It’s Adam and Eve, Ruth and
Naomi, David and Jonathan:
The Biblical Case for a Broader View of Family
By Rev. Deborah G Celley
On November 6, the citizens of
Minnesota will be asked, “Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to
provide that only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized
as a marriage in Minnesota?" My answer will be no. I am voting no because
the amendment is discriminatory. The sole reason for the amendment is to prevent
homosexual couples receiving the same rights that heterosexual couples receive
through marriage. I am one of hundreds of Clergy United for All Families, a coalition
of religious leaders working to defeat this amendment.
The pro-amendment side also has the
support of some Minnesota clergy, most notably the Roman Catholic bishops and conservative
protestant church leaders. These religious leaders claim that the union of one
man and one woman is the biblical view of marriage. I will grant that it is one
model of marriage found in the Bible. But one man, one woman is not the only
biblical view of marriage and family.
Throughout most of the Bible, marriage is a
union between one man and as many women as he can afford to keep: like Jacob,
Leah, and Rachel, for example. Also, a man’s family includes servants and the
children of the servants that he has impregnated: the children of Bilhah and
Zilpah in Jacob’s case (see Genesis 35: 23-26 for the roll of Jacob’s sons),
and the child of Hagar, in the case of Jacob’s grandfather Abraham. We will
visit Abraham’s story again later.
Genesis includes the story of Adam and Eve,
but it also includes the story of Lot having sons by his daughters. His excuse
was that they got him drunk; he didn’t know what he was doing (Genesis
19:30-38). Perhaps getting him drunk and sleeping with him was their revenge
for his offering them up to be gang raped by the men of Sodom (Genesis 19:8).
The manliest man of them all, King Solomon,
had among his wives, seven hundred princesses and three hundred concubines.
With a thousand women to impregnate, it is no wonder he turned to a fertility
goddess for a little extra help. (See 1 Kings 11:1-5). Solomon himself was not
the son of David’s first (nor second, nor third) wife. Solomon was the son
Bathsheba, whom David married after arranging her widowhood. (2 Samuel 11).
So, how can biblically literate people make
the claim that one man, one woman is the
Biblical view of marriage? Conservative Christians commonly site the words of
Jesus in Matthew 19:3-6:
Some Pharisees came to him, and to
test him they asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any
cause?’ He answered, ‘Have you not read that the one who made them at the
beginning “made them male and female”, and said, “For this reason a man shall
leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become
one flesh”? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has
joined together, let no one separate.’
Jesus quotes from each of the two distinct creation
narratives. The first chapter of Genesis describes creation by the word of
God’s mouth. Note the repeated refrain: “God said ‘Let there be—,’ and there
was---.” The creation of human beings is the final act of creation, the capstone
of God’s magnificent work. In this version, male and female humans are a
simultaneous creation (Genesis 1:26-27).
The second chapter describes the order and
process of creation distinctly differently from the first. In the second
chapter God creates an earth-creature out the dust, and animates the creature.
Then God plants a garden for the creature to live. After deciding that the
creature looks lonely, God creates animals. The earth creature names them all,
but among all these creatures not one was quite what God had in mind. So God
put the earth creature to sleep, and divided it in two, and created a woman and
a man.
And that, little children, is why we are
always looking for the one who completes us, the one who makes us whole again.
It is a beautiful story, and for most of us it works just so. Sometimes the
person that completes another happens to be of the same gender. Whenever we
celebrate the marriage of two people who love each other, the church intones
these words, “What God has joined together, let no one separate.” It works
regardless of gender.
In the gospel context, this passage is not as
much about marriage as it is about the confrontation between Jesus and the
Pharisees, who present a question not about marriage but about law, specifically,
a law regarding divorce. The Pharisees knew the answer before they asked the question.
The answer is yes, it is lawful. See Deuteronomy 24:1: if a man finds something
objectionable about his wife he can write her a certificate of divorce.
In one remarkable biblical example, a mass
dissolution of marriage was required by the will of the religious community, in
order to be faithful to the law. You will find it in the book of Ezra, which
chronicles the return of the exiles from Babylon to Jerusalem. The problem,
introduced in the ninth chapter, was intermarriage. Some prominent people among
the retuning exiles had taken foreign wives and had children with them.
Intermarriage is prohibited by law (Deuteronomy 7:3-4). After fasting and
prayer, the community concluded that those who had intermarried must divorce.
(Ezra 10:3) The book of Ezra ends on the chilling report: “they sent them [their
wives] away with their children.”
The Pharisees were experts in the law. They
were members of a religious reform movement that was devoted to creating a
society based on God’s law. As the gospel’s antagonists, the literary function
of the Pharisees is to try and fail to trick Jesus into contradicting the law.
Here is why Jesus always stunned and
outwitted the Pharisees: he did not contradict the law but he fulfilled the law.
Jesus filled the law full of justice and mercy. Women were always the victims
of divorce. While the intent of the law which allowed for divorce was to
prevent the injustice of one man having to raise another man’s child (if the
woman was found to be pregnant before her time), men used the law to interpret
“something objectionable” freely. Women
received nothing but a certificate of divorce-- no property, no child support
(and probably no children either, children were the husband’s property), no
income. There was no law allowing a woman to divorce her husband. Only a man
could initiate a divorce.
Jesus refused to be a party to injustice. In
Jesus’ view, if someone takes a wife, he is responsible for that woman as long
as she lives. Then Jesus followed up this teaching with something that the
“biblical marriage” people conveniently forget.
“His disciples said to him, ‘If such is the
case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.’” (Matthew 19:10) Jesus
concurred, and then gave a peculiar little speech about men who have made
themselves “eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept
this who can.” Here is evidence that celibacy and singleness were preferable to
marriage and childbearing, in early Christian thought.
The apostle Paul recommended celibacy to the
first Christians. He wrote it plainly in 1 Corinthians 7:25-35. Ironically,
this letter is the same source for the ode to love so often read at weddings (1
Corinthians 13). Not that marriage itself is a sin, Paul wrote, he simply
advised that it was better to remain single, because the responsibilities of
marriage are a hindrance and a distraction from Godly devotion.
The Hebrew Bible presents marriage as a union
of one man and as many women as he can afford to keep, regardless of the
consent of the women taken as wives or concubines. The law, in Deuteronomy,
makes provision for a man to divorce a wife with whom he finds fault, but no
provision for a wife to divorce her husband. The Greek New Testament presents
marriage as a worldly distraction, a threat to whole-hearted devotion to God
and to the Christian community. This is not good news for any kind of marriage.
Fortunately, there is more. Within the Bible,
I also find stories which ignite hope for the future of families, and affirm family
values which I believe are more faithful to the heart of God than the
one-man-one-woman mantra of the Christian right.
What makes a family? What kind of family delights the heart of God?
The book of Ruth tells the story of a widow,
Naomi, who, after emigrating from Israel with her husband, is widowed. Her two
grown sons, who had taken foreign wives, also died, childless. The three widows
Naomi, Orpah, and Ruth, did not have a promising future. Naomi kissed her
daughters-in-law goodbye, sent them back to their fathers, and wished them
well. Then she turned her face toward her homeland, to seek refuge there. But the
younger daughter-in-law Ruth clung to Naomi and promised:
Where you go, I will go; where you lodge,
I will lodge;
your people shall be my people, and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die—there will I be buried. (Ruth 1:16-17)
The women became a family of choice. They crossed the border
together and made a home in Bethlehem. They supported one another by gleaning
grain from the fields. The elder devised a plan for the younger to marry a
relative, and when Ruth gave birth to a son, Naomi became the baby’s nurse. A
woman, a woman, a man and a baby—that’s a biblical example of family that we do
not see promoted at our local conservative church. But the value of devotion to
one another, the value of enduring hardship together, the celebration of new
life together, these are good family values. The story of Ruth clues us in to
the kind of family that delights the heart of God: it is not the appearance
that matters, as much as the quality of the relationships.
Church leaders who promote “traditional
marriage” are often the same leaders who publicly deride single mothers, even
if these women are single because they have been abused. Single mothers have a
biblical champion in Hagar, the mother of Ishmael. I promised you I would
revisit Abraham’s story. Hagar was an Egyptian slave in Abraham’s household;
she was his wife Sarah’s maid. When Sarah thought she would never bear
children, she used Hagar as her surrogate. Then, after Sarah gave birth to a
son of her own (Isaac), Sarah insisted that Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away
(see Genesis 21:9-19). Abraham put the child on Hagar’s shoulder and sent them
into the desert with a skin of water and a bit of bread. And when the bread and
water were gone, and the child cried out in hunger, Hagar sat down to die.
Then God did something without precedent in
the Hebrew Scriptures. God spoke to a woman. God spoke to Hagar and said, take
that little boy by the hand, because I am going to make a great nation out of
him. And God did. Starting with a poor African single mother and her little
orphaned child, God made the nation that Scripture and tradition identify as
the Arab people. But you don’t hear about that in the conservative women’s
bible study.
Neither do you hear about Jonathan’s love for
David. At first sight,
…the soul of Jonathan was bound to
the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul…. Then Jonathan made
a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. Jonathan stripped
himself of the robe that he was wearing, and gave it to David, and his armor,
and even his sword and his bow and his belt. (1 Samuel 18:1-4)
David and Jonathan were intimate. They were bound together;
they became family. Jonathan declared that he loved David more than his own
life (1 Samuel 20:17). When Jonathan was killed, David sang this lamentation:
I am distressed for you, my brother
Jonathan;
greatly beloved were you to me;
your love to me was wonderful,
passing the love of women.
Far be it from me to “out” David and Jonathan. Whether their
relationship was typical of a Band of
Brothers comradeship or more Brideshead
Revisited is conjecture. There was a fierce love there, and a covenant, and
at the last, grief and tears. That sounds a lot like a marriage.
We also meet all kinds of families in the New
Testament. We meet young Timothy, Paul’s protégé, who was raised by two women:
his mother and grandmother, Eunice and Lois (2 Timothy 1:5); there is no
mention of a father. We have Lydia, a female head of household and leader of a
church (Acts 16:14-15). We have the curious partnership of Prisca (aka
Priscilla) and Aquila (mentioned several times in Acts and in some of Paul’s
letters). I was sure that Aquila was a girl’s name, but it is not; I checked
with Professor Deborah Krause of Eden Theological Seminary just to make sure.
What is remarkable about this partnership, Professor Krause wrote
,
is that the name of the wife frequently precedes that of her husband, which is
an unusual construction. It may suggest that first century Christians were more
egalitarian than the conservative organization Focus on the Family would like
us to think.
Jesus scandalized the religious conservatives
of his day by suggesting that biological family ties were not of great
importance. He shunned his mother and brothers when they were asking for him
and proclaimed familial relationship with everyone who does the will of God
(Mark 3:35). When James and John got up from their nets to follow him, he did
not tell them to go back and take care of their father (Matthew 4:22). People
left their mothers and fathers and children and homes to follow Jesus (Matthew
19:29) and he did not chastise them for it, he blessed them.
Married
with Children was a popular American situation comedy that ran from
1987-1997. I was married (with children), during most of its decade-long run,
so I was too busy to watch it, but I gather that it was a parody of the popular
television families of the 1950’s: Leave
It to Beaver, the Donna Reed Show, Father Knows Best. These fictional
programs, not the Bible, are the more likely source for the conservative idea
that marriage has been—from time
immemorial—one man, one woman, with children. Real life has always—yes,
even from biblical times-- been much more diverse than the Hollywood archetype.
What makes a family? What kind of family
delights the heart of God? Look for the passion of Jonathan for David; look for
the tender care and super-human strength in adversity of Hagar for her son
Ishmael; look for the devotion to the next generation of Eunice, Lois and Timothy.
Look for people united in a common mission to benefit the least and last, like
the first Christian communities sharing possessions (see Acts 2:43-47 and
4:32-35). Where are our brothers, our sisters, our mothers and fathers?
Wherever there is love, there is the family of Christ.
c. Deborah G Celley,
2012
