When the law of Moses sets rules for servitude, divorce or war, it is not automatically telling you God thinks those practices are good. Jesus himself drew that line. Asked about the divorce certificate in Matthew 19, he called it something Moses permitted because of hard hearts, and then he measured it against what God made at the beginning. This guide teaches you to run that same test on specific laws, and to notice where the test helps and where it stops. You can work through it alone in one or two sittings, or with a group over a single long session. Have a Bible open to Matthew 19, Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 20 and 24.
Start with the conversation Jesus was pulled into
Before reading any commentary, read Matthew 19:3-9 slowly, twice. On the first pass, look only at the Pharisees. On the second, look only at Jesus. Write down your answers to three observation questions before going on:
- What exactly do the Pharisees ask in verse 3, and what do they ask in verse 7? Are those the same question?
- Where does Jesus go for his answer in verses 4-6? Which earlier passages is he drawing on?
- What verb do the Pharisees use for what Moses did, and what verb does Jesus use?
The first question in verse 3 is about grounds: “Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?” (Matthew 19:3). Jesus does not answer by quoting the divorce law. He answers from creation, from Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:24, where God made them male and female and the two become one flesh. So the Pharisees press him with the law itself: “Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away?” (Matthew 19:7).
Now look at the reply. “Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). The Pharisees said Moses commanded. Jesus says Moses suffered it, an older English word meaning allowed or put up with. That one change of verb carries the whole argument. A command tells you what the lawgiver wants. A permission granted because of hard hearts tells you what the lawgiver is willing to tolerate in people who will not do better.
Notice also the pronoun. Jesus says the hardness of your hearts, speaking to the men in front of him. The concession was not only for some primitive ancient audience. It was for people like the questioners. That should keep any reader from feeling superior to the first readers of the law.
One caution belongs here. Matthew 19 is about divorce. It does not, by itself, tell us how to read every other law in the Pentateuch. What it gives us is a method that Jesus modeled on one law, and the question is how far that method can responsibly travel.
What Dr. Peter Williams adds to the reading
In his conversation with Lisa Fields on the Jude 3 Project podcast, Dr. Peter Williams takes the method from Matthew 19 and applies it beyond divorce. He begins by granting that the laws are presented as coming from God and are in that sense good, but he denies that this makes each one the best possible law. Reading Jesus’ answer, he concludes that “ideally a different law would’ve been written.” He explains why God would give a less-than-ideal law at all: when God decides what law to give, “one of the things he is taking into account is people’s sinfulness and what law is possible in that situation.”
Then he extends the move to servitude. Looking at laws that seem to allow people to have slaves, he reasons that in the beginning it was not like that, and says, “I’m applying exactly the same principle that Jesus uses.” He describes what such regulations are doing in plain terms: “it’s not saying this is good, but it’s trying to limit bad.”
From this, you can build a short set of questions to bring to any hard law. These are reading tools, not a formula that settles every case:
- What does this law assume is already happening? Many laws open with “if” or “when.” They describe a situation before they rule on it.
- What does the law limit, and whom does it protect? Look for time limits, penalties on the stronger party and rights given to the weaker one.
- What does the pattern at creation show about this subject? Genesis 1-2 is the reference point Jesus used.
- Does the law match that pattern or fall short of it? Williams is clear that not every law is a concession. He gives the example of the law against marrying your mother, which he thinks still applies today.
Faithful Christians describe the relationship between the Mosaic law and believers today in several ways, and they sort the laws into different categories. Williams’s own view is that some laws served Israel’s purpose at a particular time and have done their job, while others still apply directly. This guide does not ask you to choose one system. The four questions above can be used inside more than one of them.
Case one: servitude in Exodus 21
Read Exodus 21:1-27 and apply the four questions. Mark every place the law sets a limit.
The first verse already assumes the arrangement exists: “If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing” (Exodus 21:2). The law does not create the practice. It puts an end date on it. Later the text protects the servant’s body: “And if a man smite the eye of his servant, or the eye of his maid, that it perish; he shall let him go free for his eye’s sake” (Exodus 21:26), with the same rule for a tooth in the next verse. And in the middle of the chapter sits this: “And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death” (Exodus 21:16).
That last verse deserves time. Kidnapping a person in order to sell him is a capital crime in this law. The Atlantic slave trade was built on exactly that act. Williams makes a related point about vocabulary: “the word slave tends to be a very historically particular term,” and “we mustn’t read any of that later stuff back into the text.” He argues that much Old Testament servitude was what we might call debt slavery, where a person in a subsistence economy sold future work to avoid starving. That is his historical judgment, and it is worth testing against the text yourself.
Now read verses 20-21 and do not hurry. A master who beats a servant to death at once is punished, yet “if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money” (Exodus 21:21). The regulation reading helps here only partly. It explains why such a rule could exist without being God’s ideal. It does not make the verse comfortable, and a group should be free to say so. Leviticus 25:43 points the other way, telling Israel regarding a fellow Israelite in service, “Thou shalt not rule over him with rigour; but shalt fear thy God.” Holding those two texts side by side is part of honest reading.
Case two: the divorce certificate in Deuteronomy 24
Read Deuteronomy 24:1-4. This is the law the Pharisees had in mind. Apply the first two questions before anything else.
The law begins with a man who has already decided to send his wife away. It does not instruct anyone to divorce. It requires that if he does, he give her a written document, and it then forbids him to take her back after she has married another man. Some interpreters think the written certificate protected the woman by giving her proof that she was free to remarry. That is a reasonable proposal, but it is an interpretation, so hold it as one. What the text plainly shows is a law managing something already happening, which is exactly how Jesus treats it.
For groups: conversations about divorce can touch real wounds. This passage is about how to read an ancient law, not a ruling on anyone’s marriage. If someone in the room is in a marriage marked by abuse, the reading in this guide does not mean they must stay. Help is available through the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.
Case three: where the test reaches its limit
Read Deuteronomy 20. The chapter separates two situations. For distant cities, Israel must first offer terms of peace, and the chapter even protects fruit trees during a siege. For the cities of the peoples in the land, the instruction is total destruction.
Run the four questions and something changes. The rules for distant cities look like regulation of war, which was already a constant of the ancient world. But the commands about the Canaanite cities are not framed as a permission granted to hard hearts. They are framed as direct commands. Matthew 19 gives no warrant for calling them concessions, and a careful reader should not stretch the test to cover them.
Williams does not stretch it either. When Lisa Fields asks how a loving God could command what looks like genocide, he answers with a different line of argument. He points to the Canaanites sacrificing their own children, to the claim in Joshua that the people of the land knew what God had done and chose to resist, and to the idea that God, who gave life, stands in a different relation to it than we do. He also admits the limit of his case: “I can’t prove that of God, but I can trust it of God.” Christians weigh these arguments differently, and this guide does not settle them. The lesson for your reading is narrower: the regulation test explains some hard laws well, and it is a mistake to use it as though it explains all of them.
Questions to work through together
- In Matthew 19:7-8, the Pharisees say “command” and Jesus says “suffered.” What would you lose if your Bible translation blurred that difference?
- Which detail in Exodus 21 did the most to change how you read the chapter, and which detail still troubles you most? Why those two?
- Williams says the laws are good in that they come from God, yet not necessarily the best. Can both claims be true at once? What would make you doubt it?
- Jesus addressed the hardness of his questioners’ hearts, not only ancient Israel’s. Where might a modern reader’s own hardness shape what laws seem reasonable to them?
- What is the difference between saying a law was a concession and saying a law was wrong? Try to state it in one sentence that a skeptic would accept as fair.
- Why does the regulation test fit the divorce certificate and the servant laws better than the Canaanite commands? What other argument would those commands need?
Facilitators: let the group sit with question 2 before moving on. People often need permission to say a verse still bothers them. That honesty tends to make the rest of the discussion sharper, not weaker.
A practice for this week
Choose one law in the Pentateuch you have never examined closely. Exodus 22, Leviticus 19 and Deuteronomy 21-25 all offer good options. Then do the following on a single sheet of paper:
- Copy the law out by hand, word for word, from your Bible.
- Circle every “if” or “when” and write what the law assumes is already happening.
- Underline every limit, penalty or protection, and note who benefits from each.
- Find the closest relevant passage in Genesis 1-2, and write one sentence comparing the two.
- Decide, tentatively, whether the law looks like a concession, a lasting standard, a law tied to Israel’s particular calling, or a case where you are not yet sure. Write down what evidence would change your answer.
If you end with “not yet sure,” that is an honest result. Williams describes working on a hard pair of texts like working on a puzzle for an hour, and notes that “just ’cause you can’t do it doesn’t mean it can’t be done.” His advice for those moments is practical: “pray about them, ask friends, and also read it a lot in groups.”
Bring your sheet back to your group or to a friend who reads Scripture carefully. Ask them to check one thing: did you let the text say what it says before you decided what it means?