Which Does God Hate More – Divorce or Abuse?

CAUTION!

Computers can be monitored and are impossible to clear completely. If you are afraid your internet and/or computer usage might be monitored, please close this site immediately and use a safer computer.

Malachi 2:16 states that God hates divorce. Abusers love to quote that passage as a means of spiritually controlling and abusing their wives.

But, as much as God hates divorce, He hates abuse even more.

There are at least a couple of places in the Bible where God commands the respectful treatment of a wife by her husband. I wrote of one such example in an earlier article titled, When God Commands Divorce, based on Exodus 21.

In Exodus, chapter 21, God’s law stated that a husband must provide food, clothing, and marital rights his wife, regardless of whether or not he loved his wife, and regardless of whether or not she was slave or free. The law also commands any husband not providing these basic provisions to divorce his wife. In this way God protects women from neglect and a lack of love.

There’s another example of God’s protection for women in Deuteronomy 21:10-14, which states that if an Israelite man takes a woman prisoner of war as his wife and later decides that he does not love her, he must not treat her brutally. According to the Jewish rabbinical method of reasoning, we would argue from the lesser to the greater. For example, if this is true of a foreign prisoner of war wife (one who could have been sold into slavery), then the command is applied even more strictly to a husband with a free woman of his own culture. Therefore, the command is for all husbands to treat their wives with respect and without brutality. Deuteronomy 21 goes on to state that if a husband decides he does not love his prisoner of war bride, he must set her free, which means to divorce her.

Conclusion: God does not tolerate abuse; He clearly hates it more than divorce.