In Malachi’s context, God raises two specific issues related to marriage in this passage. Men were choosing to marry women from outside the covenant community (Mal. 2:11) and were also divorcing their wives (2:14). These two sins were not unrelated: men were divorcing wives from within the community of faith, to whom they had been married as young people, in order to marry someone else from outside the covenant community. Such decisions were not necessarily simply the result of relational conflict