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and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and will be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh’?[a] So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command us to give a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her?”[b]

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Footnotes

  1. Matthew 19:5 sn A quotation from Gen 2:24.
  2. Matthew 19:7 tc ‡ Although the majority of witnesses (B C N W Γ Δ 078 087 ƒ13 33 565 1241 1424 M syp,h) have αὐτήν (autēn, “her”) after the infinitive ἀπολῦσαι (apolusai, “to divorce”), several authorities lack the αὐτήν. This shorter reading may be due to assimilation to the Markan parallel, but since it is attested in early and diverse witnesses (א D L Z Θ ƒ1 579 700 lat) and since the parallel verse (Mark 10:4) already departs at many points, the shorter reading seems more likely to be initial text’s wording here. The pronoun has been included in the translation, however, for clarity. NA28 includes the word in brackets, indicating reservations about its authenticity.sn A quotation from Deut 24:1. The Pharisees were all in agreement that the OT permitted a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce his wife (not vice-versa) and that remarriage was therefore sanctioned. But the two rabbinic schools of Shammai and Hillel differed on the grounds for divorce. Shammai was much stricter than Hillel and permitted divorce only in the case of sexual immorality. Hillel permitted divorce for almost any reason (cf. the Mishnah, m. Gittin 9.10).