Deuteronomy 24:4

_AND WHEN SHE IS DEPARTED OUT OF HIS HOUSE, SHE MAY GO AND BE ANOTHER MAN'S WIFE._ No JFB commentary on these verses....

1-4 Where the providence of God, or his own wrong choice in marriage, has allotted to a Christian a trial instead of a help meet; he will from his heart prefer bearing the cross, to such relief as tends to sin, confusion, and misery. Divine grace will sanctify this cross, support under it, and teach so to behave, as will gradually render it more tolerable....

Verse Deuteronomy 24:4. _SHE IS DEFILED_] Does not this refer to her having been divorced, and married in consequence to another? Though God, for the hardness of their hearts, suffered them to put away their wives, yet he considered all after-marriages in that case to be pollution and defilement; and it is on this ground that our Lord argues in the places referred to above, that whoever marries the woman that is put away is an adulterer: now this could not have been the case if God had allowed the divorce to be a legal and proper separation of the man from his wife; but in the sight of God nothing can be a legal cause of separation but adultery on either side. In such a case, according to the law of God, a man may put away his wife, and a wife may put away her husband; (see Matthew 19:9); for...

In this and the next chapter certain particular rights and duties, domestic, social, and civil, are treated. The cases brought forward have often no definite connection, and seem selected in order to illustrate the application of the great principles of the Law in certain important events and circumstances. These four verses contain only one sentence, and should be rendered thus: If a man hath taken a wife, etc., and given her a bill of divorcement and Deuteronomy 24:2 if she has departed out of his house and become another man’s wife; and Deuteronomy 24:3 if the latter husband hates her, then Deuteronomy 24:4 her former husband, etc....

EXPOSITION LAWS RESPECTING DIVORCE, AGAINST MAN-STEALING AND INJUSTICE. DEUTERONOMY 24:1 _Of divorce_._ _If a man put away his wife because she did not any longer please him, and she became the wife of another man, by whom also she was put away, or from whom she was severed by his death, the first husband might not remarry her, for that would be an abomination in the eyes of the Lord, and would bring sin on the land. This is not a law sanctioning or regulating divorce; that is simply assumed as what might occur, and what is here regulated is the treatment by the first husband of a woman who has been divorced a second time....

HER FORMER HUSBAND WHICH SENT HER AWAY MAY NOT TAKE HER AGAIN TO BE HIS WIFE,.... Though ever so desirous of it, and having heartily repented that he had put her away: this is the punishment of his fickleness and inconstancy, and was ordered to make men cautious how they put away their wives; since when they had so done, and they had been married to another, they could not enjoy them again even on the death of the second husband; yea, though she was only espoused to him, and he had never lain with her, as Ben Melech observes, it was forbidden the former husband to marry her; though if she had only played the whore, according to the same writer, and others a, she might return to him: AFTER THAT SHE IS DEFILED; not by whoredom, for in that case she was not forbidden, as it is interpreted, but by her being married to another man; when she was defiled, not by him, or with respect to him, no...

20. CONCERNING DIVORCE AND LAWS OF MERCY CHAPTER 24 _ 1. Concerning divorce (Deuteronomy 24:1)_ 2. Concerning pledge and slavery (Deuteronomy 24:6) 3. Concerning leprosy (Deuteronomy 24:8) 4. Concerning the oppression of the poor (Deuteronomy 24:10) 5. Concerning injustice (Deuteronomy 24:16) 6. The stranger, the fatherless and the widow remembered (Deuteronomy 24

The right of divorce on man's part (not woman's) is taken for granted here and elsewhere in the OT (see Deuteronomy 22:19; Deuteronomy 22:29; Leviticus 21:7; Leviticus 21:14; Leviticus 22:13 f., Numbers 30:9; _cf._ Matthew 19:9). Later Judaism (_Kethuboth_, vii. 10) extended to woman the right of divorce under certain specified conditions....

MAY NOT TAKE HER AGAIN. Compare Jeremiah 3:1.Isaiah 50:1. SIN. See App-44. THE LORD. Hebrew. _Jehovah._ App-4. GOD. Hebrew. _Elohim._ App-4....

_after that she is defiled_ Ambiguous indeed, as the most carefully chosen terms of some laws often are. But the natural meaning is that she is unclean to the former husband by her union with the latter. It cannot be a matter of indifference to him that she has been another's, as (presumably) the popular humour took it. Such easy passage of a woman from one man to another did defile her: it is _an abomination before Jehovah_(notice the peculiar construction _before_and the absence of _thy God_after the divine name). She was, therefore, _taboo_, or unlawful to her first husband. Marti suggests that the _uncleanness_may have a demonistic origin (cp. Deuteronomy 22:9-11). This, of course, may have been the motive of the original law, but if so, it has disappeared from its present form. _thou shalt not cause the land to sin_ Sam., LXX ye shall