Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Deuteronomy · About this commentary
A Certificate in Her Hand
Deuteronomy 24:1-9
1 When a man takes a wife and marries her, then it shall be, if she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some unseemly thing in her, that he shall write her a certificate of divorce, put it in her hand, and send her out of his house. · WEB
Divorce is regulated rather than instituted, and the document a woman receives is what stops her being discarded without standing.
The passage is often read as though it authorized divorce. It does not institute it; it takes a practice already in use and puts conditions on it, and the conditions are all on the man.
He must write her a certificate of divorce, put it in her hand, and send her out of his house Deuteronomy 24:1.
Every element protects her. A written document rather than a spoken dismissal. Placed in her own hand, so she holds the evidence. And the effect of it is stated next: she may go and be another man's wife Deuteronomy 24:2. Without the certificate she would be neither married nor free — unable to remarry and unsupported, which is exactly the position a discarded woman occupied everywhere else.
The restriction that follows closes the obvious abuse. A man who divorced her may not take her back after a second marriage Deuteronomy 24:4. That makes divorce irreversible for him, which removes it as a tactic — a wife cannot be dismissed in anger and reclaimed later, and no arrangement can be made to pass a woman between households.
When the Lord is asked about this passage he says exactly what it does not say. Moses allowed you to divorce your wives because of the hardness of your hearts, but from the beginning it has not been so Matthew 19:8. A concession regulating a hard practice is not the same as a design.
The next law is the gentlest in the code. A newly married man shall not go out in the army, neither shall he be assigned any business. He shall be free at home one year, and shall cheer his wife whom he has taken Deuteronomy 24:5.
A full year, exempt from military service and from public duty, and the stated purpose is his wife's happiness. A nation about to fight for its existence writes that into its statute book.
Then a rule about security for loans: no man shall take the mill or the upper millstone as a pledge, for he takes a life in pledge Deuteronomy 24:6.
A hand mill is how a household turns grain into bread. Taking it as collateral is technically legal and practically starvation, and the law names it for what it is. Nothing a family needs in order to eat can be pledged.
And kidnapping is treated as the gravest theft: a man who steals a person and deals with him as a slave, or sells him dies for it Deuteronomy 24:7.
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