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| Sarah presenting Hagar to Abraham |
(Please note: this is really a work
in progress. It does not say everything
that I would want to say, but indicates the direction of my thinking. I expect
to be expanding and refining this argument over time. I also highly recommend
N.T. Wright’s Scripture and the Authority
of God, especially for an excellent discussion of monogamy in the last
chapter.)
Those who complain about
Christians citing “biblical marriage” as a reason for denying marriage to
same-sex couples ostensibly have a good point.
A Facebook page called: Traditional Biblical Marriage: Trading Women for Money and
Other Goods, lists lots of quotes from the Bible (mainly the Old
Testament) that show women being (as it says) traded for money and other
goods. It shows that the Old Testament
men had multiple wives, evidently with God’s blessing. So why would someone who accepts the Bible as
somehow authoritative think that God-ordained marriage is one man-one woman? In
order to answer that question, we will have to look at several things. In this
post I will address how I think one should interpret the Old Testament passages
that seem to validate polygamy and buying wives. Next I will look at some of those texts to
see what we can learn about marriage. In
future posts, I will consider the New
Testament texts and, finally, I will take a look at the broader understanding
of marriage that we can draw out of the creation stories and the metaphor of
God as the bridegroom.
My thesis is this: Throughout the
Old Testament, men are judged by how they treat women, in marriages and other
relationships. Whenever men break
covenant, fail to trust God, etc. poor treatment of women follows.
First:
An Excursus on How I Interpret the Bible
I have written elsewhere about my basic
method of interpretation more extensively, so here I will only give a brief
summary. I take the bible to be “authoritative”
in the rich sense laid out by N. T. Wright in Scripture and the Authority of
God. I read the Bible to learn about God and the relationship that God has had
with God’s people. I read to learn about
the mighty acts of God in salvation history, in renewing the world. But I also read to know God and who I am in
relationship to God. For me the bible conveys information, but it also allows
God to work in and through me, by the power of the Holy Spirit; it allows me to
be transformed and renewed. I take the
words of scripture very seriously because I believe that it is important to
understand why a passage reads one way and not another. Why was this word used and not that
word? Why were these stories that ones
that were saved and not other stories? In the end, the story of God and God’s
people becomes my story, with the climax of the story being the redemptive act
of Jesus on the cross and through the resurrection. That is the highlight of history for me.
My job then, is to live in a way that is
consistent with this story; to live a kingdom life. And to do that, I have to
study the bible in its cultural context, I have to read it devotionally, I have
to read it both privately and together with others in the community of faith,
both current and historical, I have to use it for worship. Above all I have to ask the Holy Spirit to be
at work in me as I read and humbly beg for mercy when I am inevitably wrong
about some things.
Leaving aside Genesis one and two
for the moment, the model of marriage in Genesis is not one that I would hold
up for anyone to imitate. However, I
don’t think the point of Genesis is to present heroes for our imitation, but to
present fallible human beings to show us the grace of God. Not one of those multiple marriages in
Genesis turns out well. Abraham tried to
substitute Hagar for Sarah, because he did not trust God to fulfill God’s
promise to him. But God made sure he knew that Sarah was just as important to
the covenant as Abraham. Then God cared
for Hagar and her son. The conflicts
that arise out of the two sons – the son of Sarah as the forerunner of the
Jewish people and the son of Hagar as the forerunner of the Arab people – are
conflicts that have lasted for thousands of years. As another example of how polygamous marriage
grows out of the deceit of men and causes generational conflict, see the story
of Jacob. In the story of Jacob, the
conflicts between Jacob’s four wives are at the root of the conflicts between
the tribes of Israel.
In addition to the problems with
polygamous marriages, sexual “impurity” crops up as a sign (not a cause, but a
sign) of other kinds of moral failure. A
passage that gets used and misused extensively is Genesis 19 – the story of
Sodom and Gomorrah. I would argue that
it is neither a passage about a group of homosexuals, nor just a passage about
bad hospitality. The desire of the men
of the town to rape the angels is symptomatic of their desires to satisfy their
lusts in other ways, indicated by the oppression of the surrounding
people. And Lot’s offer to give them his
virgin daughters shows his own lack of righteousness (they get back at him
later on when they get him drunk and have sex with their father in a cave).
The poor treatment of women in
Genesis in other passages – the story of Dinah and Shechem, the way that Laban
tricks Jacob into taking both his daughters, and Judah’s treatment of Tamar all
show problems with this family that
is supposed to carry the covenant. Judah, in particular recognizes that even
though Tamar has deceived him and acted as a prostitute, she is “more righteous”
than he is because her ingenuity enables the family line that carries the
covenant to continue.
Leviticus has several texts that
the LGTB movement calls “clobber” passages, having to do with improper sexual
relationships. And many people argue
that since we no longer follow all the laws in Leviticus, and these laws are
culturally conditioned, we no longer need to uphold the laws that deal with
sexual misconduct. See for example
Leviticus 18:4-24. This passage begins
with a list of all those relatives that you are not supposed to have sexual
relations with: your father, your mother, your father’s wife, your sister, your
father’s daughter, your mother’s daughter, your son’s daughter, your daughter’s
daughter, your father’s sister, your mother’s sister, your father’s brother’s
wife, your son’s wife, your brother’s wife, both a woman and her daughter, your
wife’s sister (unless your wife dies), a menstruating women, your kinsman’s
wife—all of this through verse 20. Verse
21 forbids offering your children as a sacrifice to Molech, and then we have
the famous passage in verse 22: You shall not lie with a male as with a woman;
it is an abomination. Continuing in
verse 23 the people are forbidden to have sexual relations with any animal. And
verse 24 is the point of the whole thing: Do not defile yourselves in any of
these ways, for by all these practices the nations I am casting out before you
have defiled themselves. In other words, these are the typical practices of
those who are not the people of God,
particularly the sacrifice of children, lying with a male as with a woman and
having sexual relations with animals.
If we are going to say that
Leviticus, and in particular the text prohibiting homosexual relationships, no
longer has cultural relevance, instead of citing the laws having to do with
what kind of cloth can be woven together, we should look at the actually
literary context of the passage. Do we
tend to accept or throw out the other laws having to do with sexual
relations? Why or why not? Let’s look
again: The list of sexual prohibitions in verses 4-20 are, in a sense, very
practical for keeping the peace in families and tribes and for keeping genetic
diversity within the community. Actually, for the most part, we still see the
validity of most of them. The list of prohibitions in 21-24 have to do with
keeping yourselves separate from the nations around you. You are called to be different. You are
called to holiness, to be holy as God is holy. The only one of those prohibitions that is
currently being called into question is the one about lying with a man as with
a woman. We are still on board with
prohibition of child sacrifice and sexual relations with animals. In the context of Leviticus, in the context
of being called to holiness, if we are going to take seriously sexual holiness,
we might not want to totally discard Leviticus.
(I will discuss Jesus approach to this in the next post.)
In Deuteronomy we are introduced
to the concept of Levirate marriage – a man must take his brother’s wife if his
brother dies. This is not a recipe for
the normative view of marriage but a protection for the women who could not
survive without a family. Any children
the brother had with the woman were technically children of the dead
brother. This meant that the child would
inherit the dead man’s property and thus his mother would be cared for. We may
not like this way of doing things but at the time it made sense.
Probably the most atrocious
example of women (and children) being abused is found in Judges 19-21. I won’t go into it here, but please note that
the final line of the book shows the cause of the abuse: “In those days there
was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.” If we want to know the consequences on
society of doing what is right in our own eyes, this story from Judges tells us
what to expect.
On to the multiple marriages of
the Kings . . .
The women around David are foils
in displaying parts of his character.
Michal, the daughter of Saul shows that David is taking not only the
spirit and the Kingship from Saul, but has taken the love of his children as
well. David cares nothing for Michal as
anything but the daughter of the king; someone he needed in order to further
his political ambitions. When David
takes Bathsheba in adultery, once again this is indicative of his sinful
nature, not a suggestion that taking multiple wives is a good thing. The wives
and concubines of David become pawns in the succession narrative; when Absalom
sleeps with the women, he is declaring that he is king, he is usurping the
power of his father. Later on, Adonijah tries to take control of the throne by
taking control of the last woman to sleep with David (at least that is how
Solomon sees it!). And certainly the
multiple wives of Solomon are a bad influence on him, leading him astray by
causing him to worship other gods.
In summary, alternatives to
monogamous marriage do show up in the Hebrew Scriptures. And even “monogamous” marriages are not
always models for emulation. I know that some religious traditions argue that
multiple wives are encouraged by the Hebrew Scriptures, but by my reading of
them, they emphatically do not
encourage us to think that multiple wives are a good thing. The practice always leads to conflict. And even further than that, both polygamy and
poor treatment of women both in and out of marriage is almost always either a
cause or a symptom of men straying from the covenant and straying from trust in
and worship of God.
In the next installment – New
Testament passages regarding marriage.
