favour to refer to the favour of beauty, or if he find a matter of uncleanness. But the legal decision is according to the school of Hillel, that is, if a wife sin against her husband, he may divorce her." (Arbah Turim, Hilchoth Gittin., 1.) This monstrous passage is in itself sufficient to shake the authority of the oral law, for in the first place we find three grave authorities, Shamai, Hillel, and Akiva, all differing as to the sense of a most important passage, bearing upon a subject that most nearly affects the happiness and well-being of human society. One of the gravest questions that can be propounded is, When is a man justified in divorcing his wife? If there be an oral law at all, it ought certainly to answer this question clearly, unequivocally, and satisfactorily. The existence of disputation shows that these three rabbies had no authoritative tradition on the subject, but were merely giving their own private opinions: and that therefore the assertion, that an oral law exists, is a mere fiction invented to impose upon the credulous, but insufficient to beget faith in any man or woman that will make use of the reason given by God. The old fable, that God caused a voice to be heard from heaven, saying, when the rabbies differ, "That
(
Hebrew characters)
both speak the words of the living God," will not do now.
Every one can understand that God does not speak contradictions.
No one will believe that the profane sentiment of R.
Akiva, That a man may divorce his wife as soon as he finds
another who pleases him better, can proceed from the God of
holiness and justice. It is true that his opinion is not the
law; but the opinion of Hillel, which is the law, is not a whit
better. It pronounces that if a woman only spoil the broth
she may be divorced: now this interpretation or the words of
Moses is plainly contrary to the grammatical sense: (Hebrew characters) is
in Regimen ((Hebrew characters)) and joined to (Hebrew characters) by a munach, and
can therefore by no means be separated from it so as to signify
"Either uncleanness or some other matter." The words of
Moses, the points, and the accents, all decide that there is
only one cause for which a man may put away his wife. Hillel
and his successors have wilfully passed by the plain sense of
the Hebrew words, in their eagerness to obtain a facility for
putting away their wives. They were not ignorant of the
right sense, for that was plainly asserted by Shamai, but were
determined to get rid of it; and such was the state of the Jews
at the time, that they had influence enough to turn their false
interpretation into law; and such has been the state of the
Jews ever since, that it continues law to this very hour. A
rabbinical Jew may, according to his religious tenets, turn
away his wife, the mother of his children, on a pretext that
