The Jewish divorce certificate gave women the right to remarry, but some men used it rule over women

Conservative Jewish religious leaders have for thousands of years insisted that in order for a divorce to be legal, the husband must sign the divorce certificate.

The essential words in the traditional Jewish divorce certificate were “You are free to marry any man”.

Jews call this divorce certificate a ‘get’ – it is a Hebrew word unrelated to our English word ‘get’. Traditionally the Jewish husband wrote the get and gave it to his wife. If he was not very literate he might have paid a scribe to write it and then he would sign it.

Jewish religious leaders and their man-made laws and traditions

Jesus told us that the Jewish religious leaders invented many laws in addition to the Mosiac Law (see Mark 7:7-13). By Jesus’ day, the Jewish leaders had invented many laws which were their interpretation of what Moses had written. These man-made laws often oppressed the common people, the people who didn’t own much land and were barely able to feed their families. Some of these man-made laws privileged men and disadvantaged women.

One of their traditions was that a divorce was only legal if a get was issued by the husband to the wife. I encourage you, dear victim of spousal abuse, to not worry about the tradition, because it is not confirmed anywhere in the bible.

By Jesus’ day, the religious leaders had heavy-handedly pushed this tradition by hyper-focusing on verse one of Deuteronomy 24 — to serve their own male-privileging agenda they misread that verse as a stand-alone law. They hyper-focused on verse one, and conveniently obscured the real law in verse four which prohibited hard-hearted men from using divorce and remarriage as a type of legalised wife-swapping.

The New Testament teaches that as Christians we are to abide by the laws of the country in which we live, unless complying with our country’s laws would require us to disobey God.

As far as I’m aware, most if not all countries say that a divorce certificate is essential to make a divorce legal, and that the certificate has to be issued by the court system run by your state or nation. Mosaic Law did not require either of those things: Moses simply mentioned the get because it appears to have been a custom among men in ancient Israel. The Orthodox Jews believe that the husband must sign the divorce certificate for it to be legal, but they are believing merely a man-made tradition. Even if one could prove that Mosaic Law said a divorce was only legal if the husband signed the divorce certificate, it would be one of the Mosaic Laws which are have become obsolete in the New Covenant era.

If your abusive husband is a conservative or orthodox Jew, you will not be committing sin if you divorce him. If he refuses to sign the divorce certificate, you will not be in sin if you take whatever steps you need to take to legally free yourself from his control. He can bluster and dig in his heels as much as he likes. He might insist that you and he are ‘still married to him in the eyes of God’ — but he will be wrong. You can ignore any conservative Jews who tell you that you are chained to him for ever, and you can’t remarry. You can ignore their claims because all they are relying on is the Jewish religious leaders’ legalistic and misogynist interpretation of Deuteronomy 24. In other words, Orthodox Jews might try to lay guilt on you, but I encourage you to harden your forehead against their criticisms.

My previous post in this series (Part 3) explained that Deuteronomy 24 has been greatly misunderstood. In Deuteronomy 24, Moses did not specify what is, or is not, a legitimate ground for divorce, he only set limitations on the future conduct of men who chose to divorce their wives.

When the Pharisees challenged Jesus on the topic of divorce, they were trying to entangle him in a complex debate between different schools of thought in Judaism. The school of Shammai said one thing, the school of Hillel said another thing.

Jesus did NOT affirm the notion held by the Hillelites that Deuteronomy 24:1 authorised a husband to divorce his wife if he deemed her objectionable for any reason.

Nor did Jesus confirm the notion held by both Shammaites and Hillelites that a divorce is only legal if the husband signs the divorce certificate. 

The Jewish use of the get was a custom. But a custom is not the same thing as Divine Law.

Assuming that a custom is a Divine Law causes much confusion and erroneous interpretation of scripture.

All the Jewish religious leaders insisted that Deuteronomy 24:1 lays down a law – a law which says the husband MUST write a get to make a divorce legal. But they were wrong. They were wrong, and they still are wrong. And I’m not the only one who says that. The very conservative Jay Adams had the same view as I do on this.

As I noted in Part 3, Jay Adams said:

in Deuteronomy 24:1-4, there is no command to divorce, no criteria for determining what is a valid or invalid divorce, nor even a requirement to give a bill of divorce. … Deuteronomy 24 merely recognizes divorce as an existing, legal process that it regulates.
– Marriage Divorce, and Remarriage in the Bible, Jay E. Adams, 62.

What can we learn from ancient documents?

Dr David Instone-Brewer has this to say about the Jewish divorce certificate in Old Testament times:

…the right of a woman to a divorce certificate is equivalent of the right of a woman to remarry. In fact, the purpose of the divorce certificate was to help the woman remarry.

The reference in Deuteronomy 24:1 to a divorce certificate is unique in ancient Near Eastern sources. Nowhere outside Judaism is there any reference to a divorce certificate or any other document that would be taken away by every divorced woman.¹

The wording on the divorce certificate is not stated in the Pentateuch but there are good reasons to conclude that it was similar to the wording of standard rabbinic divorce certificates: “You are allowed to marry any man you wish.”  This wording can be traced through Jewish divorce certificates and marriage certificates that have survived from as far back as the fifth century BC. … The document would be needed by women, but not by men, because men could marry more than one woman in any case. It would have been a most valuable document for a woman to possess because it gave her the right to remarry. Without it she would be under the constant threat of her former husband, who could claim at a later date that she was still married to him and thus charge her with adultery [if she had married another man].

It is likely that some financial receipt would have been handed over at the time of the divorce, but this would have been needed by the man, not the woman. The dowry, in part or whole, usually had to be repaid to the divorced woman, and presumably some kind of written or witnessed oral receipt had to the man to testify that his debt had been paid. This document or witness testimony would have been very important to the man to prevent his ex-wife from claiming that he had not repaid the dowry.
Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible: the Social and Literary Context [Affiliate link] (Eerdmans Publishing, 2002), pp 28-29.

Instone-Brewer continues:

Unfortunately because of the way the law of the divorce certificate was interpreted, it actually became a way to stop women from getting divorced.

Side note from Barb: I do not agree with calling it ‘the law of the divorce certificate’. I challenged the idea that verse one of Deuteronomy 24 is a stand-alone law in Part 3 of this series. Back to Instone-Brewer…

The law was interpreted to mean that one could not get divorced without a divorce certificate. This meant that divorce became the prerogative of the husband because he wrote out the divorce certificate. Therefore, a provision that was meant to empower the divorced woman resulted in the enslavement of women who wished to get divorced.

As will be seen in later chapters, there were ways in which a rabbinic court could force a man to write out a divorce certificate when the woman had good grounds for a divorce. However, there was, and still is, one group of [Jewish] women who could not get a divorce. These are those whose husbands are missing, either through misadventure during war or during travel abroad, or deliberately. These women [according to Judaism] cannot remarry unless some proof is found that their husbands are dead. As long as there is a possibility that their husbands are alive, they cannot be divorced without a certificate signed by their husbands. The Jewish world is still struggling with this conundrum.
— ibid p 31, emphasis added, paragraph breaks added for readability

These Jewish women are called agunah, which literally means anchored or chained. I feel for them in their plight. Agunah Jewish women are separated but still ‘legally married’ by the twisted interpretation of Moses’ words which conservative Jewish religious leaders have hung onto for thousands of years. These women are suffering spiritual abuse because they are trying to comply with what their religious leaders say about divorce. Agunah women are chained to husbands who refuse to write the divorce certificate.

Most if not all of those husbands are what we would call anti-husbands: they are vindictive men who refuse to write the divorce certificate because they want to punish their wives and make them suffer. Dog in the manger. Greed. Juvenile nastiness. Evil.

In 2018, Hayley Gleeson, an Australian journalist, did a report on Chained Women: The Jewish wives being held hostage in abusive marriages. It was part of the series on Religion and Domestic Abuse by Julia Baird and Hayley Gleeson.

There are other passages about divorce in the Mosaic Law where no divorce certificate is mentioned.

The Jewish religious leaders recognised Deuteronomy 21:10-14 as being applicable to divorce. They also recognised that Exodus 21:10-11 allows a wife to divorce when her husband obstinately neglects his responsibility as a husband. David Instone-Brewer documents these things in his book that I referred to above.

Post updated November 2025.

[August 10, 2024: Editors’ notes:

—For some comments made prior to August 10, 2024 that quoted from the post, the text in the comment that was quoted from the post might no longer be an exact match.
—For some comments made prior to August 10, 2024 that quoted from the post, the text in the comment that was quoted from the post might no longer be found in the post.
If you would like to compare the text in the comments made prior to August 10, 2024 that quoted from the post to the post as it is now (August 10, 2024), click here [Internet Archive link] for the most recent Internet Archive copy of the post.]

Further reading:

What about divorce? — one of our FAQ pages.

Exodus 21 authorises an abused wife to divorce a hard-hearted husband

Deuteronomy 21 gives dignity and rights to wives in both marriage and divorce

Instone-Brewer’s views on divorce compared to mine: Part 1, appreciations & agreements

Instone-Brewer’s Views on Divorce Compared to Mine: Part 2, Differences

Posts in this series:

Part 1: The tangled mess of mistaken notions about what the Bible teaches on divorce

Part 2: The Bible uses different words for divorce but they all mean legal divorce. Those who tell you otherwise are mistaken.

Part 3: Jesus did NOT say “Hardness of heart is grounds for divorce”. Deuteronomy 24 has been greatly misunderstood.

Part 4:  Is this post.

Part 5: Does scripture differentiate between ‘putting away’ and ‘divorce’?

Part 6: Divorce in Deuteronomy 21 gives dignity and rights to the woman