Is it OK for a divorced woman to remarry?
Deuteronomy permits a divorced woman to become another man's wife, while Luke calls the man who marries her an adulterer.
- 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
- Major
- A major event or claim with wider implications.
A divorced woman's subsequent marriage is explicitly permitted in one legal teaching and classified as adultery in the other.
An editorial assessment of the quoted passages. Importance describes the stakes; it does not increase certainty. Reading order weighs both.
A certificate of divorce releases the wife to remarry
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.
The divorced woman may become another man's wife
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.
Marrying a divorced woman constitutes adultery
Whosoever putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband committeth adultery.
Understanding the contradiction
Deuteronomy 24:1-2 describes a husband writing a divorce certificate and sending his wife away. It then explicitly says that she may become another man's wife. The repeated quotation in the first two groups presents the same permission, not two independent positions.
Luke 16:18 calls marriage to a woman put away by her husband adultery. The relevant situation is the same: a husband has dismissed his wife and another man marries her. One text recognizes the subsequent marriage as available to her; the other classifies entering it as a sexual offense. Calling the later teaching a changed rule would acknowledge the difference in the rules, not make the earlier permission and later condemnation identical.