Divorce in Early Judaism

Although the Bible contains a number of references to divorce, it offers little information on how divorce was enacted in ancient Israel and under what circumstances. The most pertinent biblical legislation is Deuteronomy 24:1–4, which prohibits a man from remarrying a woman he has divorced if she has been married to another man in the interim. Although the topic of the text is remarriage, the description of divorce in verse 1, which states that the man “writes her a divorce document, hands it to her, and sends her away from his house,” was understood by some Second Temple–era Jews and the rabbis as the basis of Jewish divorce law.

The rabbis and, it appears, the Pharisees before them required that divorce be initiated by the husband. However, Roman law also allowed wives to initiate divorce, and the restriction of this right to men may not have been universally accepted in Jewish communities before rabbinic law became dominant. Josephus comments disapprovingly on two women in the family of Herod the Great, Salome and Herodias, who divorced their husbands, and several other texts, including a divorce document found in the Judean desert dating to 135 CE, suggest that Jewish women in the Roman era sometimes initiated divorce.

Rabbinic divorce law is mostly contained within tractate Gittin (the plural of the Aramaic word get). This tractate discusses in detail how the divorce document, or get, is to be formulated and delivered by a man to his wife. The consequences in rabbinic law of failing to execute a divorce properly are immense: Marriage to a woman who has not been properly divorced constitutes adultery and results in any child born of the union being considered a mamzer, prohibited from marrying anyone but another mamzer.