GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 10:4
Desuetude
There is a practice in the United States legal system known as desuetude, which, among other things, refers to laws that remain on the books but are out of date, no longer in use, or no longer enforced. This is an apt category for the following laws: In Alabama, it is illegal to wear a fake mustache in church that causes laughter; in Arizona, it is illegal for donkeys to sleep in bathtubs. In Alaska, it is illegal to wake a sleeping bear for the purpose of taking a photograph. In California, it is illegal to whistle for a lost canary before 7 a.m. In Florida, it is illegal to skateboard without a license; in Georgia, it is illegal to tie a giraffe to a telephone pole or street lamp. In Maine, it is illegal to step out of a plane while it is in flight. In North Carolina, it is illegal to use elephants to plow cotton fields. In Texas, it is illegal to graffiti someone else’s cow. These are just a few examples of laws in desuetude.
St. Mark wrote that when Jesus was in Judea, near Jerusalem, some Pharisees—one of the largest sects in Israel at the time—came to test him by asking if it was permissible for a man to divorce his wife. Jesus likely perceived the intent of the test, so he turned the question back to them by asking what Moses had written centuries earlier. “But they said, ‘Moses permitted [a man] to write a certificate of divorce and send [her] away.’” (Mark 10:4)
Why is it illegal to wear a fake mustache in church, wake a sleeping bear, step out of a plane in flight, or tie a giraffe to a telephone pole? Because, at some point, someone was causing a scandal in church, or waking sleeping bears, or tying giraffes to telephone poles. Why did Moses inscribe this divorce principle in Deuteronomy 24:1: “If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house”? The reason was likely this: men were dismissing their wives capriciously, and Moses sought to impose order on the disorganized behavior.
Just because it is illegal in Arizona to allow a donkey to sleep in a bathtub does not mean every owner did so—but some may have. Similarly, during the Exodus, men were mistreating their wives by capriciously sending them away. Moses’ response was to halt this practice by inscribing a statute.
Moses’ command rests on the word “indecent,” which has a narrow meaning—usually referring to nakedness, a euphemism for sexual misconduct, specifically adultery in this instance. By Jesus’ time, divorce could be based merely on displeasure, and marriage had become unstable. Moses’ original principle had fallen into desuetude: it permitted divorce only in cases of serious marital unfaithfulness.
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