From the Beginning: Mark 10:1-12

The Pharisees came with a question designed to trap. The divorce debate was contentious—Rabbi Hillel allowed it for almost any reason; Rabbi Shammai restricted it to sexual immorality. Whichever side Jesus took, he would make enemies.

"Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?"

Jesus answered their question with a question: "What did Moses command you?"

"Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away."

They had their proof text. Deuteronomy 24. Case closed.

"It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law," Jesus replied. "But at the beginning of creation God 'made them male and female.' 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.' So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."

He did not side with Hillel or Shammai. He reached past Moses entirely, back to Genesis, back to the garden, back to the way things were meant to be before sin shattered everything. The hardness of heart that necessitated divorce laws was never God's plan. One flesh—torn apart by human selfishness, permitted by Moses as damage control, but grieving the heart of the Creator.

In the house, the disciples pressed him further.

"Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery."

The standard applied equally—revolutionary in a world where men held all the power. The woman was not merely property to be discarded. She was flesh of his flesh, and tearing that union broke something sacred.

Jesus was not offering new rules for divorce lawyers. He was pointing back to Eden, to the vision of covenant that paperwork could never capture.