What Did Jesus Mean By "Makes Her Commit Adultery"?

There are four passages where Jesus talks about divorce and remarriage: Matthew 5:31-32, Matthew 19:3-9, Mark 10:2-12, and Luke 16:18. I give these texts in full at the end of this essay. Much has been written about them. It would take a book to begin to cover all the issues. My purpose here is modest: to explain just one phrase in those texts - "makes her commit adultery" - which appears only in Matthew 5:32. The verse reads,

But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

How could you make somebody commit adultery? And if you succeeded in making her do it, would she still be guilty of sin?

Context means everything here. The texts in Matthew 19 and Mark 10 show Jesus responding to a question put to him by the Pharisees: "Can a man divorce his wife for any reason?" (See Matthew 19:3 and Mark 10:2). The question was not innocent. An agenda of self-justification provoked it. Pharisees prided themselves on their obedience to the law. The law said, "Do not commit adultery," and no Pharisee ever wanted to be accused of cheating on his wife. But what if you're married and get tired of your wife and someone new comes along? No problem, said some Pharisees - just dump the first wife, give her a certificate of divorce (a legal document declaring her free to marry someone else), and then marry your second wife. That way you have not cheated on anybody.

Jesus said, in effect, No. You can't just dump a wife for no good reason and marry somebody else. That is still cheating. Even if you say, "But I gave her a certificate of divorce! She can go marry anybody else she wants, I don't care. I did the right thing by her." No, Jesus insisted, you have still wronged her. That's still your wife. Whether you slept with someone else while still married to her, or dismissed her with divorce papers and then took another woman - it's all the same. Either way it is still adultery.

I believe that is the essential point in all four passages.

But there are always complications. For example, what if the first wife wasn't innocent herself? What if she was sleeping around? Well in that case, Jesus said, the principle does not apply. You can divorce her. See Matthew 5:32 and Matthew 19:9 where he says you can't divorce your wife except on the grounds of sexual immorality. In 1 Corinthians 7:15, St. Paul gave another exception - abandonment by an unbeliever: "If an unbelieving partner leaves, let him do so. The brother or sister is not bound in such cases." The Bible does not address other possible exceptions. For example, what should you do if your husband gets drunk all the time and beats you and the kids? Or what should you do if your wife tries to poison you or concocts false evidence against you so that you go to prison? I think in such cases we are expected to use the wisdom God gave us.

But then there are other kinds of complications. I believe the phrase "makes her commit adultery" - odd to our ears - arises in response to a linguistic complication.

At issue is the definition of the word "adultery." What exactly does the word mean? For us I think it usually means "cheating on a spouse" - sleeping with somebody while married to someone else. The potential problem with this definition is that it implies that the same act may be adulterous for one partner but not for the other. For example, if a married man sleeps with a single woman, this definition means that he has committed adultery but she has not. (What she has done is wrong, of course, but we would use some word other than "adultery" to refer to it.)

A wider definition specifies not so much the person but the act as adulterous. In this understanding, adultery is the act that takes place when a married person sleeps with someone other than his or her spouse - regardless of the marital status of the third party. With this definition, in the example above, both the man and his single paramour would be guilty of adultery.

In Jesus' day, did the word "adultery" refer to the person who was doing the cheating or to the act where cheating was done?

I believe that best evidence suggests that the word itself was in flux, and, by Jesus' day, was acquiring its present meaning of "cheating on a spouse." This is the way Jesus uses the word in Mark 10:11 where he says, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her." That is, such a man is essentially cheating on his first wife.

But for a precision-minded scribe or Pharisee, Jesus' point might lose force on the simple ground that that's not what the word adultery means! The original definition of adultery was wider in that it referred to the act but more narrow in that it was gender-specific. That is, adultery was the act that took place when a married woman slept with someone other than her husband. It didn't matter if that other man was married or not. He was an adulterer if he slept with another man's wife. In Leviticus 20:10 the death penalty is invoked both for him and the adulteress.

With this older definition in mind, a Pharisee might think, "But how could my second marriage be adulterous if my second wife was a virgin? Yes, I will have slept with two women, but in no case did I ever sleep with another man's wife. Even on Jesus' own terms, then, I'm still not an adulterer." (It must be emphasized again that we are not here contemplating the morality of the action but only what to call it. In the minds of some, if a married woman has not slept with another man, then - by definition - no adultery has occurred.)

I believe it was to accommodate this older definition and head off the objection it might provoke that Jesus said in Matthew 5:32 "makes her [the ex wife] commit adultery" rather than "commits adultery himself." The idea is that the abandoned ex-wife will surely remarry. When she does, then the older defining parameters of adultery will have been met: she'll be sleeping with someone other than her husband because her "real" husband, the first one, left her.

Does that mean that such an abandoned woman should never remarry, because by doing so she would become a true adulteress herself? No, that utterly misses Jesus' point. Jesus assumes that she will remarry. His point is that the guilt of this "adulterous" act is laid at the feet of her scoundrel ex-husband. He cannot finesse his way out of the charge of adultery by saying, "I never slept with another man's wife, so I am not guilty of adultery." Even if we grant the narrow point that he hasn't slept with another man's wife, he's still guilty of breaking the seventh commandment because of the situation into which he has forced his ex wife.

I believe the best parallel to this usage of "make," "force," or "make out to be" is found in 1 John 1:10, which says, "If we say we have not sinned, we make him [God] a liar, and his word is not in us." The Greek word here for "make" is the same in Matthew 5:32. Can anyone truly make God a liar? Of course not. God does not lie (Titus 1:2; Hebrews 6:18 ). What St. John means is that when we contradict God we make him out to be a liar - it is as though we were saying, "God lies." But we are the ones in the wrong, not he. We bear the guilt, not he. In exactly the same way, a man who divorces his wife for no good reason makes her out to be an adulteress, even though in point of fact she is quite innocent. He bears the blame, not she.

I hope this helps.

Full texts are below:

Matthew 5:31-32:
31 It was also said, "Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce." 32 But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

Matthew 19:3-9
And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?” 4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” 7 They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” 8 He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 9 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”

Mark 10:2-12
2 And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 3 He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 4 They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” 5 And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7 ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” 10 And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

Luke 16:18
18 Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery.