. . . 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)
