Strictly speaking, deserted believers were not free to remarry under the laws of Scripture. They were free to remarry only if they had a valid divorce based on one of the four grounds named in Scripture. Desertion was not one of the grounds, though most Jews would have said that there was no problem for a man who had been deserted because he could simply write out a divorce certificate citing “any matter” as the ground. A woman, however, was stuck unless she could persuade her ex-husband to write