Someone emailed:
Have you seen Tomson's review of your work? Unlike most reviewers, he is quite critical, and appears to have some serieious criticisms.
Reply: Tomson's review has some very telling points (as well as pointing out some spelling mistakes).
His review points up a couple of important areas where I have been unclear. I wish I had spent more time dealing with Westbrook, whom I no longer think has the correct solution to Dt.24.1-4 – see here). And I wish I had dealt with the origin of the Any Cause divorce - the Hillelites clearly didn't invent it cos it was used in 5th C BCE Elephantine, but they invented the Scriptural justification for it (see here).
I don't agree with his reading of the Qumran material, which seems to be a merging of the old view (that the phrase 'two wives in their lifetime' referred to remarriage) and the newer view (which might even be called a consensus) that it refered to polygamy.
I don't think that I failed to justify my use of Matthew's additions to the divorce tradition, as he suggests. I argued that Matthew was writing some time after Mark when the Hillelite-Shammaite debate was no longer current, so he had to remind his readers about it.
I am flattered that such a fine scholar has clearly read my work very carefully.On "two wives" at Qumran see Ginzberg's Explanation of "during their lives" in Divorce & Remarriage in the Bible
On Matthew's additional phrases see The Exceptions in Divorce & Remarriage in the Bible
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