6/6/2014 MercatorNet: In the beginning: why all forms of marriage in the Bible are not equal

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In the beginning: why all forms ofmarriage in the Bible are not equalThe only form of marriage that existed before the fall was between one man and onewoman.

Richard Whitekettle | 5 June 2014

Jacob meets Rachel. Erwin Speckter / Wikimedia Commons

Equality can sometimes be a good thing. For example, it was nice when your brother or sisterdidn’t get a bigger piece of cake than you did. And it’s nice when two friends care about eachother with equal affection. And it’s nice when you pull the left oar and right oar of a rowboat withequal strength as you try to cross a lake on a windless day.

Equality has become a buzzword among those who support samesex marriage. The idea isthat different forms of unions (for example, samesex and oppositesex) should have equallegal status as marriage.

While there are good secular/rational/natural arguments against samesex marriage, people offaith also make arguments based on their religious beliefs, and especially on what the Biblesays. As a result, proponents of samesex marriage sometimes resort to the Bible as well. Oneparticular aspect of the Bible that proponents often cite in support of their position is the varietyof marital forms found in the Old Testament.

For example, in 2001, Bruce Robinson published an article on the Ontario Consultants onReligious Tolerance website entitled “Marriages & family forms: opposite and samesex, inancient times and now.” The article identifies and discusses the eight different maritalarrangements found in the Old Testament and presents them in the following handy chart:

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6/6/2014 MercatorNet: In the beginning: why all forms of marriage in the Bible are not equal

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Robinson argues that, given the diversity of marital arrangements in the Old Testament, andthe fact that “there do not appear to be any passages in the Bible that condemn any of theabove forms of marriages or family structures,” there was no such thing as a “biblical marriage.”That is to say, there was no standard concept of marriage in the Bible. For Robinson, theimplication is that one cannot describe samesex unions as a deviation from a biblical norm, asmany opponents of samesex marriage are wont to do.

Robinson’s article and the chart it contains have been referred to and used by various otherauthors on the web, though Robinson notes that the chart is not his own and that the creator ofthe chart is unknown. And, of course, Robinson is not alone in using the apparent absence of astandard form of marriage in the Old Testament in support of redefining marriage to includesamesex relationships.

For example, at the 2013 Covenant Conference of the Covenant Network of Presbyterians,Amy Plantinga Pauw, Professor of Doctrinal Theology at Louisville Seminary, presented anargument in favor of redefining marriage to include samesex unions in a talk entitled “It’sTime.” Pauw argued:

there is no single, unchanging biblical view of marriage. This is clear as soon as we startreading the Bible. Biological procreation was of supreme importance for ancient Israelbecause their very survival as a people depended on it—which is why you get…theacceptance of polygamy, the insistence that a man marry his brother’s widow, an extremeworry about “wasting” male seed. Those are biblical ways of thinking about marriage andsexual activity that Jews and Christians don’t regard as normative anymore.

While it is certainly true that marriage takes various forms in the Old Testament, and that nodirect condemnations of these various forms are ever made, Robinson, Pauw, and those of likemind are missing or ignoring or dismissing one very important interpretive feature of the OldTestament: its narrative trajectory.

Much of the Old Testament is chronologically organized. For example, Genesis through Kingsmove from the creation of the world to the exile of the Southern Kingdom of Judah. Chronicles,Ezra, and Nehemiah cover some of that same chronology and move it forward into the periodfollowing the return from exile. And there are chronological markers in many of the propheticbooks that allow one to fit them into the broader chronology.

Biblical chronology begins with the creation of the world. In the first chapter of Genesis, Godcreates the entire universe and all of its inhabitants, declaring that what has been made isgood. This implies that there is a moral order to the world (that is, that the things God hascreated are acting or functioning in the way that He wants them to). In the second chapter ofGenesis, God creates a man and a woman, establishes the “(one) man + (one) woman” maritalform, and gives the man and the woman a basic moral framework to live by: not eating from thetree of knowledge is right, and eating from the tree of knowledge is wrong.

In the third chapter of Genesis, the man and woman do the wrong thing and eat from the tree of

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knowledge. This moral failure changes everything. It changes the human heart and mind, and itchanges how the world works. For example, after the moral failure there will be social tensions(Genesis 3:12, 15), reproductive difficulties (Genesis 3:16), disruption of the male/femalerelationship (Genesis 3:16), and death (Genesis 3:1719).

The Bible presents the history of the world as involving its creation (the prefall world), its fall,and its continuation as a fallen world (the postfall world). In other words, the Bible understandsthe world to have been made in a certain way, to have fallen apart in a certain way, and tocontinue on in a certain fallen way.

Consider, then, the eight marital forms in light of the pre and postfall structure of the history ofthe world. The only marital arrangement found in the ideal, prefall world is the man + womanarrangement. That is to say, the only marital arrangement that God establishes as part of howHe wants and intends the created order to work is the man + woman arrangement. All of theother marital arrangements emerge after the world has fallen. Moreover, they emerge as adirect result of the fallen characteristics of the fallen world.

For example, social tensions led to power differences among males and their amassing offemales and children as projections of their power and virility (Judges 10:35; 12:810, 1315; 2Samuel 3:25), to power differences among females and their competition for males andreproductive success (Genesis 29:3130:24; 1 Samuel 1:120), to warfare and the acquisitionof females by males during wartime (Numbers 31), and to slavery and the control of themarital/sexual lives of male and female slaves (Exodus 21:4).

Reproductive difficulties led to the creation of alternative reproductive strategies such aslevirate marriage (Genesis 38) and polygyny (Genesis 29:3130:24). The disruption of themale/female relationship led to the objectification of females by males as reproductivecommodities (Judges 21), to the objectification of females by males as social commodities(Genesis 28:69), to the objectification of females by males as political commodities (1 Samuel18:1729; 25:44; 2 Samuel 3:1216), to the objectification of fertile females by infertile femalesas reproductive surrogates to gain the love and respect of a man (Genesis 16; 29:3130:24), tothe sexual abuse of females by males (Judges 19:2526), and to the use of power by males toacquire females (2 Samuel 11). And death itself, another result of the fall, led to the creation oflevirate marriage (Genesis 38).

In sum, the narrative trajectory of the Old Testament shows that not all marital arrangementswere equal. Only the male + female arrangement was part of how God designed the world torun in its ideal, unfallen, state. All other forms found in the textual record, as well as thedegradation of the male + female arrangement, emerged in the fallen world as consequencesof the world’s and human beings’ fallen qualities. The male + female form of marriage was,therefore, the normative form from which all other forms deviated and devolved. Thus, thevariety of marital forms in the Old Testament cannot be used to support the notion thatalternative forms of marriage, such as samesex unions, do not deviate from a biblical norm.

Moreover, while the seven postfall marital arrangements are deviations from the prefall male +female standard, they are nonetheless all, like the standard form, heterosexual forms ofmarriage. They are all, therefore, formal deviations from the standard (for example, from male +female to male + females). A samesex marital form, however, would be a material deviationfrom the standard (with a male substituted for a female, or a female substituted for a male).

While formal deviations from the standard emerge in the fallen world of the Old Testament, amaterial deviation never does. It was not considered a viable, material form of marriage, even inthe fallen world. Thus, while the variety of marital forms in the Old Testament cannot be used tosupport the notion that samesex marriage does not deviate from a biblical norm, the commonand exclusively heterosexual character of the various forms of marriage found in the OldTestament (together with the prohibition and condemnation of homosexual behavior itself inLev 18:22 and 20:13) rules out the possibility of support even further.

Of course, having said all of that, in order to accept the preceding line of argumentation asvalid, one has to believe that there was, in fact, a fall. That is, one has to believe that the Bibleis right when it says that the world was made in a certain way, that it fell apart in certain ways,and that we now inhabit a fallen world. In other words, one has to believe in a before and afterpicture of the history of the world.

And to believe that, one must also believe that, at some point in our hominid ancestry, we hadhuman forebears who were capable of moral reasoning, that these morally capable humanbeings encountered God, that this God gave those human beings a moral framework to live by,that those human beings made a moral choice that was wrong, and that this moral failurechanged the human heart and mind, and the way the world works ever after.

6/6/2014 MercatorNet: In the beginning: why all forms of marriage in the Bible are not equal

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Such a primordial scenario is something the secular world does not generally accept. It is notsurprising, then, that many who use the chart shown above (or similar arguments) in support ofsamesex unions have overlooked the disconnect that exists between the chart, which seems tosuggest that the various forms of marriage found in the Bible are all equal, and the larger,foundational arc of the scriptural narrative, which shows that the forms arenot all equal.

Curiously, this primordial scenario is something that an increasing swath of the religious worldis coming to disbelieve or disregard too. Consequently, the use of the prefall/postfall narrativetrajectory of the Old Testament as a foundational way to think about marriage and sexuality,and about many other things as well, is eroding and disappearing, from both secular andreligious thought, with farreaching consequences. But that would be the subject for anotheressay. Or a book. Or prayer.

Richard Whitekettle holds a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from YaleUniversity. He is Professor of Religion at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI. This article wasfirst published on Public Discourse and is reproduced here with permission.

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