How God takes back a people he sent away
A common argument makes Calvary the legal mechanism that removes the prohibition of Deuteronomy 24. Tested against the original text it fails at four points — and Jeremiah raises the question himself, centuries earlier, and answers it.
There is an argument about Israel that turns up in sermons, at conferences and in popular study books, and it is impressively built. It runs like this. The Torah forbids a man to take back the wife he has sent away. God sent Israel away. Therefore God cannot take Israel back — unless something happens that removes the impediment. That something is said to be the death of Christ: the divine Husband dies, and with that the prohibition lapses. Calvary thus becomes the legal mechanism behind the restoration of Israel.
The argument ties law, prophets and cross together in an impressive way. It is also checkable, and that is what happens here. Scripture is quoted from the New King James Version.
What the text says
“Then I saw that for all the causes for which backsliding Israel had committed adultery, I had put her away and given her a certificate of divorce; yet her treacherous sister Judah did not fear, but went and played the harlot also” (Jeremiah 3:8).
Note the scope. The certificate of divorce concerns the northern kingdom. Judah receives none; what is said of Judah is that she paid no attention to the example. The difference runs through the whole history: Judah is chastised and returns, Israel is sent away and disappears among the nations.
Isaiah 50:1 is often brought in as a second witness, and that calls for care, because the text does something else: “Where is the certificate of your mother’s divorce, whom I have put away? Or which of my creditors is it to whom I have sold you?” This is a rhetorical question, and the expected answer is: there is no such certificate, and there is no such creditor. The verse does not confirm the divorce — it rejects it as an explanation and lays the cause at the door of the people’s own iniquities. To use it as supporting evidence is to make the text say the opposite of what it says.
Four places where the argument breaks
The impediment arises from the second marriage, not from the divorce. The defilement of Deuteronomy 24:4 comes solely from verse 2: וְהָלְכָה וְהָיְתָה לְאִישׁ־אַחֵר — “and goes and becomes another man’s wife“. Without that second, lawful marriage there is no impediment. The verb in verse 4, הֻטַּמָּאָה, stands moreover in a passive stem: she has been defiled, it has happened to her. The Septuagint confirms this with μετὰ τὸ μιανθῆναι αὐτήν, “after she has been defiled“. Anyone who wants to apply the law to Israel must therefore be able to point out who that second husband is. Idolatry is called harlotry and adultery throughout the prophets — not a legally valid second marriage. It is therefore uncertain whether the condition of verse 2 has been met at all.
Deuteronomy 24 knows of no release by the death of the first husband. The law regulates exactly the opposite case: the first husband may not take her back after the second has sent her away or has died. About the death of the first husband the text says nothing — and his death would not solve the problem but abolish it, since a dead man does not remarry. The idea that the husband’s death dissolves the bond comes not from Deuteronomy 24 but from Romans 7:2-3. These are two different legal figures, and the common argument quietly merges them.
Paul applies his own picture the other way round. In the picture of Romans 7 the husband dies; in the application the believer dies. “Therefore, my brethren, you also have become dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you may be married to another — to Him who was raised from the dead” (7:4). Paul does not say that the Husband has died so that the wife is free, but that the wife has died with Christ so that she may belong to him. To use the picture in the first way is to use it against the application Paul himself gives it.
Jeremiah asks this very question himself. That is decisive. The third chapter opens with an unmistakable reference to the law: “They say, 'If a man divorces his wife, and she goes from him and becomes another man’s, may he return to her again?'” (Jeremiah 3:1). The problem was not discovered by later interpreters; the prophet puts it on the table himself. And he does not leave it unanswered. A few verses further God calls the same repudiated wife back: “Return, backsliding Israel,” says the LORD; “I will not cause My anger to fall on you. For I am merciful” (3:12), and with a word that says everything: “Return, O backsliding children,” says the LORD; “for I am married to you” (3:14). This is not a distant prospect and not a pointer to a legal act still to be performed. It stands there in the present tense, centuries before Calvary, addressed to the people that received the certificate.
Hosea says the same thing in other pictures. The unfaithful wife comes to her senses — “I will go and return to my first husband, for then it was better for me than now” (2:7) — and the chapter runs out into “I will betroth you to Me forever” (2:19). In Hosea 3 the prophet even buys his wife back: in his own person he does precisely what Deuteronomy 24 forbids, and that is not a transgression but the prophetic sign itself.
What is left
In my view this, and it is not less than the legal argument offered but more. Scripture does not hide the legal difficulty, and it does not solve it with a construction either. It asks the question out loud and answers it by an appeal to who God is: “I am merciful“, חָסִיד. The return of Israel is therefore not a legal outcome but an act of grace that goes beyond the law — exactly as the law itself regulates the divorce but nowhere promises the reunion. Calvary, on this line, is not the removal of an obstacle but the place where that grace is paid for.
That is a stronger foundation than a watertight legal argument. A legal argument stands or falls with the question whether the analogy holds at every point. God’s faithfulness does not.
What this does not settle
Three things, and the first goes to the heart of the matter.
Paul applies Hosea to the Gentiles. In Romans 9:25-26 he quotes the very formula from Hosea 1 — οὐ λαός μου, “not My people” — and applies it to believers from the nations. Anyone who argues, as I do, that the party sent away and the party restored are the same must explain why Paul uses the same words more widely. My answer is that in Romans 11 he is unmistakably speaking of ethnic Israel — he offers himself as the proof (11:1) — and that the one use does not exclude the other. But this is the strongest New Testament objection, and it does not belong in a footnote.
Pictures prove nothing; they clarify. As soon as you start working out a picture in legal terms — who is the first husband, who the second, when does which provision take effect — you ask of it more than a picture can bear. That is exactly where the reasoning above ran aground, and it is a warning that applies to my own alternative reading as well.
The Reformed reading is not a careless one. It argues that the promises to Israel are fulfilled in Christ and that the church is the Israel of God (Galatians 6:16). That is a considered position, defended by serious exegetes. Anyone who disagrees with them should represent their best argument and not their weakest.
The full article
This question is one section of a longer piece that follows Israel’s role across the whole arc of the story: the election of Abraham, the covenant at Sinai, the division after Solomon, the New Covenant, replacement theology, the restoration of 1948, the predicted wars of Psalm 83, Ezekiel 38-39 and Zechariah 12-14, and Israel’s calling as a light to the nations. It also sets out the places where a common claim does not hold — the identification of רֹאשׁ in Ezekiel 38:2 with Russia, the supposed fault line through the Mount of Olives, the “Psalm 83 war” — with notes and a bibliography.