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tinpraIf you missed my previous posting, I am writing a (hopefully) brief series of essays in response to a YouTube video that supposedly lays out the dirty truth behind what a Biblical marriage really is. In the course of the video approximately fifteen examples of “marriages” are brought up, each one completely outrageous and jaw-dropping if you’ve never heard of them. Each one is also actually in the Bible. However most of them are not examples of a Biblical marriage.
Just because something is in the Bible doesn’t mean that it is in fact biblical. The Bible doesn’t just show you what you’re supposed to do and the people who did wonderful things, the Bible also shows people in their real lives doing real things. And as we all know, real people doing real things includes a lot of outrageous, jaw-dropping actions that you wouldn’t believe if you hadn’t seen it for yourself. Does that mean that those actions set the standard for relationships, job protocol, families, etc.? No. Which is the very reason why they’re outrageous and jaw-dropping in the first place.
When there is no standard, there can be no deviation. Where there is no ability to have deviation, there is no room for shock or shocking behavior—it’s just behavior. So if there’s shock, somewhere out there is a standard that is being deviated from.
All of that said, I’m going to discuss the first set of examples raised in the YouTube video. Please keep in mind what I just made note of: Not every situation noted in the Bible is also biblical. When we use the term biblical we can mean either “Of, relating to, or contained in the Bible” (as defined in TheFreeDictionary.com) and something that is godly, where godliness is defined as “Pious; reverencing God, and his character and laws; obedient to the commands of God from love for, and reverence of, his character; conformed to God's law; devout; righteous; as, a godly life.” (from BrainyQuote.com).
You don’t have to get very far in the Bible to find people who, although they should be living up to the second definition of what it means to live a biblical life, are living lives that are just “contained in the Bible.” The very first people, point in fact.
According to the Bible, God created Adam, gave him a job, and laid down some ground rules (eat whatever you want, except the fruit from those two trees over there) for living in the garden. At some point after that, God created Eve. Then Adam and Eve turned around and broke the ground rules. Two people who literally had anything they could want decided that they wanted more. They wanted to be like God; they wanted a little piece of the God-action. That was how Eve was convinced to eat from the Tree of Knowledge after all. She had ignored the tree just fine when the only temptation was how yummy and delicious it looked. You figure that Adam and Eve both saw the tree and its fruit on a regular basis. If it was a flowering tree, as many fruit trees are, they would have smelled its blossoms. They saw its fruit grow and ripen, and yet they never tried for it as far as we know. It wasn’t until she was tempted with the idea that “the day you eat it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God…” did she start to look at it and decide that it was even yummier and more delicious than she’d ever previously thought. And why was that? Because it would make her like God. Not the character of God, which she would have learned and grown into by being with God (as she and her husband regularly were) but the glory and wisdom of God. They didn’t want to imitate—aka the highest form of flattery—they wanted to duplicate…aka pride.
So she eats the fruit, and then Adam eats the fruit…and it all goes downhill from there. All of this within virtually the first moments of creation. (As a sidenote, even though Eve ate the fruit first and then offered it to Adam, this is always referred to as Adam’s sin and Adam’s fall in the Bible. Which is not to say that Eve wasn’t wrong, but Adam was the one in charge and as the one in charge he got the blame. Kind of like being the older kid who has to watch the other kids during a party. Even if they throw food on the walls, you end being the one getting yelled at because you didn’t stop them or get an adult.)
So they have kids. Their kids, apparently, don’t like each other. The oldest boy kills the younger one out of spite and jealousy. As a punishment he gets banished from the family, and is made a perennial vagabond. At some point he gets married and has kids. (Genesis 4:1-17)
Here’s where the YouTube video comes in. Thought I’d forgotten, didn’t you?
According to the vid, Murderer Cain married and had kids with his mother, Eve. And so, according to the video, a biblical marriage is one man, one woman, and incest with your murderous son.
Cain did have an incestuous marriage (and that is just squicky to think about) but not with his mother. We don’t know who Cain married, but we know it had to be a fairly close relation. It could have been one of his sisters, a niece or perhaps even a great-niece since people were living well into their hundreds at this point in history.
You’re probably saying, “Okay, so its possible that he didn’t sleep with his mother. He still committed incest with someone!!!”
Very true.
Think of the times and situations, however: Unless God was going to make more people, and apparently that wasn’t his plan, who else was Cain going to marry? Unless he never married at all, the only person to marry was a sister, niece or great-niece.
Even if you think the entire Bible is just mythology, look at this situation logically and logistically. If we evolved from random cells, starting as individuals who reproduced asexually (individual cells splitting), and developing into individuals that reproduced sexually, there is a great chance that there weren’t that many individuals to reproduce sexually with. So who do you marry? Family. Because, even if we’re all sexually reproducing individuals now, we all apparently came from a single asexually reproducing individual then. We’re all family. It’s already been proven that human beings around the world share genetic markers that point to a handful of ancient individuals. There was a really interesting documentary on PBS a few of years ago about a geneticist, or team of geneticists, tracing common human genomes literally around the world and eventually back to Africa or the Middle East.
The issue comes back to incest happening in a marriage, and whether or not that’s Biblical by the second definition: Is it godly?
Note that everything happening with Cain and his unnamed wife occurs before God gives the law—although there are godly principles that exist.
What were the ground rules that God had set up for Adam and Eve before they were kicked out of the garden? They were to be caretakers of the garden (they had to work) and they weren’t supposed to eat the fruit from the two trees in the center of the garden (Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life). They bombed out on Rule 2 by eating from the Tree of Knowledge, and they got kicked out before they could get a notion about eating from the Tree of Life. God didn’t set down any rules about who to marry. There is a general principle laid down concerning monogamy. After all, when God decides that Adam doesn’t really do bachelorhood well he doesn’t create a bevy of ladies for Adam to spend his free time with, just one. So even though God doesn’t specifically say to them at that moment “And thou shalt only have one husband and one wife…stop looking around!” the way he sets up their relationship says it. Also, although it’s unstated here, there’s a principal against marrying your parents. This will come up in a bad, bad way when we get to Lot and his family.
So while Cain is flat out guilty of murder, he isn’t guilty of incest at that moment. For this time period before there is a law laid down against incest, and it is a painfully specific set of laws let me tell you, no one is guilty of incest. It would like being guilty of something now that isn’t going to be wrong until next year. Like getting a ticket from the cops because you parked your car where they’re going to put a fire hydrant, even though there’s nothing on the ground yet. Doesn’t make sense.
The Bible pulls no punches with its characters. When people do bad things, it tells you what they did and what the consequences were. Cain murdered his brother and deeply wounded his family; he got put out of, presumably, the only job he knew well; he became “a fugitive and vagabond”; and he was disconnected from God. There is, however, no condemnation here or elsewhere in the Bible for Cain’s choice in wives.
Just because something is in the Bible doesn’t mean that it is in fact biblical. The Bible doesn’t just show you what you’re supposed to do and the people who did wonderful things, the Bible also shows people in their real lives doing real things. And as we all know, real people doing real things includes a lot of outrageous, jaw-dropping actions that you wouldn’t believe if you hadn’t seen it for yourself. Does that mean that those actions set the standard for relationships, job protocol, families, etc.? No. Which is the very reason why they’re outrageous and jaw-dropping in the first place.
When there is no standard, there can be no deviation. Where there is no ability to have deviation, there is no room for shock or shocking behavior—it’s just behavior. So if there’s shock, somewhere out there is a standard that is being deviated from.
All of that said, I’m going to discuss the first set of examples raised in the YouTube video. Please keep in mind what I just made note of: Not every situation noted in the Bible is also biblical. When we use the term biblical we can mean either “Of, relating to, or contained in the Bible” (as defined in TheFreeDictionary.com) and something that is godly, where godliness is defined as “Pious; reverencing God, and his character and laws; obedient to the commands of God from love for, and reverence of, his character; conformed to God's law; devout; righteous; as, a godly life.” (from BrainyQuote.com).
You don’t have to get very far in the Bible to find people who, although they should be living up to the second definition of what it means to live a biblical life, are living lives that are just “contained in the Bible.” The very first people, point in fact.
According to the Bible, God created Adam, gave him a job, and laid down some ground rules (eat whatever you want, except the fruit from those two trees over there) for living in the garden. At some point after that, God created Eve. Then Adam and Eve turned around and broke the ground rules. Two people who literally had anything they could want decided that they wanted more. They wanted to be like God; they wanted a little piece of the God-action. That was how Eve was convinced to eat from the Tree of Knowledge after all. She had ignored the tree just fine when the only temptation was how yummy and delicious it looked. You figure that Adam and Eve both saw the tree and its fruit on a regular basis. If it was a flowering tree, as many fruit trees are, they would have smelled its blossoms. They saw its fruit grow and ripen, and yet they never tried for it as far as we know. It wasn’t until she was tempted with the idea that “the day you eat it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God…” did she start to look at it and decide that it was even yummier and more delicious than she’d ever previously thought. And why was that? Because it would make her like God. Not the character of God, which she would have learned and grown into by being with God (as she and her husband regularly were) but the glory and wisdom of God. They didn’t want to imitate—aka the highest form of flattery—they wanted to duplicate…aka pride.
So she eats the fruit, and then Adam eats the fruit…and it all goes downhill from there. All of this within virtually the first moments of creation. (As a sidenote, even though Eve ate the fruit first and then offered it to Adam, this is always referred to as Adam’s sin and Adam’s fall in the Bible. Which is not to say that Eve wasn’t wrong, but Adam was the one in charge and as the one in charge he got the blame. Kind of like being the older kid who has to watch the other kids during a party. Even if they throw food on the walls, you end being the one getting yelled at because you didn’t stop them or get an adult.)
So they have kids. Their kids, apparently, don’t like each other. The oldest boy kills the younger one out of spite and jealousy. As a punishment he gets banished from the family, and is made a perennial vagabond. At some point he gets married and has kids. (Genesis 4:1-17)
Here’s where the YouTube video comes in. Thought I’d forgotten, didn’t you?
According to the vid, Murderer Cain married and had kids with his mother, Eve. And so, according to the video, a biblical marriage is one man, one woman, and incest with your murderous son.
Cain did have an incestuous marriage (and that is just squicky to think about) but not with his mother. We don’t know who Cain married, but we know it had to be a fairly close relation. It could have been one of his sisters, a niece or perhaps even a great-niece since people were living well into their hundreds at this point in history.
You’re probably saying, “Okay, so its possible that he didn’t sleep with his mother. He still committed incest with someone!!!”
Very true.
Think of the times and situations, however: Unless God was going to make more people, and apparently that wasn’t his plan, who else was Cain going to marry? Unless he never married at all, the only person to marry was a sister, niece or great-niece.
Even if you think the entire Bible is just mythology, look at this situation logically and logistically. If we evolved from random cells, starting as individuals who reproduced asexually (individual cells splitting), and developing into individuals that reproduced sexually, there is a great chance that there weren’t that many individuals to reproduce sexually with. So who do you marry? Family. Because, even if we’re all sexually reproducing individuals now, we all apparently came from a single asexually reproducing individual then. We’re all family. It’s already been proven that human beings around the world share genetic markers that point to a handful of ancient individuals. There was a really interesting documentary on PBS a few of years ago about a geneticist, or team of geneticists, tracing common human genomes literally around the world and eventually back to Africa or the Middle East.
The issue comes back to incest happening in a marriage, and whether or not that’s Biblical by the second definition: Is it godly?
Note that everything happening with Cain and his unnamed wife occurs before God gives the law—although there are godly principles that exist.
What were the ground rules that God had set up for Adam and Eve before they were kicked out of the garden? They were to be caretakers of the garden (they had to work) and they weren’t supposed to eat the fruit from the two trees in the center of the garden (Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life). They bombed out on Rule 2 by eating from the Tree of Knowledge, and they got kicked out before they could get a notion about eating from the Tree of Life. God didn’t set down any rules about who to marry. There is a general principle laid down concerning monogamy. After all, when God decides that Adam doesn’t really do bachelorhood well he doesn’t create a bevy of ladies for Adam to spend his free time with, just one. So even though God doesn’t specifically say to them at that moment “And thou shalt only have one husband and one wife…stop looking around!” the way he sets up their relationship says it. Also, although it’s unstated here, there’s a principal against marrying your parents. This will come up in a bad, bad way when we get to Lot and his family.
So while Cain is flat out guilty of murder, he isn’t guilty of incest at that moment. For this time period before there is a law laid down against incest, and it is a painfully specific set of laws let me tell you, no one is guilty of incest. It would like being guilty of something now that isn’t going to be wrong until next year. Like getting a ticket from the cops because you parked your car where they’re going to put a fire hydrant, even though there’s nothing on the ground yet. Doesn’t make sense.
The Bible pulls no punches with its characters. When people do bad things, it tells you what they did and what the consequences were. Cain murdered his brother and deeply wounded his family; he got put out of, presumably, the only job he knew well; he became “a fugitive and vagabond”; and he was disconnected from God. There is, however, no condemnation here or elsewhere in the Bible for Cain’s choice in wives.