Is it OK for a divorced woman to remarry?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Deuteronomy 24:1-4 is the Torah's foundational divorce regulation. A man who finds "some uncleanness" (עֶרְוַת דָּבָר, *ervat davar* — a notoriously vague phrase) in his wife writes her a bill of divorcement (*sefer keritut*), and once dismissed "she may go and be another man's wife" (Deut 24:2). The remarriage to a different man is openly sanctioned; only the *return* to the first husband after a second marriage is prohibited as an "abomination" (vv. 3-4). The plain force is permissive. Luke 16:18 then has Jesus declare flatly: "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and whoever marries one divorced from a husband commits adultery." No exception, no qualification. Mark 10:11-12 likewise has no exception and notably extends the ruling to women initiating divorce — a Greco-Roman, not strictly Palestinian, scenario. Matthew alone inserts the *porneia* clause (Matt 5:32; 19:9), exempting divorce "except for sexual immorality."

The vagueness of *ervat davar* generated the first-century rabbinic dispute Jesus is implicitly addressing. The House of Shammai read it narrowly (sexual misconduct); the House of Hillel read it broadly enough to license divorce "even if she spoiled his dish" (m. Gittin 9:10). David Instone-Brewer's influential reconstruction is that Jesus targets the Hillelite "any cause" divorce — the lax abuse of Deuteronomy 24 — rather than abolishing all remarriage; Craig Blomberg similarly reads Jesus as intensifying the Mosaic intent for the kingdom era, not contradicting it.

In Matthew, this harmonization is strong. The *porneia* clause, the explicit framing as a Hillel-Shammai debate ("Is it lawful... for *any cause*?" Matt 19:3), and the appeal back to Genesis 1-2 over against Deuteronomy's concession (Matt 19:8, "because of your hardness of heart") together make Matthew's Jesus a participant in an inner-Jewish halakhic argument rather than a flat contradictor of Moses. To that extent the tension is partially harmonized.

But Luke 16:18 — the verse actually cited — carries none of this apparatus. It is an unqualified declarative: marrying a divorced woman *is* adultery, full stop. If Jesus were merely correcting a Hillelite abuse, Luke's redactor either did not preserve that nuance or did not intend it. Read on its own terms, Luke 16:18 brands as adultery precisely the remarriage Deuteronomy 24:2 permits.

The critical reconstruction sharpens this. John P. Meier (*A Marginal Jew*, vol. 4) argues at length that the historical Jesus prohibited divorce absolutely — a position stricter than both Deuteronomic and Pharisaic law and one of the few rulings multiply attested (Mark, Q/Luke, Paul in 1 Cor 7:10-11) — and that the Matthean *porneia* exception is a secondary softening by the Matthean community accommodating communal realities. Joseph Fitzmyer reaches the same conclusion on Luke, and his earlier study connected the exception to the Qumran prohibition of certain unions. On this reconstruction the contradiction with Deuteronomy is real and deliberate on Jesus' part: a prophetic abrogation of a Mosaic concession, not a clarification of it.

Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable in Matthew via the Hillel-Shammai frame; genuinely contradictory in Luke, where the unqualified ruling overturns the Deuteronomic permission.