Marriage and Divorce

Most churches teach that Yahuah is against divorce, period. Scripture says something different. The Torah gives a written divorce, Yahuah Himself gave one, and what He actually hates is a man who throws his wife away and will not set her free. Behind all of it stands a bigger marriage: a Father who divorced an unfaithful wife, and a Son who comes as the Bridegroom to take her back.

What the Words Mean

Hebrew has no word for “marriage.” A man simply takes a wife. Where the King James says “marriage” in the Old Testament, it is translating something else.

In Exodus 21:10 the “duty of marriage” is onah, H5772, a word used only here. It is what a husband owes his wife, listed right beside her food and clothing. It is her right, not a ceremony. If he holds these back, “then shall she go out free” (Exodus 21:11).

In Psalm 78:63 the maidens were “not given to marriage.” The Hebrew says they were not praised, from halal, H1984, the root of hallelu. With the young men dead, no one sang over them. A bride, in Hebrew, is someone praised.

In the New Testament the word is gamos, G1062, used sixteen times. It just means a wedding, from Cana (John 2:1) to the marriage of the Lamb (Revelation 19:7).

The Bride and the Bridegroom

The bride is kallah, H3618, from a root meaning “to make complete.” The same word also means daughter-in-law. Tamar is Judah’s kallah (Genesis 38:11); Ruth is Naomi’s (Ruth 1:6-8). A Hebrew bride does not just marry a man. She is brought into his father’s house.

The bridegroom is chatan, H2860, and it also means son-in-law. Lot’s sons-in-law are chatan (Genesis 19:14). The root means to be joined to another family by covenant, not by birth.

That is a problem for the Trinity. In Yahushua’s own parable a king “made a marriage for his son” (Matthew 22:2). The father throws the wedding; the son is the one married. Two people, two roles. John the Baptist says it plainly: the one who has the bride is the bridegroom (John 3:29), and Yahushua calls Himself the bridegroom (Matthew 9:15). The Father gives the wedding. The Son is the groom.

A bridegroom is a husband in the waiting stage. In Israel a betrothed man was already called her husband before the wedding (Deuteronomy 22:23-24), and Joseph is called Mary’s husband while only betrothed (Matthew 1:19). Yahushua is the bridegroom now, while the bride is “espoused” (2 Corinthians 11:2). At the marriage supper He becomes the husband (Revelation 19:7-9).

Husband, Not Master

The usual Hebrew word for husband is ba’al, H1167. It means owner or master: the one who watches over the house and holds the rod over it. The nations turned that word into the name of their god, Baal.

Yahuah’s answer is in Hosea. A day is coming, He says, when “thou shalt call me Ishi; and shalt call me no more Baali” (Hosea 2:16). Ishi means “my husband.” Baali means “my master.” Yahuah does not want to be called owner. He wants to be called husband, and He promises to take her back for good (Hosea 2:19-20). The English title “Lord” carries the very meaning He set aside.

The Writ of Divorce

The Torah does not forbid divorce. It requires that it be done in writing. The man must write her a bill of divorce, put it in her hand, and send her away, and then she is free to marry another man (Deuteronomy 24:1-2). The bill is sefer keritut, a “cutting” paper. It protects her. Without it she has no standing and no future.

Yahuah used this paper Himself. Of the northern house of Israel He says, “I had put her away, and given her a bill of divorce” (Jeremiah 3:8). If divorce were sin in itself, Yahuah could not have done it.

Let Her Go

What the Torah really cares about is a woman held against her will. Even a woman captured in war could not be kept once she was unwanted: “let her go whither she will” and do not “make merchandise of her” (Deuteronomy 21:14). That word, amar, H6014, is used again for kidnapping and selling a person (Deuteronomy 24:7). A man who keeps a wife he has already rejected is acting like a kidnapper. Yahuah’s answer is always the same: “she shall go out free” (Exodus 21:11).

Two Words Yahushua Kept Apart

English Bibles blur two Greek words. Apoluo, G630, means to send away. Apostasion, G647, is the written divorce paper. Yahushua says that a man who sends his wife away must give her the paper, and that a man who sends her away for anything short of fornication causes her to commit adultery (Matthew 5:31-32).

He is not cancelling Deuteronomy 24. He is condemning the man who puts his wife out of the house but never hands her the paper. She is still bound. If she remarries, he has made her an adulteress. The sin is his. Joseph planned to “put her away privily” (Matthew 1:19), the same word, and Scripture calls him a just man for it.

The Other Side

None of this makes divorce a small thing. From the beginning the two were one flesh (Genesis 2:24), and Moses allowed divorce only “because of the hardness of your hearts” (Matthew 19:8). The permission exists because people fail, not because the plan changed.

Malachi 2:16 is the verse everyone quotes: Yahuah “hateth putting away.” Read the whole passage. The word “treacherously” (bagad, H898) shows up five times in seven verses, and the same verse condemns the man who covers violence with his garment. Yahuah hates a man betraying the wife of his youth, not a woman receiving a lawful release.

Paul holds the same balance. A believer should not leave, but if an unbelieving spouse walks out, the brother or sister “is not under bondage” (1 Corinthians 7:15). The word is douloo, to be enslaved. The Word will not leave anyone chained to a marriage the other side abandoned.

How the Wife Comes Home

Here is the problem. Israel played the harlot, and Yahuah gave her a divorce paper (Jeremiah 3:8). The Torah says a divorced woman who has been with other men can never go back to her first husband (Deuteronomy 24:4). And the Torah says the adulteress must die (Leviticus 20:10). So how does she ever come home?

She dies. Not in a grave of her own, but in Messiah’s death. Paul says believers are buried with Him in immersion, so that the old person is put to death with Him (Romans 6:3-6). The death sentence the Torah demanded is carried out, and the law is kept, not broken.

Then a new person rises. Paul calls it walking in “newness of life” (Romans 6:4). “If any man be in Messiah, he is a new creature: old things are passed away” (2 Corinthians 5:17). The woman Deuteronomy 24:4 shuts out is the old one, and she is dead and buried. The one who rose out of the water has never been divorced.

Now she is free, but not to marry just anyone. Paul says she is dead to the old marriage “that ye should be married to another, even to him that is raised from the dead” (Romans 7:4). The word for another, heteros, G2087, means a different one, not the same husband again.

This is where the Trinity breaks. If the Son is Yahuah, the new person has gone right back to the first husband, and Paul’s word “another” means nothing. Yahuah was never raised from the dead, because He never died. The one raised is the Son.

It is the pattern of Genesis 24. Abraham sends his servant to bring a bride for his son Isaac. The father chooses her, the son marries her, and she comes to live in the father’s house. So the new bride enters Yahuah’s house by a new door, as kallah: bride of the Son and daughter-in-law of the Father. That is how Yahuah can say “thy Maker is thine husband” (Isaiah 54:5) and still give the bride to His Son. Once home, she lives by the rules of that house. Deliverance comes first; the walk in the Father’s Torah follows.

Isaiah saw it coming. The forsaken land is renamed Beulah, “married,” and “as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy Elohim rejoice over thee” (Isaiah 62:4-5).

Israel was given her divorce paper, but the story does not end in Jeremiah 3. It ends at the marriage supper of the Lamb, where the bride has made herself ready (Revelation 19:7-9), comes down “as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2), and is still calling, “Come” (Revelation 22:17).