Saturday, June 29, 2024

A. Andrew Das on Romans 7:2-3

  

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)