Asking All the Wrong Questions about Marriage–Part 1

God’s ideal at creation was two people (one man and one woman) becoming one flesh and that is the definition of marriage.  The image of God was at stake and God’s rule and reign were in the balance.  After the Fall of Man, Adam and Eve immediately find their relationship strained and their offspring’s likeness would be that of Adam–a broken image of God. Brokenness is everywhere.

Much of early marriage was considered a private matter, a social arrangement for political, strategic, or property acquisition purposes.  Parents often arranged marriages, although stories from the Bible show us how “marrying for love” even within your extended clan had its issues.  Jacob sought Rachel to be his wife because he loved her.   Rachel’s father Laban, promised Rachel, but gave Jacob Leah instead saying, “It is not our custom here to give the younger daughter in marriage before the older one” (Genesis 29:26).  You’re not from around these parts, are ya’, boy?  After Leah’s one week honeymoon, Jacob also got the Rachel he wanted (in exchange for another seven years of work) and the competitive conception wars began.  Polygamy.  Even among the Bible’s great patriarchs, marriage veered from God’s ideal.

Genesis reports a full and often tawdry side of Hebrew history, shows how sin impacted their culture, and reveals the problems arising within marriages and families because of it (e.g. divorce, mixed marriages, polygamous marriages, inheritance issues).  By the time we get to Exodus, the Torah is given because the Israelites were preparing to enter the Promised Land and would see it displaying all kinds of vice and license (Deuteronomy 18:6-12).

Basically, it was the Star Wars Cantina meets the Ancient Near East version of Pottersville.  The “sin of the Amorites” (Genesis 15:16) had reached its full measure, and it was more than enough.

The Israelites were supposed to be set apart, so Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy instructed about how to retain God’s ideals (in marriage, too, even when these ideals suffer in sin and result in promiscuity, adultery, divorce, and inheritance problems, etc).

The Bible is not alone.  Even the Code of Hammurabi refers to marriage most often with respect to divorce, adultery, and inheritance issues and assumes marriage is between members of the opposite sex.   For example, 128. “If a man has taken a wife and has not executed a marriage contract, that woman is not a wife.”

Even so, often the Code’s solution to a problem is that someone gets burned, impaled, strangled, or thrown into the water.  Throughout the Ancient Near East, laws were developed in an attempt to maintain an orderly society in an increasingly broken world.  But among those laws, the mention of homosexuality is rare and when it is mentioned, it’s not considered a social good.  As the Bible describes humanity, we invent ways of doing what is wrong (Romans 1:30), so we have to invent new laws in an effort to keep ourselves in check.

Thus, marital law began. 

According to Thomas Safley in Let No Man Put Asunder, there is a “classic sociological idea” that deviations from a social value (such as marriage) help a community to establish “ideological and behavioral limits for itself.”  Basically, traditions which are based on common community values become more defined each time the limits are challenged by deviations from that value.

Deviance—a natural kind of social activity on the spectrum of human behavior—serves to challenge, form, and codify limits of what a community considers acceptable behavior.

So, from the Old Testament times to the New Testament times, God’s people–as a community–viewed marriage as the spiritual union of a husband and a wife.  The purpose of this union was fulfilling the blessing of God–in unity–by producing offspring to inherit the covenant promises,  to give order and progress within family and society, and to assist with our understanding the spiritual unity of God’s holy people as a reflection of the holy character of God.

Therefore idea of marriage being significantly for begetting of legitimate children wasn’t too much of a stretch.  Church fathers such as Augustine taught (according to McBrien’s Catholicism):

  marriage has three values: fidelity, offspring, and sacrament.” 

It was seen as a commitment of love and trust producing offspring who are loved, nurtured, and inculcated with the Christian faith.  Marriage also signified the unity of the people of God, and therefore its basic value and holiness were affirmed not only for individuals, but for the entire community and gave marriage beauty whether or not one had children.

Today, many people balk at a primary purpose of marriage being for child-bearing purposes, but for people of the early Bible times through our modern day, children:

1. carried forth the family or clan name for inheritance purposes,
2. provided the future work force to care for the elderly as children grew to be young men and women who made positive social contributions to society, and
3. therefore, through the course of work they also contributed economic value to the society.

All of this explains why sons held a special place in families then,  as they still do today in many cultures.  It also sheds light on why a woman’s barrenness was considered to be unlucky at best, a disgrace and punishment to women in Bible times, and it remains so today to varying degrees around the world.  The preference for sons historically led to exposure in certain cultures and today results in gender selective abortions.  Marriage, however, is the civilizing institution in which child-bearing is legitimized.

That said, one does not want to devalue childless marriages or heap additional sorrow on childless couples, so theologians and politicians have exalted the companionship and love aspects of marriage.  Unfortunately, this good concern for sensitivity has turned on the religious view of marriage by resulting in denial of the very first blessing of God for marriage–fertility–which happened before pain in childbearing and brokenness of fertility were introduced at the Fall of Man.

Earlier, marriage’s purpose was stated as the vehicle for the image of God present in both man and woman to be unified and multiplied on the face of the earth.  This happened in their union both by length of days (i.e. holy living as husband and wife over the course of time) and production of offspring, legitimized by marriage.  We may find it uncomfortable, but the definition of marriage being tied to the purpose of legitimate child-bearing cannot be overstated. 

Once we divorce marriage’s original purpose from legitimate child-bearing, the whole definition of marriage begins the redefinition process.

On the next page you can learn how marriage, initially a formless transaction with a civilizing function, began to take shape–often due to challenges present in a broken world.  The view of marriage in Israel–important for present discussions of civil marriage–will be examined.  Finally, in Part 2 we will look at European marriage law which came to America and the first of 6 watershed moments in marriage history.

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