Category: Marriage

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Seven Patterns of Marriage in the Bible

Seven patterns of marriage in the Bible. Concubines, wives, handmaids, levirate, etc.

This isn’t a how-to article. I’m not going to tell you how to have a happy or fulfilling marriage. Marriage advice is vital. No matter how smart or “experienced” you think you are, you can’t figure it out all on your own. You need help.

That’s not this. This is more of a “how-did” kind of article. Good, bad, or ugly…this isn’t about managing the dynamics of person-to-person relationships. It’s about categories of marriage that nobody else seems to want to talk about.

That’s understandable. In modern America today, for the most part, a man and a woman date, get engaged, and get married. That’s pretty much how everyone does it. (For the moment, set aside the world’s wickedness and rare outliers like surrogates.)

But I’ve got some foreign and uncomfortable news for you: Modern America is an anomaly. Most people throughout history–most people in the rest of the world right now–don’t do marriage the way we do. That includes the ancient Hebrews who wrote the Bible and for whom it was written.

Marriage Is Central

The concept of marriage is central to God’s portrayal of his relationship with his people. Adam was made in his image, and from Adam, God extracted Eve, making the two together a more complete image of God than either one separately. Over and over, he describes his relationship with his people as a marriage.

The wedding feast…The bride of Christ…Idolatry is the same as adultery.

If God uses marriage as a metaphor of his relationship with us throughout the Bible, it seems to me that it’s important for us to understand how the Bible portrays marriage.

That’s not to say that every marital arrangement in the Bible is a pattern we ought to follow. The Bible doesn’t hide its characters’ bad choices. In fact, it frequently–almost always–highlights them in order to give us examples of what not to do.

But that’s also not to say that every marital arrangement in the Bible that doesn’t conform to our cultural expectations of right and wrong is actually wrong. God doesn’t care about our cultural standards. He communicates with us where we are, but he doesn’t conform his moral standards to ours. If God says something is morally acceptable, then it is. If he says it’s not morally acceptable, then it’s not. Our preferences carry no weight.

God determines right and wrong. We don’t.

It’s tempting to think that God merely “winked” at the sinful nature of foreign things like concubinage and polygamy, which appear on the surface to be unfair to women, because the ancient Hebrews didn’t know any better, but that was never a consideration for any of the laws that he gave. God didn’t hesitate to give a law against making and worshiping statues of him, even though the Hebrews obviously didn’t know that they weren’t supposed to do that. They struggled with idolatry for another thousand years after Sinai, so suggesting God didn’t outright ban any of these marital arrangements only because the Hebrews wouldn’t have understood is absurd.

Slavery…bride price…capital punishment…polygamy…genocide…. Like it or not, these are things that God allows in his Law under some circumstances, and our gut feelings about how right or wrong they are is completely irrelevant to the reality of their rightness or wrongness.

With that understanding, I’d like to describe seven marital arrangements that you will encounter while reading the Bible, especially the Old Testament. Not because I think we need all of these arrangements now, but because I don’t think you can fully understand the Scriptures without understanding the culture and mindset of the people who wrote them. I am neither promoting nor condemning any of these practices. I’m just telling you how marriage used to work and what God allows in his Law. “Allows” does not equal “desires”. “Allowed” does not mean “ideal”.

  1. Betrothal
  2. Free Marriage
  3. Concubinage
  4. Levirate Marriage
  5. Handmaid Concubinage
  6. Slave Marriage
  7. Captive Concubinage

Betrothal is somewhere between our “engagement” and marriage. Free Marriage is closest to what we call “marriage” today. Levirate Marriage is tied to life in the land of Israel. The other four are all variations of concubinage. I’ll explain what that means later, but it’s important to know that Biblical Hebrew doesn’t have a separate word for any of these, except perhaps for “concubine”, and that word isn’t always applied to concubines. In fact, it doesn’t have specific words for marriage or wife at all.

The Hebrew word for “wife” used in the Bible is ishah (אשּׁה), which really just means “woman”. Except for the Levirate Marriage (yabam / יבם), there is no single word for marriage or marry. For women, the Bible uses phrases like “become a woman” or just “become”. For men, it most often says “master”. For readability, almost all English translations render these terms as some variation of “wife” or “marry”, depending on the context. That’s fine as long as the reader knows this, but if you don’t, I think it can often lose meaning or gain unintended meanings.

The differences between these marital arrangements are fuzzy and often overlap. A captive woman might become a handmaid to a Hebrew wife and then be given to the husband as a surrogate. A concubine might be a man’s only wife and if he dies childless, she might become a levirate wife to his brother. It can be complicated.

The ancient Hebrews probably didn’t categorize their relationships in the way I do below, but I think applying labels and descriptions will help the modern Bible student understand what he’s reading in the Scriptures.

Betrothal

Betrothal is similar to what we think of as engagement, but wasn’t so easily broken. In fact, betrothal was considered tantamount to marriage and could only be broken by a divorce. A woman who was betrothed to one man and had a sexual relationship with another would be guilty of adultery.

A betrothal would begin when a man and woman (and her father) agreed to marriage. Under normal and ideal circumstances, the man would give her and her family a bride price–a substantial gift that would likely be shared between the bride and her father or eldest brother. The woman’s family would reciprocate with a dowry of land, livestock, or some other tangible form of wealth. If her husband ever abandoned or divorced her unjustly, her family would probably try to get her dowry back from him.

Joseph’s betrothal to Mary (Matthew 1:18-19) is an example. The primary laws governing betrothal (apart from to whom you are allowed to marry) are in Exodus 22:16-17, Deuteronomy 20:7, and Deuteronomy 22:23-29.

Free Marriage

A free marriage is one in which a man marries a free (not a slave) woman and receives a dowry as part of the marriage agreement. Although we don’t consciously think of bride prices and dowries, this is what we usually have in mind when we talk about marriage.

If the man paid the woman and her family a bride price and did not receive a dowry in exchange, then she would probably be considered a concubine instead. Recall the story of Jacob’s marriages to Leah and Rachel. He agreed to work seven years for each of them, and if that had been the full transaction, they would have been concubines instead of full wives. When Jacob suggests that it’s time they left his father-in-law, both of the sisters replied by saying “Our father sold us and devoured our money”. They were complaining that Laban had sold them to Jacob for labor and had used up their dowry for himself. Fortunately for them, God intervened and miraculously extracted their dowry from Laban in the form of striped and spotted sheep, ensuring that they were free women. See Genesis 31.

Abraham’s marriage to Sarah, Isaac’s marriage to Rebekah, and David’s marriage to Abigail are all examples of free marriage.

Concubinage

In short, a concubine is a wife who is also a purchased slave, usually belonging to the man to whom she is married. In many ancient cultures, such as the Greek, a slave girl could be used by her master however he saw fit, including for prostitution, but that kind of behavior is forbidden by Torah.

If a man owned a female slave who was married to someone else, usually another slave, and if he had sex with her, then he could be executed as an adulterer. A man could take any of his unmarried, unbetrothed slave girls to be his own concubine, but that would become a permanent relationship. She would be his wife, and he couldn’t then toss her aside or give her to someone else like a party favor.

The primary difference between a concubine and a free wife was her legal/economic status as a slave. She had an added layer of economic obligation to her husband that a free wife did not. This had a huge impact on her social standing and on her options if he were to abandon or divorce her, but–contrary to popular mythology–it did not change the fact that she was his wife. She did not stop being a slave when she became his wife, nor did she stop being his wife just because she was also a slave. God required that he provide for her in the same way that he provided for a free wife. See Exodus 21:10.

The children of a concubine did not inherit her status as a slave if her service was owned by her husband directly, but probably would not be able to inherit as a firstborn unless he had no children by a free wife.

Abraham’s marriage to Keturah (Genesis 25:1; she was not the same as Hagar) and the unnamed Levite’s marriage to the unfaithful woman who was murdered (Judges 19) are examples of concubinage.

Levirate Marriage

The word “levirate” isn’t related to the tribe of Levi. It comes from a Latin word that means “brother-in-law”. In this type of marriage, if a man married a woman and then died without having any children, one of his brothers was to marry his widow and their first-born son would become the legal heir of the deceased. The woman was fully a wife to her new husband, just as she had been to her late husband.

Levirate marriage existed to ensure continuity of inheritance in the land of Israel. In Biblical language, a “name” is more than just a label. A person’s name is their character, reputation, faithfulness, and influence in the community. The story of Zelophehad’s daughters in Numbers 27 and 36 shows that a man’s inheritance in God’s promises is an important part of his name, and the levirate marriage is one way that God ensures his name isn’t lost from Israel.

Exactly how this kind of marriage played out in real life is difficult to discern from historical records, including the Bible, but we can extrapolate a few things from the limited information we have:

  • The deceased’s brother would inherit his land if he died unmarried and without any children, but the brother couldn’t simply take the land if the man had been married and was still childless. In order to take over the land, the brother needed to marry the widow and produce an heir for the deceased. The land would then belong to that heir when he came of age, so the brother would only have control of the land for that period of time. His other children would divide his original inheritance among themselves after his death, while the firstborn of his brother’s wife would be the sole heir of his brother’s estate.
  • There were no exceptions for a man who was already married, so this could result in conflict and complications in his house. A second wife doesn’t just add a second relationship, because she will have to be integrated into the whole family.
  • The widow might also come with obligations to her family, including any stipulations that might have been included in her marriage agreement.
  • The deceased’s brother could refuse to marry the widow but such a refusal would cost him honor and social standing. The levirate obligation would then pass to another brother.
  • If the deceased had no brothers or none of his brothers were willing to marry his widow, it seems from the story of Ruth that more distant male relatives might have the option to marry her and produce an heir for the deceased, although that isn’t explicit in Torah.

Tamar’s marriage to Judah’s three sons (Genesis 38:6-14) and Ruth’s marriage to Boaz (Ruth 3-4) are examples of levirate marriage. See Deuteronomy 25:5-10 for the laws governing levirate marriage.

Handmaid Concubinage

Female slaves weren’t only purchased as concubines. Frequently they were purchased as laborers or as another woman’s personal maidservant, also known as a handmaid. The mistress of such a slave could give her to her husband as an additional wife–usually because she was unable to conceive or bear any children of her own–but this didn’t remove the economic obligation of the slave to her mistress. Hence Abram’s response to Sarai in Genesis 16:6 when she complained about Hagar’s behavior: “Look, your servant is under your authority; do to her as you please.”

A wealthy man’s house could get quite complicated if he had multiple wives, each with their own handmaids. Each wife would constitute a sub-house within the house of the patriarch, and each handmaid and her children would be a sub-house within the house of her mistress. The children of the handmaid were counted as the children of the mistress in some legal sense that’s difficult to make out from scripture, but treated as children of the handmaid in household practice. As with the children of a simple concubine, any sons of the handmaid would likely be passed over as the firstborn in favor of a son born to a free wife, if there was one.

Abram’s marriage to Sarai’s handmaid Hagar (Genesis 16:1-4) and Jacob’s marriages to Rachel’s handmaid Bilhah (Genesis 30:1-5) and Leah’s handmaid Zilpah (Genesis 30:9-10) are examples of handmaid concubinage.

Slave Marriage

In God’s Law, the master-slave relationship takes precedence over the husband-wife relationship. If a man marries his female slave, she becomes his wife, while remaining his slave. If a master gives his female slave to a male slave as his wife, they both remain slaves, and their children will belong to their master.

This is probably one of the most difficult elements of God’s Law for modern Americans to accept, but we don’t get to define right and wrong. That is God’s purview alone.

God requires that Hebrew slaves be set free in their seventh year, but non-Hebrew slaves and their children can remain slaves in perpetuity. If the male slave above is a Hebrew and set free, while the woman is not a Hebrew or has not reached her seventh year, she would not be able to leave with him.

At that point, he can decide between three options:

  1. He can walk away, leaving his wife and children behind.
  2. If his slave-wife is a Hebrew, he can wait for her to reach her seventh year, so that she and her children can join him in freedom.
  3. If she is not a Hebrew or if he doesn’t want to wait for her seventh year, he can choose to remain with his master for life.

I’m not aware of any specific examples of this kind of marriage in the Bible, but it is described in Exodus 21:2-6 and Deuteronomy 15:12-17.

Captive Concubinage

Scripture records numerous instances in which Israel captured the women and children of an enemy people. Although this sounds like a horrible thing, the alternative is that they be abandoned to pagan captors, who did not have God’s instructions on how to treat slaves, or to probable starvation. The most humane thing to do after a war in which all or most of the enemy’s men have been killed, is to take the survivors under your protection, and the only practical way to do that is to put them to work.

Many (most?) of those survivors would become handmaids or field workers, but an Israelite warrior also had the option of marrying a newly widowed or unmarried woman. This would make her a captive concubine. He was not allowed to take her immediately, though. In Deuteronomy 20:13-14 and 21:10-14, God gave instructions intended to add a layer of protection for everyone.

Her new master was required to shave her head, trim her nails, and wait thirty days before he could marry her. This gave her time to mourn her family, time to know if she was pregnant or sick, and time to evaluate her character. If, at the end of that time, the man realizes that he let his passions overrule his good sense, or he changes his mind for some other reason, he is required to set her free. He humiliated her in this process and the recompense is that she had shelter in his house for at least a month and cannot then be made a slave to anyone without her consent. She was free to remain in Israel as a widowed sojourner or make her way to some other land or relatives if she had any.

Although I don’t believe the Bible gives any specific details of these relationships, the sacking of Shechem in Genesis 34:29 and the remnant of Midian in Numbers 31 show two instances when a large number of women were captured in war, some of whom almost certainly became concubines to the victors.

Shadows of the Divine

As I mentioned earlier, throughout the Bible, God uses marriage as a metaphor of his relationship with his people.

Since we are most familiar with the concept of the free marriage, it’s relatively easy for us to understand that metaphor. We are the “bride of Christ”, chosen and betrothed, waiting for the marriage supper of the Lamb. But it’s easy to miss the exchange of gifts: the bride price of the Son’s life and the dowry of gold, frankincense, myrrh, spikenard, and spices. These seem like paltry tokens compared to what we were given, but there is no requirement that the dowry and bride price necessarily have to be of equal value. One could say that we give him our lives in exchange for his, but dedicating our lives to him is the marriage itself, so I don’t think that can be considered a dowry.

When we were transgressors, we were subject to the condemnation of the Law, debtors to the Law under a burden we could never pay. He betrothed us to him while we were still hopelessly in bondage, but then he forgave our debt and redeemed us from bondage so that we could be a free bride.

The freed slave who loves his master and his family and binds himself permanently for their sake of his family. This is connected to the believing spouse in 1 Corinthians 7:14 whose family is sanctified to God because of his faith.

All of the laws governing betrothal, marriage, and servitude in scripture are shadows of greater things designed and implemented in heaven. The shadows are patterns intended for our enlightenment. By studying God’s instructions for marriage–even those marital arrangements that aren’t practiced in our culture–we can learn more about him, ourselves, and our relationship to him.

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No One Can Serve Two Masters?

No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. Matthew 6:24 ESV

In Genesis 24, Abraham ordered his servant, Eliezer, to swear by YHWH that he would find a wife for Isaac from among Abraham’s people in Haran.

And Abraham said to his servant, the oldest of his household, who had charge of all that he had, “Put your hand under my thigh, that I may make you swear by the LORD, the God of heaven and God of the earth, that you will not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell, but will go to my country and to my kindred, and take a wife for my son Isaac.”
Genesis 24:2-4 ESV

When Eliezer met Rebekah, the daughter of Abraham’s nephew Bethuel, he thanked God for guiding him.

The man bowed his head and worshiped the LORD and said, “Blessed be the LORD, the God of my master Abraham, who has not forsaken his steadfast love and his faithfulness toward my master. As for me, the LORD has led me in the way to the house of my master’s kinsmen.”
Genesis 24:26-27 ESV

Eliezer followed the orders of his master, Abraham, and of his God, YHWH.

However, in Matthew 6:24, Yeshua said, “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.” At first, it sounds as if Yeshua was saying that nobody should ever have any master except God himself, but clearly that’s not what he meant.

The word for “master” in this verse is kurios, which means the same as the English word “master”. It can refer to a teacher, employer, slave owner, nobleman…pretty much anyone who has authority over something. In Ephesians 6:5, Colossians 3:22, and other places, Paul tells slaves to obey their human masters (kurios). In 1 Peter 3:6, Peter holds Sarah up as an example for women because she obeyed her husband and called him lord (kurios). Since God established the authority of judges, husbands, and others, clearly Yeshua didn’t mean “No one can serve two masters” in a strictly literal sense.

This is another of many times that Yeshua employed hyperbole as a teaching tool. The immediate context of his statement was the pursuit of material wealth. Just a few seconds earlier, in verse 19, he said “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth”, and he didn’t mean anyone to take this in a hyperliteral sense either, because it’s not a sin to acquire wealth. Once again, Abraham is a case in point.

The key to understanding what Yeshua meant is in the verses between:

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!
Matthew 6:21-23 ESV

Do you see the world as land to be exploited for every grain of wheat and every lump of coal you can extract? Or do you see it as the property of a higher master entrusted to your care for its health and prosperity?

Eliezer served Abraham by seeking out the best possible wife for Isaac, ultimately serving God by being faithful to his charge. A disciple serves God by serving his master. A wife serves God by serving her husband and caring for her children.

There is no conflict at all between serving God and seeking the wellbeing of one’s family, employers, neighbors, and country, because the wellbeing of all people is tied to their conformity to God’s will. On the other hand, if any authority commands us to disobey God’s clear instructions, then we are obligated to obey God rather than man.

But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men.”
Acts 5:29 ESV

It’s one thing to submit to taxation that we know will be used for wicked purposes; it’s another thing entirely to obey orders to carry out that wickedness with our own hands. It’s one thing for a wife to submit to a criminal husband; it’s another to be an active participant in a criminal enterprise. Where exactly you draw that line in your own circumstances is between you and God.

YHWH is the Creator of everything and everyone and remains the ultimate authority over all people and relationships. So long as we do everything for his ultimate glory and purposes, we serve him by serving others in whatever role he has placed us. If we elevate our own desires–or those of anyone else!–above God’s, we also elevate ourselves above God, rejecting him as Master.

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’
Matthew 7:21-23 ESV

For the LORD your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.
Deuteronomy 4:24 ESV

Related video…

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Man and Woman in the Image of God

Man and woman together were created in the image of God.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:26-27 ESV

Scripture never explains why God created mankind, but there are some clues we can discern from the Creation narrative.

  • We were created in his image, so our purpose requires being like him in some important ways.
  • Our first command was to “be fruitful and multiple and fill the earth and subdue it”, so our purpose requires a large enough number of us to fill the earth and be its master. (See Be Fruitful and Multiply at the RN Blog.)
  • Adam’s first task was to inventory all the animals so that he would know he was unique and needed a helper of his own kind.
  • Eve’s first task was to assist Adam in his role as the keeper of God’s garden.

Humanity’s mission as God’s stewards over the earth requires us to act as his agents in the world, to be god-like to the plants and animals, much as Moses was to be like a god to Pharaoh (Exodus 7:1). To fill that role adequately, a man needs a wife, and through that relationship, together they act in another of God’s capacities: they create more people.

God created Adam first, and he was the only man to have been created directly in God’s image through divine action rather than through procreation. Even Yeshua, who is God in the flesh, had a body built cell-by-cell within the body of a woman. All others, including Eve, are created in God’s image by being created in Adam’s image.

Moses’ was deliberate and precise in his wording of Genesis 1:27. Consider this very literal translation:

God created the man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

The man in this verse is literally “the man”, ha adam in Hebrew, not “mankind”. While Scripture sometimes refers to mankind collectively as adam, only the first man is ever called Adam as an individual. Throughout Genesis 1 and 2, when Moses referred to the individual characters, he calls the man adam and the woman ishah. (The woman isn’t called “Eve” until the end of chapter 3.)

The Hebrew words used for male and female in v27 are also illustrative. Zakar, the Hebrew for male, comes from a root that means “remembered” or “memorial”, and what is an image but an imprinted memory of something else? Nekevah, the Hebrew for female, is derived from nekev, which means “to pierce”. It might be derived from the wearing of rings, especially in the context of betrothal, or it might be a sexual reference, as crude as that seems to our Western sensibilities. It’s a more functionally oriented word and describes more of who the woman is rather than who she resembles.

Adam was created from dust and the breath of God, while Eve was created from Adam. In 1 Corinthians 11:7-9 Paul pointed out that all mankind as a whole bears the image of God, but men more specifically are that image: “…he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.”

Despite all this, the very first task God put to Adam was to learn how incomplete he was without Ishah.

God is neither male nor female, but he has something of both the masculine and the feminine within him; else how could Eve have been created from Adam, who was created in the image of God? When the first part of the substance of Eve was extracted from Adam, both feminine and masculine traits, which he had inherited from God, were passed on to Eve, but in a very different balance. Both men and women have masculine and feminine attributes, and in this they both bear God’s image, but each in different ways and degrees

For example, Adam is the law-giver and protector (inadequate as he might have been in both of those roles) and Eve is the mother and helper. But they are only able to be fully God’s agents in Creation when they are together, not as man and man or woman and woman, but Adam and Eve. They are complements, not Lego blocks that can be swapped out for each other at will.

By God’s original design, a man is unable to be a woman and a woman is unable to be a man. They can fill in for each other in a crippled, temporary sort of way, but one will never be complete without the other. If either disregards their role for any length of time, like any well-designed machine, malfunctions will begin to accumulate in every system: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. A person can compensate for that damage for a time through drugs, entertainment and distractions, but that won’t stop the degeneration. It only hides it, enabling a cascade of failures until the whole person is drowning in utter misery.

Hollywood, the legacy media, the National Education Association, and Washington, D.C. are all intent on convincing the world that the only loving thing to do is to encourage injured people to go on destroying their lives. I can’t help but believe they know the damage they are causing and that they actually hate all those they claim to love.

For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Romans 13:9 ESV

True love isn’t making people feel good about this moment at the expense of the rest of their lives. It’s teaching them to keep God’s commandments, including those that concern sexuality and “gender roles”. If you love your neighbor, you must support the Biblical example of marriage as male and female joined together and oppose the world’s twisted counterfeit.

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What Is Marriage?

Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. Genesis 2:23-24

Some topics are more personal than others and tend to trigger more emotional reactions. Food and holidays, for example. Or “is that dress white and gold or blue and black” and, of course, marriage and sexual relations.

Although the Bible has a lot to say about marriage, it never explicitly answers the question, “What is marriage?” Probably for the same reason it doesn’t give a precise definition for travel, war, and sacrifice. Everyone in the Bible’s original audience already knew what marriage was, so why waste expensive paper and ink explaining it.

Our world, on the other hand, has become so full of confusion that we need to spell out even the most basic ideas. So, let me begin at the beginning…

Adam gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field, but the man could not find a helper fit for him. So YHWH God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that YHWH God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman (ishah), because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
Genesis 2:20-24

This passage gives us the three most important elements of the definition of marriage.

  1. Marriage exists to help a man fulfill his assigned role in Creation.
  2. Marriage is meant to be a lifelong union of a man and woman.
  3. Marriage was instituted by God from the very beginning.

Marriage Exists to Help Man Fulfill His Mission

Although Genesis 1:28 records that the first collective mission of mankind was to be a caretaker over the earth and all life on it, Adam’s first individual assignment was to evaluate all of the other creatures to see if one of them might serve as a special helper for him. Of course, God knew that none of them would, but he had Adam go through this process so that the man would also know. When Adam was satisfied that none of the animals would meet his requirements, God created a woman, whom Adam named Eve.

Adam and most other creatures were created from the ground, but Eve was created directly from Adam. God didn’t create Eve from Adam’s head or foot, but from his side, showing that she wasn’t supposed to rule over him nor be his slave, but was supposed to be a peer. The woman was to be more like the man than any other creature in heaven or earth, a counterpart who would rule over and care for the earth together with him.

Eve wasn’t created to be exactly like Adam, though, or else God would have created another man and made them hermaphrodites or capable of parthenogenesis. Woman shares in the collective purpose of mankind as God’s stewards on earth, but each woman does so primarily by assisting her husband in his individual mission.

For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.
1 Corinthians 11:8-9 ESV

I know that doesn’t sit well with many people, but it is the plain teaching of Scripture. Eve was created specifically to be a helper for Adam, and Paul asserts that this principle applies within all marriages.

While the original task of humanity was to be a caretaker of God’s creation, the Fall necessitated a change in mission parameters. Our task now is to expand the Kingdom of God through procreation, evangelism, establishing justice, and generally doing good works according to God’s standards of justice and good. How each individual and family participates in this mission varies in as many ways as there are individuals and families, but you can know this with absolute certainty: A woman’s divinely appointed mission will never be at odds with her husband’s.

All kinds of things can prevent us from fulfilling marriage’s full purpose: illness and other circumstances that might be out of our control, the husband isn’t fulfilling his calling, or the wife isn’t fulfilling hers. However, our circumstances and failings can’t change the reason God created marriage.

Marriage Is a Lifelong Union

Genesis 2:24 says that the relationship of Adam and Eve is to be a pattern for all marriages, that a new marriage is inaugurated when a man leaves his father and mother to become one flesh with his wife.

“One flesh” implies that they are united in a way that would be painful and unnatural to separate and Yeshua confirmed this understanding when he said “They are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” (See Matthew 19:4-6 and Mark 10:6-9.)

“Leaves his father and mother” doesn’t necessarily mean that he physically leaves their dwelling place. The Scriptural example is for extended families normally to live close together, frequently on the same land, and obedience to God’s instructions for the use of the land in Israel requires this. What this statement actually means is that the man steps outside of the nuclear family unit into which he was born and creates a new family still under the broad umbrella of his father’s clan and tribe.

This also doesn’t mean that marriage cannot be ended. God hates both divorce and death, but both happen, whether for good or bad, and both end a marriage. I’ll write more about this another time, but the Torah, Prophets, Yeshua, and Apostles all discuss when it is and is not appropriate to end a marriage. Divorce should be avoided because it breaks something that God didn’t want to be broken, but it is still possible.

Marriage Was Instituted by God

From the very beginning, God intended mankind to be male and female and to be joined in a union that he uses as a metaphor of his relationship with Israel.

Like the Sabbath, marriage was created for mankind’s benefit. Both parties, as well as their children, benefit from the arrangement, especially if it is conducted according to all of God’s instructions. However, also like the Sabbath, God created marriage because it suited his purposes. Every good master provides his servants with the tools necessary to accomplish his assigned tasks. The servant benefits because his job is made easier and more enjoyable. The master benefits because the servant is able to do a better job with greater economy.

Also like the Sabbath, marriage is not a man-made custom and man doesn’t get to define it. People today insist that they can make marriage whatever they want it to be: a man and another man, a woman and herself, and every other perversion one can imagine. Yet, Yeshua said that marriage is “what God has joined together”, so there can be no real question on this score. God makes the rules, not us.

Marriage was the very first government and was created by God to serve as the core of ministry, labor, justice, and civilization. It is a model of God and of our relationship to God and, as God is one (Hebrew echad), man and woman are to be one in spirit and flesh. Marriage benefits us and was created to help us in the work for which we were created, but ultimately both we and marriage belong to God and we have a responsibility to him to protect and honor it.

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Bride, Priest, and Citizen

For I feel a divine jealousy for you, since I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ. 2 Corinthians 11:2

And he shall take a wife in her virginity. A widow, or a divorced woman, or a woman who has been defiled, or a prostitute, these he shall not marry. But he shall take as his wife a virgin of his own people, that he may not profane his offspring among his people, for I am YHWH who sanctifies him.
Leviticus 21:13-15

For I feel a divine jealousy for you, since I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ.
2 Corinthians 11:2

The High Priest of Israel was only to marry a virgin of Israel.

For anyone else, there is nothing wrong with marrying a woman who is not a virgin, but, because of his close contact with YHWH, the High Priest had to keep himself to a much higher standard, beyond simple right and wrong. He is also a type of the Messiah, for whom we are preparing ourselves as a bride. In practical terms, it is impossible for us to be pure. Everyone has sinned and therefore the whole body of his people has also sinned. Our theology is corrupt, our behavior is corrupt, our minds and hearts are corrupt. On what basis can Paul say that he intends to present the Church to Messiah Yeshua as a pure virgin?

Solely on the basis of Yeshua’s righteousness imputed to us through his blood which takes away our impurity. He more than covers us, more than forgives us. He cleanses us, making us whole and pure again.

They shall teach my people the difference between the holy and the common, and show them how to distinguish between the unclean and the clean.
Ezekiel 44:23

As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
1 Peter 2:4-5

We have become the bride of Messiah, and we have also been made priests, not of the orders of Aaron or Melchizedek, but that of all believers. From the beginning, when Israel was chosen from among the nations, she was chosen to be God’s bride and a nation of priests to the world. Set apart and made holy, we are tasked with teaching the world the difference between unclean and clean, drawing them closer to their creator and interceding on their behalf.

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.
1 Peter 2:9-11

We are the bride of Christ, we are a nation of priests, and we are citizens of the Kingdom of God.  We have been reborn into the nation of Israel, wild olive shoots grafted into a cultivated tree. As citizens, whether physically circumcised or only spiritually, we are expected to behave ourselves as children of the King, not flaunting privilege, but obeying a higher standard.

Our ultimate purification is yet to come, but until we finally exchange these mortal, corruptible shells for eternal, incorruptible bodies, we must strive to live as pure as we are able, with the aid of God’s Word and Spirit. We can’t be perfect, but we can always be better than we are, one choice, one stop, one word at a time. It’s the least we can do for our ultimate, heavenly High Priest and Husband.

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What Does “Help Meet” Mean?

Eve was created to be a help meet for Adam, but what does that really mean? What does the Torah say about marriage for the Christian?

Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”
Genesis 2:18

Men and Women are Not the Same

According to Adam Clarke (Commentary on the Bible), the Hebrew for “help meet for him,” ezer kenegdo, “implies that the woman was to be a perfect resemblance of the man, possessing neither inferiority nor superiority, but being in all things like and equal to himself.” He was right to an extent.

Mankind, both male and female, is unique among God’s breathing creations, those beings that Scripture calls nephesh, or souls. This is confusing to many English speakers because we often use the terms “soul” and “spirit” interchangeably, but they don’t mean the same thing in the Bible. A soul is a living being, while a spirit is the incorporeal part of a person that carries on the essence of the person after the body dies.1

Eve was like Adam in that she was of the same kind of being, mankind, somewhere between angel and beast. Like Adam, Eve was a living soul in possession of a body, spirit, and mind. She shared his divine mission of caring for the Garden and, by extension, the whole Earth. She shared in his authority and in his role as a connection between the eternal Creator and his temporal creation.

But Eve was never “a perfect resemblance of the man, possessing neither inferiority nor superiority.”2 The physical differences between men and women are obvious. Sane people do not allow men to compete in women’s athletic events, even if those men are pretending to be women. Every society that has every existed has recognized the sexual dimorphism of humanity, sorting men and women into activities that are best suited to their capabilities. Among hunter-gatherers, men almost always do the hunting, fighting, and heavy lifting, while women almost always do the gardening and textile work, which might be even more challenging in their ways, but don’t require the same strength or speed.3

The mental differences are intuitively apparent to most people. Think of the joke about men being a machine with a single switch and women being another machine covered in switches, dials, gauges, and buttons without a hint of what they’re supposed to do. The joke is an exaggeration, of course, but still close enough to the truth to be funny. The mind is significantly more opaque than the body, so the differences between the sexes is harder to quantify, but the work of many reputable researchers, astute observers of human behavior, and less reputable (but possibly more effective) proponents of dating Game, have established their existence and general parameters beyond reasonable argument.

The spiritual differences between men and women are not so obvious. They are evident, however, in the spiritual and hierarchical roles into which men and women have almost universally organized their activities, in the Creation story of Genesis, and in the many scriptural examples of and references to the differently ordained roles of men and women.

Consider just a handful of many dozens of examples:

  • God repeatedly chose a younger son to inherit the covenants and promises of Abraham, never a daughter, although their wives and daughters certainly participated in those covenants. (Genesis)
  • When God chose someone to lead Israel out of Egypt, he chose Moses rather than Miriam. Only men were appointed by Moses as leaders over the people at God’s direction. Only the sons of Levi are permitted to serve at the Tabernacle and only the sons of Aaron to serve at the altar, although their wives and daughters enjoy some of the benefits of that service.  (Exodus, Numbers)
  • The land of Israel is passed from father to son and only to a daughter if the man had no sons. A woman joins the tribe of her husband–never the other way around–and so a daughter who inherits her fathers land must marry a man of her own tribe in order to keep the land intact. (Numbers)
  • God gave fathers the explicit right to annul the vows of their wives and daughters, but not of their sons, and Paul twice wrote of the obligation of wives to respect and obey their husbands. (Numbers 30, Ephesians, Colossians)

At about this point, some readers might be thinking to themselves, “My! What a misogynist!” But how so? If I say that elms make better shade than palms, does that mean I am somehow anti-palm trees? If I say that dump trucks haul more rocks than do refrigerated panel vans, am I saying anything against refrigerated panel vans? Of course not, to both questions. I am merely pointing out that some things are better at one thing than another.

I am also not saying that women have no legitimate role in ministry or leadership. Although men are more suited to many kinds of leadership and a preponderance of women in leadership is almost certainly a symptom of a society in trouble, God never said, “Thou shalt not suffer a woman to lead.” Scripture records a number of prophetesses and one God-ordained woman who served as the national Judge of Israel at a time when men were weak and cowardly.

Men and women are different physically, mentally, and spiritually, and it would be impossible for them to be equally suitable to performing the same tasks or filling the same roles. To insist otherwise is actually anti-man and anti-woman by disregarding their unique strengths and weaknesses.

A Help Meet for Him

If it’s not clear already, the term “help meet” (often mistakenly given as “help mate”) doesn’t mean that Eve was created to be Adam’s slave. In fact, Moses and David both used the same word to refer to God as their own helper. (Exodus 18:4, Psalm 33:20, 70:5) Surely they didn’t think of YHVH as a personal servant to be summoned and ordered about at will! God is the indisputable superior in those relationships, yet he is still called a helper.

In Ezekiel 12:14, God refers to the personal attendants–whether guards, aides, or mercenaries–of the King of Judah with this same word. So ezer ultimately implies neither inferiority nor superiority. Rather than a servant, ezer implies an ally, an indispensable supporter, and even a rescuer.

The Hebrew phrase ezer kenegdo literally translates to “a helper suitable to him”–“Meet” is an archaic English synonym of “suitable”–and by itself the word doesn’t necessarily imply any kind of hierarchal relationship at all.

So then what does it mean for Eve to be a help meet for Adam?

The fact that she was made specifically for Adam’s purposes, and not for her own, demonstrates that God’s intended purpose for her was to assist Adam in his divinely appointed mission, not to launch a separate mission of her own.

Genesis 2:15 says that God placed Adam in the Garden to keep it, but he immediately recognized that Adam could not effectively perform the task unaided, and so v18 says “It is not good that the man should be alone.” Before God created Eve, he brought all of the animals to Adam to examine and name them. The naming is explicit in the text, while the examination is implied by the context and the ancient Hebrew practice of naming a thing according to its character and behavior.

The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.
Genesis 2:20

A Perfect Complement

One of the purposes of this naming exercise was to demonstrate to Adam that none of these lesser creatures could ever be an adequate help in Adam’s primary task of caring for the Garden. God created Eve immediately afterward and, from God’s reaction, we can know that Adam was acutely aware of the animals’ entire deficiency:

Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”
Genesis 2:23

Eve was like Adam in a manner that no other creature could approach. She walked on two feet and manipulated the world with hands, fingers, and opposable thumbs, just like Adam. She spoke, laughed, reasoned, and loved like Adam, and, like Adam, she was, in her being, the image of God and carried within her the same breath that God exhaled into him.

God didn’t create Eve merely to be Adam’s friend, but she was his friend more profoundly than any of the animals could ever be. A horse can bear a man across country, a dog can show him affection, and an ox can help him plow a field, but none of these can carry on a conversation, help him solve a complex problem, bear his children, or offer him any wisdom. A wife can do all of these things and more.

Eve was Adam’s perfect complement.

It is abnormal for a woman to lead a nation or to be a spiritual teacher over men, but it is certainly no sin, and it is sometimes quite necessary. When a woman steps into a leadership role because the man who should be there is unavailable, unable, or unwilling, she is, in fact, fulfilling her purpose as a “helper suitable to Adam”. It’s a long way from God’s original ideal, but, in his wisdom, his plan included remedies for less than ideal conditions, and we should all thank God for women who are willing to step up to leadership roles when men fail!

God created Adam and appointed him to a task before he created Eve. From this we know that Eve’s purpose is to aid Adam. But God also purposefully created Adam incomplete and unable to perform the task to which he had been set, so that he would love Eve and fully appreciate his need for her.

I suspect that we would all live happier, more fulfilling lives if we didn’t fight so hard against God’s plan and instead used it as a blueprint for our marriages, families, and civil governments.

End Notes

1 Major tangent: Like God, man is a tripartite being, a living soul, made up of body, spirit, and mind. Our bodies are made up of numerous, complex organs and systems that are also made up of complex, interconnected systems. Our consciousnesses, the part of our thoughts and minds that can’t be dissected and objectively measured, also appear to contain separate systems and components. What about our spirits? We know almost nothing about them, and anyone who claims otherwise is most likely either a con-artist or under demonic influence. However, we do know that God’s Spirit is seven-fold in some manner (Isaiah 11:2; Revelation 1:4, 3:1, etc.) and probably more complex in ways that we couldn’t possibly understand. What might that say about our own spirits? Or about the anatomy (for lack of a better word) of the rest of God? Purely academic questions, of course. There’s no way to answer them and probably little value in spending a lot of time thinking about it.

2 I’m sure Clarke never meant to imply that men and women are equal in a mathematical sense, but many people to day really do believe his statement to be literally true despite all evidence and reason.

3 Goldberg, Stephen. The Inevitability of Patriarchy. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1974. 228. “…the central fact is that men and women are different from each other from the gene to the thought to the act and that emotions that underpin masculinity and femininity, that make reality as experienced by the male eternally different from that experienced by the female, flow from the biological natures of man and woman…the women of every society have taken the paths they have not because they were forced by men but because they have followed their own imperatives.”

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Patriarchy, Feminism, and the Government of a Godly People

The antidote to feminism isn't patriarchy, but repentance.

And I will make boys their princes, and infants shall rule over them. And the people will oppress one another, every one his fellow and every one his neighbor; the youth will be insolent to the elder, and the despised to the honorable. For a man will take hold of his brother in the house of his father, saying: “You have a cloak; you shall be our leader, and this heap of ruins shall be under your rule”; in that day he will speak out, saying: “I will not be a healer; in my house there is neither bread nor cloak; you shall not make me leader of the people.”

…My people—infants are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, your guides mislead you and they have swallowed up the course of your paths. The LORD has taken his place to contend; he stands to judge peoples. The LORD will enter into judgment with the elders and princes of his people: “It is you who have devoured the vineyard, the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor?” declares the Lord GOD of hosts. The LORD said: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with outstretched necks, glancing wantonly with their eyes, mincing along as they go, tinkling with their feet, therefore the Lord will strike with a scab the heads of the daughters of Zion, and the LORD will lay bare their secret parts….Your men shall fall by the sword and your mighty men in battle. And her gates shall lament and mourn; empty, she shall sit on the ground.

And seven women shall take hold of one man in that day, saying, “We will eat our own bread and wear our own clothes, only let us be called by your name; take away our reproach.” In that day the branch of the LORD shall be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land shall be the pride and honor of the survivors of Israel. And he who is left in Zion and remains in Jerusalem will be called holy, everyone who has been recorded for life in Jerusalem, when the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and cleansed the bloodstains of Jerusalem from its midst by a spirit of judgment and by a spirit of burning. Then the LORD will create over the whole site of Mount Zion and over her assemblies a cloud by day, and smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night; for over all the glory there will be a canopy. There will be a booth for shade by day from the heat, and for a refuge and a shelter from the storm and rain.

Isaiah 3:4-4:6 (abbreviated)

A Nation of Weak Men

This prophecy in Isaiah concerned the ancient nations of Israel and Judah as well as the coming Messiah and His Kingdom, but there are still lessons for us to learn from the example. Look at the sins that brought about this punishment from God: men refusing to take leadership, teachers leading the people astray, oppression by selfish rulers, oppression of neighbor against neighbor, promiscuity, vanity and dominion of women.

When the men God called to leadership refuse to take it, women, children, and fools take it instead. God brings down the proud and avenges the oppressed. He will not sit idly by forever. In time, God will purge His people so that only those worthy and those willing to accept His ways will survive. Men will accept the role that God assigned to them as the heads of their families and the leaders of their people. Women will accept the role that God assigned to them as their husbands’ assistants and supporters.

“In that day, seven women will take hold of one man,” the prophet says, and today’s western Christian immediately recoils in horror at the thought. “What!? Women subjecting themselves to the authority of a man?” But this is not a part of the sin, this is a part of the healing process. When men turn to God and accept the leadership He desires for them, and when women turn to their men and accept the headship that God has placed over them, then we will begin to truly see what God can do with His people.

The Symptoms of Decline

These things are specifically listed in Chapter 3 as being good things that God would take away as punishment for their sins; they are the support and sustenance of a nation:

  • Food and water
  • Strong men and soldiers
  • Judges, prophets, administrators, elders, military commanders, honorable men, skilled craftsmen, and eloquent speakers

These things are listed as either sinful or the terrible consequences of the absence of those things listed above:

  • Government by women, children, and weak-minded men
  • Infighting
  • Disrespect for elders
  • Elevation of the disreputable above the honorable
  • Prideful and vain women

The pattern should be obvious. The first list is typical of a well-ordered, patriarchal society. The second is typical of a feminized democracy. Except for the judgeship of Deborah when no man was willing to stand up for the whole people, God’s mandated leadership throughout all of Israel’s history was masculine. Every one of God’s specially appointed kings, priests, elders, and judges (with that one exception) was a man. The only times when women led the nation were times of turmoil and weak-willed men.

Feminism Is an Effect, not the Cause of Trouble

I do not mean that no woman should ever be in a leadership position, or that it is somehow a sin for a woman to have authority over men. Some women are well suited for leadership, and some leadership positions are best occupied by women, and there is no command in God’s Law against women holding leadership positions. We should thank Him that there are competent and willing women available to take charge when all of the men have advocated their responsibilities!

None the less, any society with a significant percentage of its leadership positions–civil, business, family, or religious–occupied by women is already in serious trouble. A healthy society will always be governed primarily by godly men.

Humble Righteousness Is the Cure

If weak and selfish men are the disease and feminism a symptom, what is the cure?

Repentance.

In Isaiah 4, the healing begins with the repentance of women, but if that’s as far as it went, then there would have been no real healing at all. Ultimately, national healing requires the humble repentance of men.

We could take back the reins of power, take the vote away from women, and re-establish men-only universities and clubs… But without godliness, that would only replace one tyranny with another.

The solution to crime, corruption, and decaying public morality isn’t patriarchy in itself, but humble, righteous men picking up their divinely appointed staffs and mantles in their homes, churches, and synagogues. Be the men that God intended for you to be. Live righteously. Keep the commandments. Ensure justice for the oppressed–the legitimately oppressed, not people who merely imagine themselves to be oppressed–the widows and orphans.

When we obey God, when we follow his standards in our personal lives and in our homes, the rest will fall into place naturally.

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Burning Down the House with Strange Fire

Nadab and Abihu evidently held to the same maxim as feminism and today's emasculated church: "Listen to your heart."

Leviticus 10:1-11 “Nadab and Abihu…offered strange fire before the LORD, which he commanded them not.”

When addressing the age-old spiritual pathologies of feminism, humanism, and hedonism, there is no passage more appropriate than Jeremiah 17:9. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

Nadab and Abihu evidently held to the same maxim as feminism and today’s emasculated church: “Listen to your heart.”

I believe they meant well. They wanted to express their devotion to God in a dramatic way, but it is not man’s place to decide when, where, or how to worship God.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this story to understand is Moses’ instruction to Aaron and his remaining sons. They were not allowed to touch the bodies nor show any grief or sympathy for the two dead men. They appear to have been in the middle of consecrating the Tabernacle for its first use, and Moses said that if they were to leave the Tabernacle or disrupt the ceremony before the consecration was complete, they would die. That’s not because they were weak, but because there are dangerous spiritual forces at work in the world, both good and evil.

Remember Uzzah.

God allows us a wide margin of freedom in showing our love for him, as fathers do their children, but every good father imposes rules for the health and safety of his family. There are some tasks in a house which are only appropriate for more mature children and only appropriate at certain times and when done in certain manners.

There are also tasks in God’s kingdom which he has set apart with more specific guidelines, and not all of them have to do with the Levitical Priesthood. In fact, most of them don’t.

God also gave us instructions on crime and punishment, clothing, diet, and family relationships. None of his instructions are arbitrary. They are all given for our benefit, to keep God’s house healthy and family safe.

He appointed men to be the heads of their wives and the spiritual coverings of their houses, for example. When they abdicate their authority, their families suffer. When women attempt to take on those roles, they are more likely to be harmed than blessed, not because women are weaker, but because they are the wrong tools for the job. A voltmeter is a great tool, but it makes a very poor hammer.

When our hearts lead us to actions contrary to God’s design, they deceive us and leave us vulnerable to consequences which we might not foresee or to attacks against which we are not prepared to defend. It’s better to accept God’s design without understanding than to rely on your own understanding and be burned like Nadab and Abihu.

When a wife consciously rejects her husband’s covering–or a child rejects his father’s or, indeed, when any person rejects the covering of God’s instructions–based solely on the feelings in her heart she must accept the consequences of her own actions. Courts and other sympathizers who would blame her husband for her actions insult the woman by treating her as completely incapable of controlling herself, and they treat her husband unjustly.

Nadab and Abihu walked their own path instead of the one that God had mapped out for them. No one forced them to act outside the covering of their priestly calling. They were not deceived by anything outside themselves, and no one else could accept any blame. They followed their hearts and they died for it.

God will not hold them blameless who hold their own hearts higher than his Law.

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The Son of Peaceful…and Egypt

Don't rush into marriage. Take your time. Seek God. Get good council.

The son of a woman of Israel and a man of Egypt went out among the sons of Israel. And this son of the woman of Israel and a man of Israel struggled together in the camp. And the son of the woman of Israel blasphemed the name of YHWH, and cursed. And they brought him to Moses. His mother’s name was Shelomith (“Peaceful”), the daughter of Dibri (“My Word”), of the tribe of Dan. …And YHWH spoke to Moses saying, “Bring forth the despiser outside the camp. And let all that heard lay their hands on his head. Let all the congregation stone him.” (Leviticus 24:10-14)

Torah doesn’t record names merely for the sake of entertainment. This man was the son of a woman who was known as Peaceful, the daughter of a man who was probably known for his integrity (My Word), but she made the mistake of marrying an Egyptian man, metaphorically a man of the world and not a man of God. The precise bent of the Egyptian’s character isn’t as important as the fact that he did not fear God, and so never taught his son to fear God either. No doubt Shelomith was a good influence on her son, but her husband had a powerful influence as well, and her son grew into a violent, blasphemous man.

Most of us have known a family like this one, in which one or the other parent was a believer, while the other was a drunk or a criminal or simply a man who didn’t care. It rarely turns out well.

Of course, “bad” doesn’t always mean violent and blasphemous. Sometimes it just means unkind, but isn’t that bad enough?

Having one bad parent–or even two!–doesn’t automatically make for bad offspring. I’m sure most of us know of cases in which the child of an abusive parent matured into a loving and kind adult. But we’d be kidding ourselves if we thought bad parenting doesn’t have bad effects.

Having good parents and a healthy home life as a child is a lot like eating a healthy diet. It doesn’t guarantee that you’ll never get sick, but, all else being equal, you’ll be better off eating right than not.

Be careful whom you choose as a mate. For the vast majority of people, there’s no single person we’re meant to be with. It’s more a matter of the kind of person than the specific person. Don’t rely on chemistry or feelings, and definitely don’t rely on your own judgment. Take some time. Seek God. Get good council.

Remember that it isn’t just your own happiness and personal fulfillment at stake, but potentially the very souls of your children.

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Garments of Authority and Submission

Veils, robes, and mantles are marks of authority and submission.

This Torah portion (Vayeshev, Genesis 37-40) is full of clothes and head coverings.

  • Reuben tore his clothes (Genesis 37:29)
  • Joseph’s brother dipped his robe in blood and presented it to their father (Genesis 37:33)
  • Jacob tore his garments (Genesis 37:34)
  • Tamar removed her widow’s garments and donned a veil (Genesis 38:14-15)
  • Tamar removed her veil and donned widow’s garments (Genesis 38:19)
  • Potiphar’s wife caught Joseph by his garment and used it to frame him (Genesis 39:12-16)
  • Pharaoh’s baker dreamed of three baskets on his head (Genesis 40:16-19)

Garments and coverings of all kinds are prominent throughout Scripture and almost always have a deeper meaning than what can be read only on the surface.

For example, when Moses came down from Mt. Sinai, his face glowed and he wore a veil over his face to hide the glory of it from the Israelites. (Exodus 34:29-35) I was taught that this was a purely pragmatic act, that he had absorbed so much of God’s glory that nobody could stand to look at it, but I think that’s only partly correct.

When Moses was engaged in God’s business–for example, when he spoke the Torah to the assembled Israelites and when he was in the tent communing directly with God–he removed the veil. When he was about more mundane business–for example, judging legal cases and performing administrative duties in the camp–he wore the veil. The key distinction is not whether or not the person in front of him could stand to look at him, but whether or not it was appropriate to display God’s glory directly.

I think it was important that he did not appear to be speaking for God at every waking moment. He wasn’t a replacement god–as much as he must have seemed so both to Pharaoh and Israel–but an emissary for God. He had to hide his face so that the Israelites would not be tempted to worship him or to take every word he spoke as divine law. Removing the veil for Moses in the wilderness was like the Catholic Pope speaking ex cathedra. He removed the veil when he spoke God’s Law because he wanted Israel to see God speaking in the rays of light that shone from his face.

Coverings in Scripture are often emblems of authority and protection: headcoverings, veils, mantles, robes of state, wraps, hangings, bedding, shadows, gold plating…even tree branches and pitch are used in this way.

Headcoverings and mantles are two of the most obvious as well as two sides of the same coin. How the covering is worn or used advertises the bearer’s relationship to the authority.

Worn on the head, they indicate submission to the authority of another, like a military cover. One who is under authority is obligated to obey, but is entitled to protection and provision. To a certain extent, he shares in the power of that authority.

Some examples of coverings representing submission to authority or protection:

  • Ruth covered herself with a corner of Boaz’s tunic (tallit?) as a subtle marriage proposal.
  • Boaz told Ruth to remove her veil–something that should only be done by someone in authority: a husband or father, for instance–so that he could fill it with barley, so that he could provide for her. He was replying in the affirmative to her proposal.
  • Paul argued that a woman who prays or prophecies without a headcovering dishonors her husband.
  • Headcoverings were frequently used to hide shame or sorrow, an expression closely related to submission.
  • The Hebrew word for “pitch” in the story of Noah’s ark literally means “covering.” The same word is also translated “bribe” or “ransom.”
  • After God threatened Abimelech’s life for attempting to take a prophet’s wife as his own, Abimelech told Sarah that Abraham was a covering for her.
  • In the trial of a wife suspected of adultery, the priest removes her headcovering before subjecting her to the ordeal, symbolizing the removal of her husband’s protection.

Worn on the shoulders, coverings represent the authority carried by the wearer. One who carries authority is responsible for its exercise and for the protection and provision of its subjects. The fact that it is worn on the shoulders and not under foot reflects the reality of good leadership: authority must never be worn for its own sake, but for the sake of those beneath it, like Atlas holding the world on his shoulders.

Some examples of coverings representing the bearing of authority:

  • Elijah was a chief prophet and the headmaster of a school. He wore a mantle on his shoulders as a badge of office and passed it on to his successor, Elisha.
  • The High Priest wore an onyx stone bearing the names six of the twelve tribes on each of his shoulders. They represented his right to judge the nation on spiritual matters, while he wore a gold plate with twelve different precious stones over his heart to represent his obligation to judge with love and mercy.
  • Jacob gave Joseph a coat of many colors. Immediately after that, Joseph dreamed that all of Israel would someday bow to him. I don’t think that Jacob meant for Joseph’s coat to represent anything except his affection, but God had other plans. Think of the twelve differently colored stones on the High Priests breastplate. How much do you want to bet that there were exactly twelve different colors on Joseph’s coat?

Noah’s pitch coated his ark to keep out the floods that destroyed the rest of the world, like Yeshua’s blood that separates us from our world and its eventual fate. Likewise, the Hebrew word translated “mercy seat” in Exodus 25:17, referring to the lid of the Ark of the Covenant, actually doesn’t have anything to do with seats. The term was originally intended to refer to the focus or center of mercy, like a county seat is the capital city of a county, but “seat” is rarely used in that sense today, and it was a very poor translation even in the 17th century. The Hebrew word actually means “lid” or “cover” and comes from the same root as the word translated as “pitch.”

The coverings on both arks protect the contents of a wooden box from something outside. The Ark of the Covenant represents (at least on one level) the heart of a human being. It’s where David said he hid God’s law and where God says he wants to write it in every person. We can’t directly face God in our natural state, but in the Tabernacle God’s presence hovered above the Ark.

The mercy seat represents Yeshua’s role as our High Priest and intermediary with the Father, who sees us through the filter of his son. In this case, Yeshua as our covering takes on almost every aspect symbolized by all the other types of coverings. He shields us from an overwhelming power. He defends us from our adversary. He seals our hearts off from the rest of the world. He commands our obedience as we submit to him.

In Genesis 38, Tamar wore a veil to hide her identity but also to subtly tell Judah that the deaths of his sons weren’t her fault. She was only submitting to Judah’s authority all along. Her very name means “upright.” The real problem was with Judah, his sons, and their mother. Through the entire humiliating ordeal, she remained submitted to authority, and thereby found Judah’s life and power in her hands. She took his staff (a symbol of power and authority) and rings (rings, bracelets, and ear/nose rings are symbols of betrothal and ownership) from him, and returned them in such a way that, had he insisted on prosecuting her, he would have forfeited his own life.

Authority rightly worn with respect to its purpose–whether on head or shoulders–is a conduit for prayers to heaven and good relationships on earth. Discarded or abused, authority is a hindrance to prayers, to love, to life itself.