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tinpraFYI: I'll probably be coming back to this one with links to the various parts of the Bible referenced here. It's always good to read the words for yourself.
If 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.
What does “biblical mean?” Well it can mean “Of, relating to, or contained in the Bible” as defined in BrainyQuote.com. This, I think, is the meaning that most of us have in mind when we talk about something being “biblical”: that it reflects the character and precepts of God as set forth in the Bible.
Just because something is in the Bible (the first definition) doesn’t mean that it is in fact biblical (the second definition). The Bible doesn’t just show you what you’re supposed to do and then give examples of people who did wonderful things, the Bible shows us people in their real lives doing real things. Often real crazy, downright outrageous things. Because real people do real outrageous, crazy things. Just because someone lives their life in the heart of Crazy Town, however, doesn’t mean we make them an example of the new standard for living. Usually we use it as an object lesson of what not to do. Why? Because it’s an indication of a wild deviation from the standard, whatever that standard is. And we know they’re deviating from a standard because when there is no standard, there can be no deviation, and where there’s no possibility for deviation you can never have shocking, outrageous behavior.
And so I am compelled to make the distinction between the marriages in the Bible, as mentioned in the YouTube vid, versus what a biblical marriage actually is.
In my last essay I tackled the statement made in the video that a biblical marriage is one man, one woman, and incest with your murderous son. The reference is to Adam, Eve and Cain (and Abel, his murdered brother). The statement is incorrect in saying, or insinuating, that Eve and Cain were ever sexually involved. He actually gets kicked out of the area pretty quickly after killing Abel. There is, however, incest. At some point Cain marries a woman who must have been his sister or niece or great-niece. This isn’t a sin though. Gross? Yes. Sin? No.
Why? Because at that point there was no law against incestuous relationships, much to my own chagrin, but whatever. There would be a law, a very detailed, covers-all-the-points-including-things-you-didn’t-think-of law, but at the time when Cain marries his female relation, it doesn’t exist. As such he’s never condemned for it.
Which brings me to the next example in the video: Abraham and Sarah. In the video it claims that Abraham and Sarah are brother and sister. And they’re half right. They are half-siblings. Apparently Abraham and Sarah have the same father, but not the same mother (see Genesis 20:12 as Abraham tries to explain why his lie about not being married to Sarah isn’t bad as it seems).
Again, there’s no condemnation leveled against either Abraham or Sarah for marrying each other, either here or elsewhere in the Bible. They both get “written up,” so to speak, for various things they do—Abraham lying about not being married to Sarah, not once but twice!, for instance. The truth is that there’s no “wrong” in the eyes of God about this particular level of incest at this time. Again, there’s no condemnation leveled against either Abraham or Sarah for marrying each other, either here or elsewhere in the Bible. They both get “written up,” so to speak, for various things they do—Abraham lying about not being married to Sarah, twice!, for instance. The truth is that there’s no “wrong” in the eyes of God about this particular level of incest at this time. Why this is so, I can’t tell you. It’s important to note that Abraham and Sarah were married long before Abraham was called by God to start a new way of life. According to the traditions of his original people (the Chaldeans) he was perfectly fine. When he leaves his family to follow God, God doesn’t break up the relationship he works with it. Similarly, when God saves us from his wrath and makes us his own, he doesn’t get rid of everything you are and everything you did in the past. Instead, God works with those things to create something new and better.
There is an interesting Wikipedia article on exactly what kinds of relations between various family members in the time of the Old Testament were considered incestuous, but it also doesn’t have a reason why. Unfortunately, the Bible is like this some times. You may have a law that is given to you, with or without examples, but without a reason why. Or you may not be given a specific law, but there are precepts given by example without being explicitly stated.
So, although Abraham and Sarah were in what we today would consider an incestuous relationship as married half-siblings, they aren’t condemned by God because there were no laws about it at that time. As I mentioned in my essay about Cain and his incestuous relationship, God condemning Abraham and Sarah for being married half-sibs would be like a cop giving you a ticket for parking in front of a hydrant that will be there but doesn’t yet exist.
Abraham & Sarah & Hagar
The next relationship the video points to is that of Abraham, his wife Sarah, and Sarah’s personal maid Hagar. What’s the story there?
Abraham and Sarah had been promised a son by God, but they were both getting old—genuinely old. By this point they’d been collecting social security for years. Sarah gets tired of waiting and tells her husband, “Hey, look, I’m too old to have kids, but you’re still going pretty strong. Why don’t you get my personal maid, Hagar, pregnant. Her kid will count as my kid, and he’ll be your heir.” This is not at all what God’s plan was. If it had been, God would have already told Abraham to do just that instead of promising him a son by his legal wife.
Honestly, the whole thing spirals out of control very quickly. Abraham should have told his wife that it was a bad idea, but no...he bowed to her wishes, only to have Sarah get mad at him when it blew up in their faces. Hagar did indeed get pregnant by Abraham, which made her smug. After all she, the lowly servant, was able to have a baby by the master of the house while his high falutin wife couldn’t. Any woman can tell you that this is a problem, especially in an age where being able to have children at all was seen as a sign of God’s favor (or disfavor). So Sarah’s mad, Hagar's full of herself, and Abraham’s caught in the middle.
Are you seeing any good here? Is there any glorification of this 3-person relationship? No, absolutely not. As a matter of fact, it only gets worse. Abraham tells Sarah to do what she wants with Hagar since she's her servant and she’s the one that’s pissed off. Sarah, in turn, treats the woman so badly that she runs off into the desert. The pregnant woman runs off into the desert! God sends her back to Sarah and Abraham, with a promise. Hagar eventually delivers her son. It continues to be a bad show between the three of them, though.
In God’s own time Sarah gets pregnant by Abraham and delivers her son. That basically pushes Hagar's kid out of the line of succession. When the wife has a kid, hers wins out over any other kids the husband may have had on the side. Them’s the rules. Eventually, Sarah’s throwing a party for her little guy where his older half-brother, aka Hagar's son, is caught teasing him. Sarah throws another fit in Abraham’s direction, and this time she puts Hagar and her son out in the desert. God once again takes care of Hagar and her son, making her another promise, but he doesn’t send her back to Sarah and Abraham. That relationship is broken off. (Genesis 21:9-21)
So what do we learn about one man, one wife, and his concubine, and what God thinks about it? That it’s a hot desert mess. The people in this story cooked it up and it was a stinking pile. It takes God to make everything right. Had the situation been either a good idea or cool with God, it wouldn’t have caused a pregnant woman to leave her job for the desert, nor would God have had to step in twice to make things work the right way.
So is this particular "marriage" that is found in the Bible biblical? No. Does it give us some principles about what a Biblical marriage should be? Yeah. It should be between you and your wife -- and God. Don't drag a third party into it when the going gets tough. Don't concoct your own schemes to make things happen. The third party will turn out to be a monkey-wrench, and your schemes will roll right over you. Trust God.
If 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.
What does “biblical mean?” Well it can mean “Of, relating to, or contained in the Bible” as defined in BrainyQuote.com. This, I think, is the meaning that most of us have in mind when we talk about something being “biblical”: that it reflects the character and precepts of God as set forth in the Bible.
Just because something is in the Bible (the first definition) doesn’t mean that it is in fact biblical (the second definition). The Bible doesn’t just show you what you’re supposed to do and then give examples of people who did wonderful things, the Bible shows us people in their real lives doing real things. Often real crazy, downright outrageous things. Because real people do real outrageous, crazy things. Just because someone lives their life in the heart of Crazy Town, however, doesn’t mean we make them an example of the new standard for living. Usually we use it as an object lesson of what not to do. Why? Because it’s an indication of a wild deviation from the standard, whatever that standard is. And we know they’re deviating from a standard because when there is no standard, there can be no deviation, and where there’s no possibility for deviation you can never have shocking, outrageous behavior.
And so I am compelled to make the distinction between the marriages in the Bible, as mentioned in the YouTube vid, versus what a biblical marriage actually is.
In my last essay I tackled the statement made in the video that a biblical marriage is one man, one woman, and incest with your murderous son. The reference is to Adam, Eve and Cain (and Abel, his murdered brother). The statement is incorrect in saying, or insinuating, that Eve and Cain were ever sexually involved. He actually gets kicked out of the area pretty quickly after killing Abel. There is, however, incest. At some point Cain marries a woman who must have been his sister or niece or great-niece. This isn’t a sin though. Gross? Yes. Sin? No.
Why? Because at that point there was no law against incestuous relationships, much to my own chagrin, but whatever. There would be a law, a very detailed, covers-all-the-points-including-things-you-didn’t-think-of law, but at the time when Cain marries his female relation, it doesn’t exist. As such he’s never condemned for it.
Which brings me to the next example in the video: Abraham and Sarah. In the video it claims that Abraham and Sarah are brother and sister. And they’re half right. They are half-siblings. Apparently Abraham and Sarah have the same father, but not the same mother (see Genesis 20:12 as Abraham tries to explain why his lie about not being married to Sarah isn’t bad as it seems).
Again, there’s no condemnation leveled against either Abraham or Sarah for marrying each other, either here or elsewhere in the Bible. They both get “written up,” so to speak, for various things they do—Abraham lying about not being married to Sarah, not once but twice!, for instance. The truth is that there’s no “wrong” in the eyes of God about this particular level of incest at this time. Again, there’s no condemnation leveled against either Abraham or Sarah for marrying each other, either here or elsewhere in the Bible. They both get “written up,” so to speak, for various things they do—Abraham lying about not being married to Sarah, twice!, for instance. The truth is that there’s no “wrong” in the eyes of God about this particular level of incest at this time. Why this is so, I can’t tell you. It’s important to note that Abraham and Sarah were married long before Abraham was called by God to start a new way of life. According to the traditions of his original people (the Chaldeans) he was perfectly fine. When he leaves his family to follow God, God doesn’t break up the relationship he works with it. Similarly, when God saves us from his wrath and makes us his own, he doesn’t get rid of everything you are and everything you did in the past. Instead, God works with those things to create something new and better.
There is an interesting Wikipedia article on exactly what kinds of relations between various family members in the time of the Old Testament were considered incestuous, but it also doesn’t have a reason why. Unfortunately, the Bible is like this some times. You may have a law that is given to you, with or without examples, but without a reason why. Or you may not be given a specific law, but there are precepts given by example without being explicitly stated.
So, although Abraham and Sarah were in what we today would consider an incestuous relationship as married half-siblings, they aren’t condemned by God because there were no laws about it at that time. As I mentioned in my essay about Cain and his incestuous relationship, God condemning Abraham and Sarah for being married half-sibs would be like a cop giving you a ticket for parking in front of a hydrant that will be there but doesn’t yet exist.
Abraham & Sarah & Hagar
The next relationship the video points to is that of Abraham, his wife Sarah, and Sarah’s personal maid Hagar. What’s the story there?
Abraham and Sarah had been promised a son by God, but they were both getting old—genuinely old. By this point they’d been collecting social security for years. Sarah gets tired of waiting and tells her husband, “Hey, look, I’m too old to have kids, but you’re still going pretty strong. Why don’t you get my personal maid, Hagar, pregnant. Her kid will count as my kid, and he’ll be your heir.” This is not at all what God’s plan was. If it had been, God would have already told Abraham to do just that instead of promising him a son by his legal wife.
Honestly, the whole thing spirals out of control very quickly. Abraham should have told his wife that it was a bad idea, but no...he bowed to her wishes, only to have Sarah get mad at him when it blew up in their faces. Hagar did indeed get pregnant by Abraham, which made her smug. After all she, the lowly servant, was able to have a baby by the master of the house while his high falutin wife couldn’t. Any woman can tell you that this is a problem, especially in an age where being able to have children at all was seen as a sign of God’s favor (or disfavor). So Sarah’s mad, Hagar's full of herself, and Abraham’s caught in the middle.
Are you seeing any good here? Is there any glorification of this 3-person relationship? No, absolutely not. As a matter of fact, it only gets worse. Abraham tells Sarah to do what she wants with Hagar since she's her servant and she’s the one that’s pissed off. Sarah, in turn, treats the woman so badly that she runs off into the desert. The pregnant woman runs off into the desert! God sends her back to Sarah and Abraham, with a promise. Hagar eventually delivers her son. It continues to be a bad show between the three of them, though.
In God’s own time Sarah gets pregnant by Abraham and delivers her son. That basically pushes Hagar's kid out of the line of succession. When the wife has a kid, hers wins out over any other kids the husband may have had on the side. Them’s the rules. Eventually, Sarah’s throwing a party for her little guy where his older half-brother, aka Hagar's son, is caught teasing him. Sarah throws another fit in Abraham’s direction, and this time she puts Hagar and her son out in the desert. God once again takes care of Hagar and her son, making her another promise, but he doesn’t send her back to Sarah and Abraham. That relationship is broken off. (Genesis 21:9-21)
So what do we learn about one man, one wife, and his concubine, and what God thinks about it? That it’s a hot desert mess. The people in this story cooked it up and it was a stinking pile. It takes God to make everything right. Had the situation been either a good idea or cool with God, it wouldn’t have caused a pregnant woman to leave her job for the desert, nor would God have had to step in twice to make things work the right way.
So is this particular "marriage" that is found in the Bible biblical? No. Does it give us some principles about what a Biblical marriage should be? Yeah. It should be between you and your wife -- and God. Don't drag a third party into it when the going gets tough. Don't concoct your own schemes to make things happen. The third party will turn out to be a monkey-wrench, and your schemes will roll right over you. Trust God.