ContradictionsReading order 69Bible context 2 min read
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.
Deuteronomy 24:1-2
Translation / edition: King James Version (KJV)
Read the full chapter:Deuteronomy 24
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.
Deuteronomy 24:1-2