The deficiency of the assumption that Jesus allows divorce

AVoice
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Re: The deficiency of the assumption that Jesus allows divorce

Post by AVoice » Sun Oct 09, 2011 3:23 pm

mattrose wrote:Avoice,

I have seriously tried to answer all of your questions. I think it is more the case that you don't like my answers than that I haven't given them.

If you can provide a list of questions that have remained unanswered, I'd be glad to get to them. I only ask that you ask them in 1 or 2 sentences.

I agree with you, though, that readers of this thread have been able to sift through the 2 views and have the necessary information to make a good decision.
I had earlier asked if you believe that if a Christian man lived in a country whose laws allowed polygamy, does the NT allow him to have more than one wife?
If a Christian man lived in a country whose laws allowed landowners to take the role of sheriff judge and executioner with regard to their own property, would it be OK before God for the Christian landowner to execute, let's say, a murderer?

AVoice
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Re: The deficiency of the assumption that Jesus allows divorce

Post by AVoice » Sun Oct 09, 2011 7:20 pm

steve wrote:
The question I'm asking now is that if there were any way that the betrothal model does not work grammatically, then please let that be known. The grammar fits perfectly in Matt 5;32 and 19;9 when the betrothal model is applied.
I don't recall this being the issue. Matt has agreed that the wording of the passage could fit with the betrothal model. I don't think anyone has denied that. I certainly wouldn't. The question is whether the wording fits equally, or better, with alternative models to the betrothal model. I have seen both Matt and Homer repeatedly point out the obvious fact to you that porneia, in the passages, can as easily carry a broader meaning—but you do not seem to get it. I think they may have gotten the message that you are not listening, or thinking clearly about what they have said. After enough of this, people find better things to do with their time.
It is not that it could fit, it does fit grammatically, and perfectly.

I don't think you perceived the motive for my asking for evidence showing that the betrothal model does not work grammatically.
Since the adultery model has grammatical problems and the betrothal model does not, that would indicate that the betrothal model was the authors intention. By asking for grammatical faults with the betrothal model, and finding none, this emphasizes its validity.
The word fornication can and often does mean the premarital sin exclusively.
Like the NT words "thieves" "extortioners" and "defraud", they are all forms of theft, yet when speaking of the covert kind of a person taking what is not rightly theirs, "theft", the same word that describes them all also has a specific covert usage.
When words have more than one definition, in this case "fornication" can possess its specific premarital definition, a context can try that definition to see if the context accomodates it. Since 'fornication" can be used to pertain to sexual sin generally, the same context can also be tried with that definition to see if the context accommodates it.
When fornication is assumed to be the post marital sexual sin, the contexts of 5:32 and 19:9 are not consistent: the last clause requires added words read between the lines.
When fornication is understood to mean the premarital sexual sin and hence pointing to the betrothal divorce for fornication, not adultery, the last clause means exactly as it appears to mean, in accordance with the last clauses of the other references in Mark and Luke. The need to insert, whether mentally or in writing, "not so divorced" or the equivalent, is not necessary. That necessary addition under the adultery model is messy with regards to the reference in Luke, especially. The same last clause in Luke would be expected to take on a meaning hinging on the existence of the exception clause and yet the verse does not have the exception clause.
The plain difference in meaning between the verses in Matt when compared to Luke and Mark is messy. This messiness does not occur under the betrothal model.
Doubtful questions emerge from the leaven. Mark and Luke both left out an essential phrase that establishes that divorce is absolutely allowed, but which by lacking that phrase divorce is absolutely not allowed? Were they ignorant or were their texts corrupted? Such questions only belong to the adultery model.
The adultery model is grammatically incompetent within the actual texts of Matt 5:32 and 19:9.
Failure to produce a grammatical parallel demonstrating the function and construction as claimed by the adultery model is the same as conceding that the adultery model always has been a private interpretation.
The mechanics of the sentence are radically changed when viewed under the betrothal model. The complications and messiness does not exist. There is no connection between the exception clause and the last clause.
So I ask again, what incompetence or convolution of meaning exists in the texts of Matthew when the exception is understood by the betrothal model? None. It enjoys grammatical perfection. Words do not need to be inserted within the last clause to reflect its meaning
The adultery model must claim that its grammatical failure is correct, while the perfect grammar which occurs under the betrothal model is wrong.

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Homer
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Re: The deficiency of the assumption that Jesus allows divorce

Post by Homer » Sun Oct 09, 2011 7:42 pm

AVoice,

You do not seem to recognize that a statement which seems absolute may not be so. A person may say something realizing that an exception is understood by the hearer. When training a person to be a police officer, the trainer might say that policemen are not to exceed the posted speed limit except when their law enforcement duties require it. That is the law.

Once upon a time, many years ago, we were headed to California on I-5. We were about one mile south of an intersection when our car suddenly quit running. I got out, lifted the hood, and was diagnosing the problem. An OSP officer stopped to see if I needed help. I explained I was in the process of diagnosing the problem and he said he would proceed to the next interchange and circle back and see if I needed help. I determined the ignition coil had likely failed and shortly afterward the officer arrived again. I explained to him what I thought the problem was and he said to hop into his patrol car and he would again circle around, stopping and waiting for me to buy an ignition coil on the way. That was some ride. No siren or flashing lights but 85 miles an hour all the way!

If this officer's supervisor happened to hear of what the officer had done he might well have said to "you are him not allowed to exceed the speed limit!" Now this warning did not mean there was an no exception to the law that was understood by the reprimanded officer.

Just because Mark and Luke mention no exception regarding divorce does not prove there is none. You have been shown plainly that there is reason to believe an exception was understood by Mark and Luke's gentile audiences. You can not prove that this is not so. So we are left with Matthew's acount of what Jesus said and Matthew included the exception twice.

Your problem is that you insist, artificially, that fornication means premarital sex in Matthew 5 and 19. That is only a possibility. All lexicons I know of say it means sexual immorality. You compound your error by insisting that I say it means adultery. I say it means sexual immorality which includes adultery. It could mean incest, homosexual acts, or beastiality. You insist we have to add words or have our own private interpretation to make the verses say what we think they say. When I read these verses in the English or Greek they say the same thing to me, no words added or needed.

I am not buying your arguments.

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mattrose
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Re: The deficiency of the assumption that Jesus allows divorce

Post by mattrose » Sun Oct 09, 2011 11:50 pm

AVoice wrote: I had earlier asked if you believe that if a Christian man lived in a country whose laws allowed polygamy, does the NT allow him to have more than one wife?
I think the NT points to the 1 man + 1 woman paradigm. Thus, I don't think that countries laws should really factor in to his thinking.
If a Christian man lived in a country whose laws allowed landowners to take the role of sheriff judge and executioner with regard to their own property, would it be OK before God for the Christian landowner to execute, let's say, a murderer?
I'm not sure what you mean. Did the person murder someone on the property of the Christian man?

If the bad guy murdered somebody on the property of the Christian... and he lived in a country where individual citizens were allowed to execute just judgments... then I think it would be allowable for him to execute said judgment. But he has no necessity to utilize such a right.

I can't say I've thought about either question a lot since they are so hypothetical to my life. Do you have a point in asking them?

Are there any other questions I missed?

AVoice
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Re: The deficiency of the assumption that Jesus allows divorce

Post by AVoice » Tue Oct 11, 2011 9:01 am

mattrose wrote:
AVoice wrote: I had earlier asked if you believe that if a Christian man lived in a country whose laws allowed polygamy, does the NT allow him to have more than one wife?
I think the NT points to the 1 man + 1 woman paradigm. Thus, I don't think that countries laws should really factor in to his thinking.
If a Christian man lived in a country whose laws allowed landowners to take the role of sheriff judge and executioner with regard to their own property, would it be OK before God for the Christian landowner to execute, let's say, a murderer?
I'm not sure what you mean. Did the person murder someone on the property of the Christian man?

If the bad guy murdered somebody on the property of the Christian... and he lived in a country where individual citizens were allowed to execute just judgments... then I think it would be allowable for him to execute said judgment. But he has no necessity to utilize such a right.

I can't say I've thought about either question a lot since they are so hypothetical to my life. Do you have a point in asking them?

Are there any other questions I missed?
At the beginning of the thread I revealed that the "God divorced israel' argument has no sound application to the topic. This is because the "marriage" and "divorce' are allegorical. God was using marriage to parallel the relationship he has with Israel, it is not an actual marriage since God does not literally have a wife, like what the Mormons say. God is not literally married and we are talking about literal marriage. God used what they were familiar with to express his frustration, like they could relate to the very personal dilemna of a man's frustrtion, disappointment and anger with an adulterous wife.
It was asserted by Steve that since God did it we can do it. But that means whatever we see God using as a teaching tool parabolically, that gives us permission to also do the same literally. So in order to be consistent, polygamy must also be allowed now, since God likens himself to have had two wives in Ezekiel. The "God divorced Israel" argument is another misapplication of scripture. In order to be consistent with the "God divorced Israel" argument, you should have declared that polygamy is absolutely allowed now since God did it we also can do it.

The NT does not allow eye for eye or vengeance. In Jesus' parable about the stewards of the vineyard, Jesus used what they could relate to in order to illustrate God's displeasure against them for what they were going to do, kill him. 'Miserably destroying those wicked men', as his parable states, would basically give permission to Christians to directly disobey the NT commandments to not kill, not exercise "eye for eye", and not take vengeance. "If God can do it paraboliocally in order to teach, then we can do it literally" is extremely unsound.

Please can you produce a grammatical parallel to 5:32 and 19:9 demonstrating the use of an essential exception clause as is the case when defining porneia to apply to her post marital sexual sin? If you cannot, it proves that the adultery model is a private interpretation, since language is incapable of performing the function that model asserts the language functions.

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mattrose
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Re: The deficiency of the assumption that Jesus allows divorce

Post by mattrose » Tue Oct 11, 2011 9:39 am

I disagree with the thrust of pretty much everything you said in that post. Human marriage is a shadow/symbol of the divine romance, not the reverse. Certainly God's 'divorce' in the OT is relevant to this discussion. The relevancy, of course, requires interpretive care. Your blanket dismissal strikes me as interpretive laziness. Do the hard work of figuring out how/why certain principles overlap.

You also fail to make a distinction b/w governmental and personal justice. The NT is against individuals taking matters into their own hands, but not against government doing its job. Your point, then, fails to make itself.

Finally, the reason you didn't accept my previous grammatical reconstruction is b/c you read the passage as an absolute rule of sorts. Again I'll say... I don't read the passage in that way. You are asking me to reconstruct a passage with a mindset that I simply don't agree with. The one I provided fits the way I read it. If I read it your way, I'd take your view... and I wouldn't be able to come up with a parallel construction either probably, just like you can't. But, granting the way I read it, there is no grammatical problem.

My interpretation is only blurry through your lens.

So, I think we are at an impasse. I read Jesus differently than you. I think it is a more consistent and less confusing way. I am sure you think the opposite. Both sides have been adequately argued above for any interested readers.

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Homer
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Re: The deficiency of the assumption that Jesus allows divorce

Post by Homer » Tue Oct 11, 2011 10:28 am

AVoice,

Your initial post and title indicates that those you disagree with have made an assumption, but you also have made an assumption. You assume that Mark and Luke's hearers did not have an implicit understanding that a marriage could be ended (the marriage contract broken) because of adultery. You wrote:
The question is then created, to whom does the last clause pertain, to the wife divorced for adultery or the wife divorced for burning dinner?
But Luke 16:18 does not have the exception clause therefore the question does not exist. It appears plainly since there is no exception clause in his gospel, the last clause cannot be making a distinction between two wives divorced for different things.
The last sentence above is incorrect if an exception is understood. I believe it is rather common for there to be unspoken exceptions in communication, and particularly in the culture of Jesus' day. In an article on the divorce question JP Holding writes:
Objections

There's no direct statement about the exception. Therefore the contradiction stands.

A direct statement is not needed. Here we bring in, more or less verbatim, a note we have now used several times in other essays:

Malina and Rohrbaugh note in their Social-Science Commentary on John [16ff] that the NT was written in what anthropologists call a "high-context" society. In such societies people "presume a broadly shared, well-understood, or 'high' knowledge of the context of anything referred to in conversation or in writing." Readers were required and expected to "fill in the gap" because their background knowledge was a given. Extended explanations were unnecessary.

In contrast, we in the modern US are a "low-context" society. We assume little or no knowledge of he context of a communication. This is in part because we have so many specialized fields requiring specialized knowledge. Thus we expect background to be given when communication is given between fields. This is in contrast to the ancient world where there was little specialized knowledge.

Malina and Rohrbaugh set forth in summary a point we may use regarding the "adultery exception":

"The obvious problem this creates for reading the biblical writings today is that low-context readers in the United States frequently mistake the biblical writings for low-context documents. They erroneously assume that the author has provided all of the contextual information needed to understand it."

Thus the high-context ancients would look at Mark and Luke's words and grasp, "Of course, adultery is an exception." They did not need it spelled out for them. They would not look at Matthew on one hand, and Mark and Luke on the other, and think, "Jesus is contradicting himself here." They would assume that the "adultery exception" was behind Mark and Luke's words.

Because of the high-context "semantic contract" between text and reader, one can only claim contradiction here by reading the text in a way it was never meant to be read.

Instone-Brewer shows further (Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible: The Social and Literary Context, 9) how this high context worked itself into the legal situations of the ANE and in the time of Jesus. Ancient Near Eastern marriage covenants were usually oral, but some were written, and only under certain circumstances (a large dowry, unusual stipulations). Otherwise there were certain stipulations that were obvious and were seldom written out.

Sexual faithfulness is one example of an unwritten stipulation that seldom appears in written marriage covenants; yet since all ANE law codes prescribed the death penalty for adultery, it was obviously something that was highly valued.

By Jesus' time, the Hillel-Shammai debate likewise made laying out the exception superfluous. In this and other legal matters, the legal schools abbreviated their answers [162] as did the rabbinic literature. Because few could read, rulings were "abbreviated down to their absolute minimum and were arranged in balanced phrases that were easy to remember. Anything that was implicit or obvious was omitted for the sake of brevity."

This makes the rabbinic debates sometimes difficult for a low-context modern to follow outside of their social context.
You can read the entire article here:

http://www.tektonics.org/af/divorceexception.html

Here is an example, from scripture, of an exception that was implicit:

Isaiah 38
1. In those days Hezekiah was sick and near death. And Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz, went to him and said to him, “Thus says the LORD: ‘Set your house in order, for you shall die and not live.’”


So Hezekiah is going to die. No exception mentioned. Or was there?

2. Then Hezekiah turned his face toward the wall, and prayed to the LORD, 3. and said, “Remember now, O LORD, I pray, how I have walked before You in truth and with a loyal heart, and have done what is good in Your sight.” And Hezekiah wept bitterly.
4. And the word of the LORD came to Isaiah, saying, 5 “Go and tell Hezekiah, ‘Thus says the LORD, the God of David your father: “I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears; surely I will add to your days fifteen years.


So what happened to Isaiah's absolute statement? Did the prophet lie, or was the exception for a possible answer to prayer understood?

AVoice
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Re: The deficiency of the assumption that Jesus allows divorce

Post by AVoice » Tue Oct 11, 2011 11:08 am

Homer wrote:AVoice,

You do not seem to recognize that a statement which seems absolute may not be so. A person may say something realizing that an exception is understood by the hearer. When training a person to be a police officer, the trainer might say that policemen are not to exceed the posted speed limit except when their law enforcement duties require it. That is the law.

Once upon a time, many years ago, we were headed to California on I-5. We were about one mile south of an intersection when our car suddenly quit running. I got out, lifted the hood, and was diagnosing the problem. An OSP officer stopped to see if I needed help. I explained I was in the process of diagnosing the problem and he said he would proceed to the next interchange and circle back and see if I needed help. I determined the ignition coil had likely failed and shortly afterward the officer arrived again. I explained to him what I thought the problem was and he said to hop into his patrol car and he would again circle around, stopping and waiting for me to buy an ignition coil on the way. That was some ride. No siren or flashing lights but 85 miles an hour all the way!

If this officer's supervisor happened to hear of what the officer had done he might well have said to "you are him not allowed to exceed the speed limit!" Now this warning did not mean there was an no exception to the law that was understood by the reprimanded officer.

Just because Mark and Luke mention no exception regarding divorce does not prove there is none. You have been shown plainly that there is reason to believe an exception was understood by Mark and Luke's gentile audiences. You can not prove that this is not so. So we are left with Matthew's acount of what Jesus said and Matthew included the exception twice.

Your problem is that you insist, artificially, that fornication means premarital sex in Matthew 5 and 19. That is only a possibility. All lexicons I know of say it means sexual immorality. You compound your error by insisting that I say it means adultery. I say it means sexual immorality which includes adultery. It could mean incest, homosexual acts, or beastiality. You insist we have to add words or have our own private interpretation to make the verses say what we think they say. When I read these verses in the English or Greek they say the same thing to me, no words added or needed.

I am not buying your arguments.
There you go again using an inappropriate example.
Use a "whosoever" example after the same format Jesus used.
Matt 5;32 and 19:9 are grammatically incompetent when the the exception clause is interpreted to be an allowance to terminate a joined marriage.
It is necessary to add words to the last clause in order for grammatical competency to be arrived at under your model. With critical words lacking; that indicates grammatical incompetency.
No words are required to be added to the last clause when the exception clause is correctly understood to be non essential.
Please provide an example of a parallel that functions the way you say 5;32 and 19:9 functions.
That type of construction of a sentence will only allow non essential exception clauses. Your examples have failed to demonstrate what you say is possible. If such a function is possible then a grammatical parallel is possible to construct.
Anyone can over generalize to make something appear as a workable example. Such is the case with Steve's 3 part paper. Make an actual parallel construction.
Does it not seem strange that the betrothal model has no problem with demonstrating by way of a grammatical parallel but the 'termination of a joined marriage' model has failed though it has tried?
You do not seem to recognize that a statement which seems absolute may not be so. A person may say something realizing that an exception is understood by the hearer. When training a person to be a police officer, the trainer might say that policemen are not to exceed the posted speed limit except when their law enforcement duties require it. That is the law.
Convert this into the format Jesus used when addressing divorce. Your exception clause will function in the same way the betrothal explanation functions. It will not function as an essential exception clause as the model allowing termination of a joined marriage. Go ahead and try it. Your above statement seems reasonable because it is an over generalization. Try to put in in the same construction that jesus used and the theory fails.
Start with a qualifying statement establishing what the actual context is, as 5:31 does. Then start with "whosoever".

AVoice
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Re: The deficiency of the assumption that Jesus allows divorce

Post by AVoice » Tue Oct 11, 2011 1:31 pm

mattrose wrote:I disagree with the thrust of pretty much everything you said in that post. Human marriage is a shadow/symbol of the divine romance, not the reverse. Certainly God's 'divorce' in the OT is relevant to this discussion. The relevancy, of course, requires interpretive care. Your blanket dismissal strikes me as interpretive laziness. Do the hard work of figuring out how/why certain principles overlap.

You also fail to make a distinction b/w governmental and personal justice. The NT is against individuals taking matters into their own hands, but not against government doing its job. Your point, then, fails to make itself.

Finally, the reason you didn't accept my previous grammatical reconstruction is b/c you read the passage as an absolute rule of sorts. Again I'll say... I don't read the passage in that way. You are asking me to reconstruct a passage with a mindset that I simply don't agree with. The one I provided fits the way I read it. If I read it your way, I'd take your view... and I wouldn't be able to come up with a parallel construction either probably, just like you can't. But, granting the way I read it, there is no grammatical problem.

My interpretation is only blurry through your lens.

So, I think we are at an impasse. I read Jesus differently than you. I think it is a more consistent and less confusing way. I am sure you think the opposite. Both sides have been adequately argued above for any interested readers.
Ask someone who knows languages. Your model of reading the exception clause makes it essential.
Your Michael Jordan example made the exception clause non essential, it functioned the same way the betrothal model functions. That is why your parallel was grammatically correct. Under the construction used by Jesus, so far no example substantiating your claim has been presented. I am still waiting.

It is pretty straightforward. Steve says if God did it we can do it. The burden of proof is on you to now justify NOT being able to have two wives. What is the basis for allowing divorce but not allowing polygamy? God practiced both of these figuratively, which according to Steve, it seems should make us able to perform these things literally.
God has never had a literal spirit wife, therefore he has never also divorced his spirit wife. He has never literally had two spirit wives. He used marriage and divorce and his having two wives to relate spiritual truths and messages because these are things people can relate to, to make the parallel hit home.
As mentioned in the beginning of the thread, such tools for teaching also use chosen aspects of the literal truth to convey the desired message. To convert the allegorical into some across the board (all literal marriages) allowance is not a rightly dividing of the word. Give us a sentence or two how you can justify the one and not the other, based on Steve's rule that if God did it we can do it.
Likening himself to a man who has a wife, ‘her’ behavior was such that it drove him to do what a man could do. Yet even then he takes her back.

AVoice
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Re: The deficiency of the assumption that Jesus allows divorce

Post by AVoice » Tue Oct 11, 2011 1:55 pm

Homer wrote:AVoice,

Your initial post and title indicates that those you disagree with have made an assumption, but you also have made an assumption. You assume that Mark and Luke's hearers did not have an implicit understanding that a marriage could be ended (the marriage contract broken) because of adultery. You wrote:
The question is then created, to whom does the last clause pertain, to the wife divorced for adultery or the wife divorced for burning dinner?
But Luke 16:18 does not have the exception clause therefore the question does not exist. It appears plainly since there is no exception clause in his gospel, the last clause cannot be making a distinction between two wives divorced for different things.
The last sentence above is incorrect if an exception is understood. I believe it is rather common for there to be unspoken exceptions in communication, and particularly in the culture of Jesus' day. In an article on the divorce question JP Holding writes:
Objections

There's no direct statement about the exception. Therefore the contradiction stands.

A direct statement is not needed. Here we bring in, more or less verbatim, a note we have now used several times in other essays:

Malina and Rohrbaugh note in their Social-Science Commentary on John [16ff] that the NT was written in what anthropologists call a "high-context" society. In such societies people "presume a broadly shared, well-understood, or 'high' knowledge of the context of anything referred to in conversation or in writing." Readers were required and expected to "fill in the gap" because their background knowledge was a given. Extended explanations were unnecessary.

In contrast, we in the modern US are a "low-context" society. We assume little or no knowledge of he context of a communication. This is in part because we have so many specialized fields requiring specialized knowledge. Thus we expect background to be given when communication is given between fields. This is in contrast to the ancient world where there was little specialized knowledge.

Malina and Rohrbaugh set forth in summary a point we may use regarding the "adultery exception":

"The obvious problem this creates for reading the biblical writings today is that low-context readers in the United States frequently mistake the biblical writings for low-context documents. They erroneously assume that the author has provided all of the contextual information needed to understand it."

Thus the high-context ancients would look at Mark and Luke's words and grasp, "Of course, adultery is an exception." They did not need it spelled out for them. They would not look at Matthew on one hand, and Mark and Luke on the other, and think, "Jesus is contradicting himself here." They would assume that the "adultery exception" was behind Mark and Luke's words.

Because of the high-context "semantic contract" between text and reader, one can only claim contradiction here by reading the text in a way it was never meant to be read.

Instone-Brewer shows further (Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible: The Social and Literary Context, 9) how this high context worked itself into the legal situations of the ANE and in the time of Jesus. Ancient Near Eastern marriage covenants were usually oral, but some were written, and only under certain circumstances (a large dowry, unusual stipulations). Otherwise there were certain stipulations that were obvious and were seldom written out.

Sexual faithfulness is one example of an unwritten stipulation that seldom appears in written marriage covenants; yet since all ANE law codes prescribed the death penalty for adultery, it was obviously something that was highly valued.

By Jesus' time, the Hillel-Shammai debate likewise made laying out the exception superfluous. In this and other legal matters, the legal schools abbreviated their answers [162] as did the rabbinic literature. Because few could read, rulings were "abbreviated down to their absolute minimum and were arranged in balanced phrases that were easy to remember. Anything that was implicit or obvious was omitted for the sake of brevity."

This makes the rabbinic debates sometimes difficult for a low-context modern to follow outside of their social context.
You can read the entire article here:

http://www.tektonics.org/af/divorceexception.html

Here is an example, from scripture, of an exception that was implicit:

Isaiah 38
1. In those days Hezekiah was sick and near death. And Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz, went to him and said to him, “Thus says the LORD: ‘Set your house in order, for you shall die and not live.’”


So Hezekiah is going to die. No exception mentioned. Or was there?

2. Then Hezekiah turned his face toward the wall, and prayed to the LORD, 3. and said, “Remember now, O LORD, I pray, how I have walked before You in truth and with a loyal heart, and have done what is good in Your sight.” And Hezekiah wept bitterly.
4. And the word of the LORD came to Isaiah, saying, 5 “Go and tell Hezekiah, ‘Thus says the LORD, the God of David your father: “I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears; surely I will add to your days fifteen years.


So what happened to Isaiah's absolute statement? Did the prophet lie, or was the exception for a possible answer to prayer understood?
Your commentary is an insult to the poor and the plain people who the Gospel is to be preached to. The writers subjectively made their case with no mention that there exists an explanation that makes Matthew grammatically sound. The termination of a joined marriage model makes Matthew grammatically unsound. Should the rendering that makes the actual words used grammatically sound be considered? The overwhelming impression is that when asked about divorce whether it was allowed or allowed for anything, the answer is crystal clear that it is not allowed for anything. "Let not man put asunder". The circular reasoning employed against this crystal clear meaning when reading Luke and Mark is the misunderstanding of the exception clause. When revealed that the exception clause makes Matthew's statements grammatically correct when understood to pertain to the betrothal divorce, the circular reasoing kicks in again, it is claimed, 'it can't be pointing to the betrothal divorce because Jesus said adultery is a grounds for divorce'!!!

The above example about Hezekiah is just another over generalization. Convert it to reflect the construction of 5:32 and 19:19. Or do you want me to do it for you and then we can see if the Hezekiah example works? Can you produce an essential exception clause within that construction?
So I ask again. how is the betrothal model not sound grammatically?
A critical phrase is missing from the last clause in Matthew when the termination of the joined marriage model is chosen. This creates direct contradiction within the same verse unless as you do, you mentally read into the verse those required words. Under your model, because of this need to mentally read a critical phrase into the text, there is no contention; Matthew was grammatically incorrect when the exception clause is rendered to be an allowance to terminate a joined marriage. There is no grammatical incorrectness when their use of terms along with the knowledge of their premarital divorce for fornication, not for adultery, is embraced.

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