ContradictionsReading order 39Bible context 3 min read
Is Divorce Ever Permissable
The passages offer different marriage rules, ranging from permitted remarriage to prohibitions with different stated exceptions.
- Textual conflict
- Interpretive tension
- The passages pull in different directions, but the conflict depends on how their wording, scope, or narrative context is read.
- Importance
- Foundational
- A central claim about origins, salvation, divine justice, or religious authority.
Permitted remarriage and adultery judgments supply materially different rules, with differing exceptions that alter what people facing divorce may do.
An editorial assessment of the quoted passages. Importance describes the stakes; it does not increase certainty. Reading order weighs both.
Moses permits divorce paperwork and a subsequent marriage
When a man hath taken a wife, and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her: then let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house. And when she is departed out of his house, she may go and be another man’s wife.
Deuteronomy 24:1-2
Translation / edition: King James Version (KJV)
Read the full chapter:Deuteronomy 24
Matthew's prohibition includes an exception for fornication
But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.
Matthew 5:32