God May Hate Divorce, But There Is Something He Hates More

Malachi 2:16 is one of the most quoted, most misquoted, and misapplied verses on marriage in the Bible. Depending on which translation you read, it says something quite different. I was surprised the other day when I looked at the NIV and noticed that it was quite different from the traditional reading of “I hate divorce.” It reads:

“The man who hates and divorces his wife... does violence to the one he should protect.”

Many other translations interpret it as, “For I hate divorce.” In one, a man is condemned. In the other, God is speaking in the first person about His own attitude toward divorce. Both cannot be a literal rendering of the same Hebrew clause. So what is actually going on here, and why does it matter for how we think about marriage today? When I looked at the Hebrew, I was quite surprised.

A Real Grammatical Puzzle

The disputed word is saney, שנה (“hates”), which sits right after the Hebrew word for “for/because” with no subject attached. In Hebrew, you can assume the subject from context. Grammatically, saney is in the third person, “he hates,” not a first-person “I hate,” which would be saneti, not saney. Some get creative in order to honor the text, which is clearly in the third person, and write something like, “For the Lord, the God of Israel, says that He hates divorce.” However, scholars say that translating it as “‘I hate divorce,’ says the Lord God of Israel,” only works if we believe that the text was altered to fix perceived errors.^[1]

Malachi has just spent verse 14 describing a man dealing treacherously with his chaveret, his wife who is his companion and covenant partner. Verse 16 seems to continue in the description of that same man: it is he who hates, he who divorces, he whose garment is stained with violence.

Old Testament scholar Gordon Hugenberger built the fullest case for this reading in his study Marriage as a Covenant. He argued that the verse is not a categorical statement from God about divorce as an institution, but a description and condemnation of a husband who has grown to hate his wife and puts her away because of it — language that echoes the technical divorce idiom already found in Deuteronomy 24. On this view, the NIV’s rendering isn’t a paraphrase running ahead of the Hebrew; it is arguably the more natural reading of the grammar as it stands.

The older, more familiar “I hate divorce” rendering has a real grammatical hurdle to clear. Every Hebrew verb in the first-person past tense ends in the suffix -ti — no exceptions.[2] שָׂנֵא “hate” does not have that ending; as it stands, it’s third person ("he hates"). To get to "I hate," you have to assume either that a first-person pronoun (“I”) originally stood before the verb and dropped out during transmission, or that the verb form itself can be read as first person despite lacking the ending that first-person verbs require. Neither move is impossible, but both are repairs to the text as we have it, not the reading the grammar gives you at face value.

(For example, אֲנִי נָתַתִּי from Malachi 2:9 says “I made/caused.” The first word אֲנִי means I. The second word has the -ti ending, תִּי. If you take away אֲנִי and תִּי, it becomes “he made/caused.”)

What Bible Did Paul Read?

The Septuagint, the Bible that Paul read, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible translated a few hundred years before the New Testament period by Jewish scholars, confirms that it is not God hating divorce, but the husband hating the wife. He sent her away because he hates her.

I don't think we need to resolve this dispute with false certainty. Good, careful scholars land on both sides. But I lean toward Hugenberger’s reading, and I think it actually strengthens rather than weakens the passage. Whether God is condemning a particular man’s treachery or stating His own posture toward divorce as a pattern of relational and covenant abandonment, the target is the same: a husband discarding a wife because she has become inconvenient. That is not a neutral legal transaction. Malachi calls it violence.

Men and women’s bodies change differently as they age — hormonal shifts, metabolism, and physical demands (including the toll of childbearing) don’t affect men and women in the same way, and much of that is simply outside either spouse’s control. A marriage built on love and covenant faithfulness isn’t shaken by any of that, because it was never actually about appearance to begin with. But a carnal man treats it as though it were — and starts looking for a younger, more attractive partner the moment his wife's body no longer serves his preferences. That is what God hates. That is what Malachi condemns. That is what this passage is about.

The Real Point: She Is Not Property

Whichever way the grammar falls, verse 14 has already put its finger on the problem. The wife is not called a possession. She is called chaveret, from the same root that gives us “companion,” “associate,” “partner,” and “friend.” Malachi is reaching for the language of joined-togetherness, not ownership. That word choice, sitting right next to “the wife of your covenant,” is speaking to us about the theology of marriage. The prophet is telling these men: this woman is not yours to discard because you have found something new and shiny. She is joined to you. “They shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24).

Set that against the ancient Near Eastern world Malachi was writing into, and the upgrade is striking. This was a revelation and probably not so easily received by the men. Consider Abigail. Within the space of a single chapter, she goes from being effectively the property of the fool Nabal to becoming the wife of David (1 Samuel 25). To be sure, it is better to belong to a godly soon-to-be king than a wicked landowner — but the very fact that her status could be transferred in a day tells you something about how women were regarded. Malachi will have none of that logic. He calls her a partner, a companion, one joined to her husband, at a time when the surrounding culture still largely treated wives as property to be acquired, transferred, and discarded.

Working Within a Fallen System

We all agree today that slavery is evil. Yet slavery was simply part of the furniture of the ancient world, including the world of the Bible. Rather than launching a frontal campaign to dismantle the entire institution overnight, which would have upended his efforts in preaching the gospel, Paul instead instructed masters to treat their slaves justly and fairly, knowing they too had a Master in heaven (Colossians 4:1). He planted a seed that, worked out over centuries, helped dismantle the very system he was living inside of. That’s what we call progressive revelation.

I wonder if something similar is happening with women in Scripture. Rather than overturning every patriarchal structure of the ancient world in one stroke, God — through Malachi, and then far more fully through Messiah — lays down principles that quietly, persistently elevate the status of women within that world.

Malachi calls a wife a covenant partner. Jesus refuses to condemn the woman caught in adultery in John 8, probably noting the man involved is conspicuously absent from the scene. Paul commends Lydia as a leader of the Philippian church and speaks of women who “contended at my side in the cause of the gospel” (Philippians 4:2–3). He teaches that a godly husband is like Yeshua, laying down his life for his wife. “Husbands, love your wives, as Messiah loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). None of this is a modern egalitarian manifesto. It is a slow, deliberate raising of the floor, generation by generation, text by text.

Think about it this way. Moses gave a husband permission to divorce his wife. Malachi saw that permission being abused and confronted it. Jesus raised the bar higher still, naming marital infidelity as the only legitimate ground. That’s a trajectory — three points on the same line, each one tightening what came before.

The status of women follows a similar trajectory. In the ancient world, a woman’s value was low. The New Testament raises it. Paul didn’t abolish slavery outright — he knew doing so directly would have undermined the gospel's spread in his own day — but he set in motion the principles that would eventually dismantle it. I believe he did something similar for the status of women: not overturning every structure of his world in a single stroke, but elevating women’s status from within it.

In the modern world, women should be treated as equals. We can debate the differences between men and women, and what those differences mean for how marriage or ministry are structured. But on one point there’s no argument: God loves women exactly as much as He loves men, and values them to the same degree. Women are not lesser.

So Does God Hate All Divorce?

I don’t think Malachi is handing down a blanket rule that divorce is unacceptable under every circumstance. And if he is saying, in some sense, that God hates divorce — that’s understandable. Ask any child who lived through their parents’ divorce, and they will tell you it was one of the hardest things they’ve ever walked through. Divorce is never God’s original design, and it always leaves wreckage behind.

But that is a very different claim from saying a woman must stay with a man who is violent toward her. We wrote last week about the Netflix documentary on the death of a pastor's wife — a case that should haunt anyone tempted to treat “God hates divorce” as a weapon to keep a woman trapped with a dangerous man. Malachi’s target was never the wife trying to survive. His target was the husband who discards a covenant partner — his chaveret — because loyalty to her had become inconvenient. Whatever else this text is doing, it is not doing that.

The idea of God hating divorce doesn’t mean that God forbids it. As a pastor, I hate confrontation, but I have to do it. It is necessary at times. God may indeed hate divorce, but what he hates more than that is a husband beating up his wife and then weaponizing Scripture to keep her from leaving him.

^[1] Richard A. Taylor and E. Ray Clendenen, Haggai, Malachi, vol. 21A, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2004), 361.

[2] OK, there is one exception called the vav consecutive imperfect. A vav (a Hebrew letter which means ‘and’) before a verb in biblical Hebrew can change the meaning from past to future or future to past. But that doesn’t apply here.