Unnecessary Clutter?

The Talmud — ancient commentaries of Judaism — says there are 613 distinct commandments in the Law of Moses: 248 positive commands (“Do this”) and 365 negative commands (“Don’t do this”). These numbers are not undisputed within Jewish scholarship, but you’ll come across the number 613 more often than not.

That may seem like a staggeringly large number of laws, but it’s really not. Not at all.

The Lord’s yoke is easy and his burdens are light. Compared to man’s penchant for rule making, a mere 613 commands is downright feathery, which may be why overly fastidious Jews got invested in Talmudism; they were afraid the Torah wasn’t sufficiently voluminous compared to the laws of their neighbors. This is probably where the “heavy burdens” of the Pharisees to which the Lord referred originated.

Speaking of Overwritten …

Here’s something more contemporary with which to compare those numbers. The US Congress passed only 27 new pieces of legislation in 2024, well below its average of 344, bringing the US code to something like 54 volumes and around 60,000 pages. Legislators add two to three million words to federal law every year. This does not include the Code of Federal Regulations, which runs 200 volumes and 188,000 pages currently. Factor in the number of judges who misapply the statutes or ignore them entirely and nobody in America, including the judiciary, knows what’s required at any given time. If it looks like they’re making it up, it’s because they are. But remember, ignorance of the law is no excuse.

Now THAT’s a burden nobody should have to bear.

While Moses can’t come close to the US code for sheer mind-boggling futility, he still has more to say about human behavior than most Christians will ever read or try to apply in principle to their own lives. As we love to say, “Christ fulfilled the law”, which for most of us comes with a great sigh of relief.

An Unusual Scenario

I found this particular subset of the divorce rules from Deuteronomy fascinating. The scenario it paints may seem excessively complex and even unlikely to many — until you’ve actually encountered a man who thinks like this:

“When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, and she departs out of his house, and if she goes and becomes another man’s wife, and the latter man hates her and writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter man dies, who took her to be his wife, then her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after she has been defiled, for that is an abomination before the Lord. And you shall not bring sin upon the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance.”

So what exactly was this law designed to prevent? At first glance it appeared to me to be unnecessary clutter, covering a situation so unusual it was hardly worth the ink in Israel’s law books.

“Some Indecency”

The alleged cause of the marriage breakdown is “some indecency in her”. The Hebrew word translated “indecency” is literally “nakedness”, and might initially suggest adultery. That won’t work, though. Under the law, a married woman who entered into a sexual relationship with another man, married or single, forfeited her life (and his) if they were caught. Adultery was a capital crime on the testimony of two or three witnesses. Further, perhaps because of the immense financial injustice that might have occurred if a wife successfully passed off another man’s child as her husband’s rightful heir, there was even a mechanism in the Law of Moses by which a jealous husband could determine with certainty if his wife had been unfaithful. So this is not that. Given the stakes, most men would hardly be content with a mere divorce in the case of adultery. It’s even less likely they would later become mysteriously disposed to take the divorced wife back.

However, the word ʿervâ can also refer to a public display of things that should never be publicly displayed. What is probably in view is some sort of major humiliation of the husband by the wife: shameless conduct, flirtation or other behavior that might lead to alienation.

It should also be evident that so long as a man didn’t spell its exact nature out too clearly, “some indecency” might easily serve as cover for replacing a wife with a younger or more desirable model. Perhaps the incumbent had done nothing terribly egregious, but the husband had a roving eye combined with a place in the community where he had to be concerned about appearances. So in order to indulge his desires, he could engage in a little “wife flipping” — and if for some reason the new relationship didn’t work out, he could just do the same thing again. To the Pharisaical mindset, “some indecency” could cover a fair bit of territory.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons a former husband was not permitted to take back a wife he had once divorced: to prevent frivolous abuse of the divorce laws.

A Failure of Imagination

Now, call me lacking in empathy if you like, but until a few years ago I genuinely could not imagine any scenario in which, given the expense and pain of modern divorce, a marriage could get so bad that you would go to the trouble of officially parting ways, then, sometime later, arbitrarily decide, “Oh, hey, I was just kidding. It was actually pretty good. Let’s give it another shot, honey.” At least, that was what I used to think. Let’s just say I was suffering from a failure of imagination.

Then I met a woman who went through almost precisely what this law forbids. Her partner got into an emotional fling online and came to the conclusion that his life would be better off shared with the new, always-friendly face on his screen than working through the difficulties that naturally arise in all long-term relationships. Of course, that was not what he told friends, family and anyone who would listen. No, he was renting a brand new condo, cutting ties and moving on because his current relationship was full of intractable problems that nobody could be expected to suffer. Work through them? Impossible.

So off he went. For about three months, until suddenly this new relationship that seemed so viable when conducted entirely online, with none of the ordinary stresses and strains of living together placed upon it, suddenly went off the rails. My friend got a weepy call from the washroom at work wondering if she might take him back. (Spoiler alert: she gently advised him to go get professional counseling and got on with her life.)

Frivolous Parting

So, yes, men really can be just that frivolous about divorce. Women can too. I’ve come across two more such scenarios in the last year or so, and one had the sexes reversed. They are far more common than I was aware. What is increasingly evident is that the desire for maximizing one’s own pleasure is often sufficiently intense and delusory that it pushes aside all other considerations and gives rise to public rationalizations that do not remotely represent the facts of the case. If nothing else, this provision of the Law of Moses prevented that happening easily in Israel. It may have served other purposes as well. At very least, it was not unnecessary clutter.

Does this law provide any indirect guidance for modern elders asked to give advice in complex, long-standing marriage breakdowns? Perhaps. It may not be binding on Christians in the age of grace, but it provides a definite indication of what the Lord thinks about our whimsical modern affections.

Perhaps it is also an indication for those who pass judgment on failed marriages that things are very often not what they initially seem.