Friday, June 28, 2024

A. Andrew Das on the Supposed Hillel-Shammai Debate Concerning Divorce

  

The Supposed Hillel-Shammai Debate

 

The previous chapters examined how the Jewish Scriptures and the broader Second Temple Jewish milieu understood divorce and remarriage—a background essential to the application of the criterion of discontinuity, but what of the later rabbinic materials and their potential for this criterion? The late second-century CE Mishnaic tractate Giṭṭin discusses divorce documents and closes in 9:10 by discussing the grounds for divorce. Deuteronomy 24:1 posits “the same of a thing” (‘erwat dābār). The Mishnah claims that the house of Shammai had inverted the phrase to place the emphasis on the word “shame” (‘erwat). The wife who is to be divorced must have done something shameful. As Meir puts it: “Hence, the contrary to what is claimed in many treatments of the subject, the House of Shammai does not limit the grounds of divorce to adultery. Any action that would bring shame upon her husband qualifies as grounds for divorce.” (Meir, Law and Love, 93) This would, of course, include adultery. (10For other Shammaite grounds for divorce, see their interpretation of Exod 21:10-11 in m. Ketub 5:6) In contrast, the house of Hillel emphasized the word “thing” (dābār) of the phrase. In other words, any thing could be grounds for divorce. Rabbi Akiva therefore thought that finding a more beautiful woman could be grounds to divorce a wife. He justified his position with another phrase in Deut 24:1: “if she (the first wife) does not find favor [ḥēn].” The Hebrew word ḥēn used in Deut 24:1 can also be translated as “grace” or “beauty.” Reading it as such, the house of Hillel, much like Philo and Josephus, considered virtually anything a ground for divorce.

 

The gospels do not identify differences in the Pharisaic position; they question Jesus on his divorce teaching, and he responds to them as a group. Josephus adheres to a generous Hillel-like position on divorce with no suggestion that there were other views. Further, for the Pharisees to have convinced Jesus to agree with one or the other subgroup would not have demonstrated their point that he was taking a position opposed to Moses, as they attempt in their other confrontations with him. Finally, the Jewish divorce rate in Judea is thought to have been around 4 percent. (Joachim Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, 371) In view of this low divorce rate, it would have been counterproductive for Hillelites arguing for a more generous divorce policy to get Jesus to agree with the more conservative Shammaites in order to discredit him. (William F. Luck, Sr., Divorce and Re-Marriage: Recovering the Biblical View, 2nd ed. [Richardson, TX: Biblical Studies Pres, 2009], 152) That Jesus was being pressed by the Hillel position to side with the Shammai position does not seem obvious.

 

John Meier faults New Testament interpreters for not realizing that m. Giṭṭin is the first attestation in Jewish literature of a dispute over the proper grounds for divorce. “As far as datable documents are concerned, this is something startingly new in Judaism. “(Meier, Law and Love, 95). Josephus, Philo, and Deuteronomy all presume the near-absolute rite for a husband to divorce his wife. (Instone-Brewer [“Jewish Greek and Aramaic Marriage,” 235] mistakenly describes Hillel’s “new ruling” as effectively giving men the same generous divorce rights as in Greek Law. There is no evidence that Jewish men ever were lacking those rights) CD IV, 19-V< 9 condemns polygyny and likely also remarriage after divorce. Apart from Jesus, pre-70 CE Judaism provides no extant of a discussion concerning the sufficient grounds for a divorce. As Meier writes:

 

Therefore, despite the almost universal tendency on the part of NT exegetes to explain Jesus’ prohibition of divorce against the “background” of the debate between the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel, this tendency may actually be a prime example of the anachronistic use of later texts to explain earlier ones. That is, a text written down for the first time at the beginning of the 3d century A.D. (the Mishna) is called upon to elucidate a teaching of Jesus reaching back to the early part of the 1st century A.D., with written attestation in the 50s by Paul and ca. 70 by Mark. Considering the dearth of any clear attestation of the dispute over the grounds of divorce between the Houses in the pre-70 period, we would do well, at least initially, to explain Jesus’ teaching on divorce solely in light of what is truly prior to and contemporary with the Palestinian Judaism of the 1st century A.D. (Meier, Law and Love, 95)

 

Meier thus pleads for an interpretation of early Christianity in the light of contemporaneous or earlier documents, especially since those documents do not offer any hint of the debate in the later Mishnaic texts. Meier’s plea accords with Jacob Neusner’s groundbreaking body of work: What cannot be demonstrated prior to 70 CE should not simply be assumed on the basis of later rabbinic sources. (A. Andrew Das, Remarriage in Early Christianity [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2024], 79-81)