oreordained and essential for all men and women. Within marriage procreation - a legal duty for Jewish males - occurs and the lineage of children is assured. Marriage is also a licit means for expressing sexual energy for both men and women. Mutual companionship and assistance, division of labor, and social stability are also achieved within and through marriage. As religious scholar Judith R. Baskin explains, one other reason gives marriage primacy in Hebrew Scripture: "In a system of theological imagery which envisioned human marriage as the closest approximation of the intimacy that could exist between human and divine, marriage also assume sacred significance" (89). Despite Hebrew Scripture positing marriage as essential for all adults, Judaism's view of the ideal society did not construct marriage as a partnership between equals, a similarity shared with Christianity and Islam that made males the dominant member of the marriage pact.
The Hebrew Scriptures include a number of passages that refer to marriage and divorce. Marriage seems to involve a number of principles such as purity, permanence, and others from a review of passages related to it. With respect to permanence, Genesis 2:24 reads: "God's original intentional was that marriage be one man for one woman, permanent until the death of one of the. This was...His ideal." In the case of males, procreation was a legal duty and a man without wife was viewed as incomplete. In B. Yevamot (62b) we get the Talmudic maxim: "Any man who has no wife is no proper man" (Baskin 89). Aside from permanence, marriage also is based on the principle of purity in Judaic tradition. Exodus 20:14 maintains: "God's state desire for every man and woman was that their relationship be pure by each covenanting faithfulness to one another." This extends even to thoughts, as impure thoughts of desire for another's wife were strictly forbidden.
With respect to divorce, ...