the apostle, a divorce would not eliminate the
adultery in marrying another man or change the situation. As Peter Tomson
rightly concludes, Rom 7:3 “is an explicative corollary which excludes
divorce as a means of terminating the marriage by stating that, as long as
the husband lives, the woman cannot ‘become another mans’.” (Tomson, “What Did
Paul Mean,” 576) (A. Andrew Das, Remarriage
in Early Christianity [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2024], 226-28)