Commentary on Deuteronomy (passages on divorce and remarriage)
The whole work on one page. Select a passage number to open that passage with its notes, Scripture references, and citation.
Route 3: the Syriac original is not in hand in readable form; the source is Assemani's Latin translation (1737), translated by Claude with a note; the Latin is never shown.
Chapter 22
22.13Assemani 1737 1
Translated by Claude from J. S. Assemani (Latin translation of the Syriac)'s Latin translation (1737) of the Syriac; neither is shown
"If a man takes a wife and says, 'I did not find in her the signs of virginity'": from this he would be seeking a pretext for accusing the woman. If the defilement is proved, the woman shall be stoned; but if, on the contrary, it is found that the woman was accused of a false charge, the slanderer shall be punished and fined a hundred shekels of silver. So if he is rich, he shall be stripped and pay the fine; if he is poor, he shall be stripped as well and give himself as a pledge. And if the accuser, once dismissed, goes on harassing his wife, since he cannot divorce her, the judges shall avenge the injury. Moreover, so that husbands would not kill wives they hated, whom they could not crush by invented charges, the bill of divorce was granted. Yet the Lord taught that Moses allowed it to the Hebrews because of the hardness of their hearts, so that they put away their wives even apart from the cause of fornication.
Chapter 24
24.1Assemani 1737 1
Translated by Claude from J. S. Assemani (Latin translation of the Syriac)'s Latin translation (1737) of the Syriac; neither is shown
"If a man takes a wife and sleeps with her, and if afterwards, divorced, she goes out of his house, he shall not take her back nor receive her into his house." This is so that, by visiting the house of her former husband, she does not give the second man, whom she married after being put away, occasion to suspect that both, having changed their minds, are returning to the camp they had abandoned. Again, it is so that the woman, sprinkled with such suspicion, does not remain abandoned like an uninhabitable and uncultivated country. For the first husband would not want to take back a woman whose company and life together had become hateful to him, nor would the second want to keep one whose faithfulness had begun to be suspect to him.