Thanks. Is Jesus, do you suppose, revising Jewish law and saying that anyone who’s gotten a divorce (legal in Jewish law!) is actually committing adultery, a crime that requires the death sentence.

Also, does the Sermon regulate the sexual relationships of Gentile people after the Crucifixion?

These are just initial questions, before we’d even get to my treatment of this passage in a piece on porneia — the word inaccurately translated “sexual immorality.” The Sermon is a prophetic discourse, with apparently sexual terms common to prophets in the Old Testament, in which nations are ‘married’ to human communities

(i.e. YHWH was the ‘husband’ of Israel, as other nations have their baal or husband deities).

Jesus speaks to the “spousal misbehavior” of the gods of the nations, not your sex life. An easy confusion, I know.