Matthew 19:8

He saith unto them,.... In answer to their objection; Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, suffered you to put away your wives: in which may be observed, that, though it was by direction

He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.

Ver. 7,8. Mark reports this a little differently, &c., as if Christ had first said unto them. What did Moses command you? And they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and to put her away. And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept, & c. The substance of our Saviour’ s answer seemeth to be this: Moses gave you no positive command in the case, he could not make a law directly opposite to the law of my Father; but Moses saw the wantonness and wickedness of your hearts, that you would turn away your wives without any just and warrantable cause; and to restrain your extravagances of cruelty to your wives, or disorderly turning them off upon any occasion, he made a law that none should put away his wife but upon a legal cognizance of the cause, and giving her a bill of divorce. Indeed possibly this bill of divorce was sometimes judicially granted upon irregular causes, and Moses might connive at it for the preventing of greater evils, because you were always a hard hearted and stiff necked people; and you by your traditions have expounded that law beyond Moses’ s intention, and made a bill of divorce grantable in cases which he never thought of, nor intended in that law. But the measures of lawfulness are neither to be taken from Moses’ s temporary toleration and connivance, nor much less from your traditions and expositions of the law of Moses, but from the original institution of marriage, and from God’ s original law relating to it: now God at first made but one woman for one man, and so united them that he styled them one flesh; so as he who puts away his wife, doth as it were divide and tear his own flesh piece from piece, which is barbarous, inhuman, and unnatural. And the law of God was not, that a man should forsake his wife whenever he had a mind to it, but that he should rather forsake his father and mother than his wife; that he should cleave to his wife, living and dwelling with her, as a man of knowledge; not hating his own flesh; loving his wife as his own body, loving and cherishing her, ,29. Now how can this possibly consist with a man’ s putting away his wife upon every little and trivial cause of offence or dislike unto her.

8 He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so. Ver. 8. Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts] Ob duricordiam vestram, saith Tertullian. For the relief of the wife, questionless, was this permitted by Moses, not as a prophet, but as a lawgiver; so he suffered them to exercise usury upon strangers. And, at this day, they are, by the states where they live, permitted to strain up their usury to eighteen in the hundred (18%) upon the Christians. And so they are used, as the friars, to suck from the meanest, and to be sucked by the greatest. But what saith our statute? Forasmuch as all usury, being forbidden by the law of God, is a sin and detestable, &c. And what saith our homily book? Verily so many as increase themselves by usury-they have their goods of the devil’ s gift, &c. And what saith blind nature? Aristotle in one page condemneth both τοκιστην and κυβευτην, the usurer and the gambler. And Agis, the Athenian general, set fire upon all the usurer’ s books and bonds in the marketplace than which fire Agesilaus was wont to say, he never saw a fairer. But to return to the text: Moses noteth the hatred of a man’ s wife to be the cause of much mischief, Deuteronomy 22:13-14. Hence a divorce was allowed in that case, Deuteronomy 24:3, lest the husband’ s hatred should work the wife’ s ruth or ruin, in case he should be compelled to keep her. He might put her away, therefore, but not without a double blur to himself. 1. By his writing of divorce, he should give testimony to her honesty, and that she was put away merely for his hard-heartedness toward her. 2. If she were again put away by a second husband, the first might not take her to wife again, as having once for ever judged himself unworthy of her further fellowship. Husbands should be gentle to their wives, because of their weakness: glasses are not hardly handled; a small knock soon breaks them. But there are a number of Nabals, a brood of Chaldeans, a bitter and furious nation, that have little growing in their furrows but wormwood; they have a true gall of bitterness in them, Colossians 3:20, whereas the very heathens, at their weddings, pulled the gall out of all their good cheer, and cast it away; teaching thereby the married couples what to do (τηνχοληνεξελοντες, ερριψαν. Plut.). And God Almighty professeth that he hates putting away; threatening also to cut off such unkind husbands as by their harshness caused their wives, when they should have been cheerful in God’ s services, to cover the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping and with crying out, so that he regarded not the offering any more, Malachi 2:13. Picus est imago ingrati mariti, the saith Melancthon.

(8) Moses because of the hardness of your hearts.—The force of the answer lies (1) in emphasized substitution of “suffered” for “commanded.” The scribes of the school of Hillel had almost turned divorce into a duty, even when there was no ground for it but incompatibility of temper or other lesser fault, as if Deuteronomy 24:1 had enjoined the writing of divorcement in such cases. (2) In the grounds assigned for the permission. Our Lord’s position in the controversy between the two schools was analogous to that in which those who are true at once to principles and facts not seldom find themselves. He agreed, as we have seen, with the ideal of marriage maintained by the followers of Shammai. He accepted as a legitimate interpretation of the Law that of the followers of Hillel. But He proclaimed, with an authority greater than that of Moses, that his legislation on this point was a step backwards when compared with the primary law of nature, which had been “from the beginning,” and only so far a step forward because the people had fallen into a yet lower state, in which the observance of the higher law was practically impossible. But for the possibility of divorce the wife would have been the victim of the husband’s tyranny; and law, which has to deal with facts, was compelled to choose the least of two evils. Two important consequences, it will be obvious, flow from the reasoning thus enforced: (1) that the “hardness of heart” which made this concession necessary may be admitted as at least a partial explanation of whatever else in the Law of Moses strikes us as deviating from the standard of eternal righteousness embodied in the law of Christ—as, e.g., the tolerance of polygamy and slavery, and the severity of punishment for seeming trivial faults; (2) that the principle is one of wider application than the particular instance, and that where a nation calling itself Christian has sunk so low as to exhibit the “hardness of heart” of Jews or heathens, there also a concessive legislation may be forced upon the State even while the churches assert their witness of the higher truth.

Verse 8. Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts] It is dangerous to tolerate the least evil, though prudence itself may require it: because toleration, in this case, raises itself insensibly into permission, and permission soon sets up for command. Moses perceived that if divorce were not permitted, in many cases, the women would be exposed to great hardships through the cruelty of their husbands: for so the word σκληροκαρδια, is understood in this place by some learned men. From the beginning it was not so] The Jews named the books of the law from the first word in each. Genesis they always term Bereshith, בראשית, which is the first word in it, and signifies, In the beginning. It is probable that our Lord speaks in this way here, In Bereshith it was not so, intimating that the account given in Genesis is widely different. There was no divorce between Eve and Adam; nor did he or his family practise polygamy. But our Lord, by the beginning, may mean the original intention or design.

8. because of the hardness of your hearts] Literally, having respect to, with a view to the hardness of your hearts towards God. So the law was relatively good, not absolutely. A great principle. Even now all are not capable of the higher religious life or of the deepest truths. Some interpret “hardness of heart,” of the cruelty of men towards their wives.

He saith unto them ... - Jesus admits that this was allowed, but still he contends that this was not the original design of marriage.

8. Because of the hardness of your hearts — Because the rigidness of the moral law, if enforced by civil law, would be by you made an occasion of still greater wrong. You would have murdered your wives to be rid of them.