Charles Spurgeon Commentary Matthew 19:8

"He saith unto them, Moses for your hardness of heart suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it hath not been so." — Matthew 19:8 (ASV)

Moses tolerated and restricted an evil custom that he knew such a people would not relinquish, once it had been established among them for so long. They could not bear a higher law, and so he treated them as people diseased with hardness of heart, hoping to lead them back to an older and better condition gradually.

As impurity ceased, and as the spirit of true religion would influence the nation, the need for divorce, and even the slightest desire for it, would die out. There was no provision in paradise for Adam to put away Eve; there was no desire for divorce in the golden age. The enactment of the Mosaic law of divorce was a later and temporary measure; and in the form into which a loose interpretation of Scripture had distorted it, it was not defensible.