"... The standard citation is the Mishnah, Gittin 9:10: 'The House of Hillel says [that he may divorce his wife] even if she has merely spoiled his food.... Rabbi Akiva says, [he may divorce her] even if he finds another woman more beautiful than she is.' Therefore, conclude the scholars, Jesus's injunctions against divorce protect the rights of women by curtailing Jewish patriarchal privilege. There was, however, no general rule in the first century concerning the grounds on which one could obtain a divorce. The statements in the Mishnah are prescriptive rather than descriptive: they propose what, in the rabbis' ideal world, people should or could do rather than describing what people did do. In the case of divorce, the argument in Gittin 9 concerns what some rabbis found to be legally possible, not necessarily what they considered to be desirable or even socially sanctioned. Further, this particular Mishnaic citation is just as truncated and therefore just as skewed as the one used to show how 'Jews' regarded Samaritan women as impure. The Mishnaic passage actually begins with a citation from the school of Shammai, the rival to the Hillelite branch, which unequivocally states, 'A man should not divorce his wife unless he has found her guilty of some unseemly conduct.' This version of the Law derives from Deuteronomy 24:1 ..."