Luke 16: 18 - By the Way - Divorce
"Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery, and the one who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery."
Slipped right in after Luke’s comments about the Law is an emphatic statement about divorce. I seem to recollect from one of the gospels that Moses and the Jewish Law allow divorce. Here Luke (and Jesus) equates divorce with adultery, a prohibition against which is one of the Ten Commandments. Why so strong? There is no context given to help us. My theory is that Jewish society at that time is a very male-centric, paternalistic society. If men had all the property and the power on their side, a woman once divorced was effectively sentenced to poverty, losing her home, her support, even her children. She would be reduced to begging and perhaps even to prostitution to support herself. From a social justice perspective divorce was cruel and damaging for the female half of the population of that time. Taken this way – the statement seems firmly from the feminist point of view. How about that?
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I don't know... What if you look at it as - wives you have to stay with your husbands (no matter what he does to you) or face prostitution, poverty, etc...) In this light it feels a lot less like feminism... It may have started out as a sort of protection - but it became greatly bastardized... I suppose I don't have the answers either.
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