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tinpraIf you haven’t seen my previous postings, I’m writing a series of essays in response to a YouTube video that supposedly tells the dirty, hitherto unknown, truth about Biblical marriages—a truth that even Christians don’t know. About fifteen examples of “Biblical” marriages are given during the four minute vid, each more outrageously unbelievable than the last.
The thing is, though, that very few of the examples given are actual Biblical marriages. So with that in mind, I’m examining the examples of so-called “biblical” marriages (or “godly” marriages since that’s what we all mean when we use the word biblical) given in the YouTube video to show how they are, in fact, rarely biblical in nature. Unfortunately, of the examples given, the marriages that are biblical are also kinda messed up. It’s not the institution of marriage that’s at fault in these relationships, but the way the marriages are lived.
To date I’ve written about “one man, one woman, and the son she seduces after he’s killed his only brother” (Adam, Eve and Cain), “one man and his sister” (Abraham and Sarah), “one man, his sister and the help” (Abraham, Sarah and Hagar)1, “one man and the table salt” (Lot and his wife), and “one man, [and] a gal who’s kidnapped and raped right after her brother, father, mother and slutty sister have been slaughtered” (the tribe of Benjamin and 400+ virgins).
It’s been a wild and crazy ride.
This essay will look at three related “biblical marriages” all from men in the same family, with nearly similar issues: they loooooved the ladies. Or as the YouTube video puts it, marriage is between “one man, one woman, another woman, yet another woman, a few more woman, an adulterer and a pack of raped whores!”, and also between “one man, and frankly enough women to make a Mormon compound seem quaintly understaffed.”
Who and what are the video talking about? The first quote is referencing King David, his wives and concubines, as well as his rebellious son Absalom who raped his father’s concubines. The second quote references King Solomon (David’s younger son) and his 700 wives and 300 concubines.
First things first: What’s a concubine? In ancient Israel, a concubine was a little lower than a wife, although she had all the rights and privileges of a wife. Her wifely status could have been lower because she came from a much lower social status than her husband and had no dowry. A concubine in ancient Israel wasn’t a slave. You couldn’t give her back or sell her. If you wanted a divorce, you had to go about it the same way you would for a wife. It was common practice at the time to have a wife and a concubine, but, like a wife, a man was only supposed to have one or the other. In any story where the main characters are part of a multi-wife household, there’s trouble with all of the relationships to varying degrees. All of them. I’ve already discussed the trouble with Abraham, his wife Sarah and her servant/his concubine Hagar. Lest you think they’re the only ones, see also Hannah, Peninnah and their husband Elkanah, as well as the more famous rivalry between sisters Leah and Rachel and their husband Jacob.
What’s more pertinent to this essay is a little verse found in Deuteronomy 17:14-17, written by Moses loooong before Israel had a ruling monarch. It specifically forbade their future-king to have multiple wives (and, remember, concubines count as wives even though they don’t have the same status). And just so the king couldn’t claim not to know what his instructions were, above and beyond this one, the very next verse declares that he is to write out the book of the law with his own hand and keep it close to him. He was supposed to study it and meditate on it, and use it to help him remember to have a healthy reverential fear (awe) of God.
Even if David, the first of our three kings, hadn’t done those things, David had two prophets of God as part of his royal court during his reign: Samuel and Nathan. A prophet is a person who speaks for God to the people. (While a priest goes to God on behalf of the people.) Neither of the two men were known for being spiritual slackers. Samuel had anointed Israel’s first king, Saul, and when he turned out to be more concerned with what people thought of him than what God told him to do it was still Samuel that God sent to anoint David. Before that, Samuel had been the one to tell his mentor that God was displeased with him and his sons, and that their entire line would be wiped out for their sin. After Samuel had died, it was Nathan that went before David and called him out on both his adulterous relationship with another man’s wife, and then having the poor guy killed. Yeah, no slackers there.
(It’s also important to note that David’s sin with Bathsheba (Solomon’s mom) starts this whole mess. He had an affair with another man’s wife, got her pregnant, tried to trick the man into thinking the baby was his, killed him when that didn’t work, then married her. Does any of that sound godly to you? As part of his punishment, God declared that violence would always plague his family, and all the women he loved so much would be taken from him publicly.)
So without needing to go any further we have the answer to our question of whether or not any of these “marriages” are biblical (godly) marriages.
No, heck no.
What’s a biblical or godly marriage? It’s one man and one woman leaving their parents, joining together to become one new entity, and living according to godly standards. That’s a biblical marriage. Nothing more and nothing less. That’s the standard all of these marriages have to live up to, and honestly that’s more than enough work on its own.
David fails at this so hard. So hard. His first wife, who was the daughter of the previous king and his best friend’s sister, should have been his only wife—but as I Chronicles 3:1-9 illustrates that she wasn’t. (She’s not listed here because she never had any children, and this is specifically a list of David’s kids.) David married these women for a variety of reasons. Some because they impressed him, some for political reasons, and some out of pure lust.
Remember my earlier example of the relationship between Abraham, Sarah and Hagar and how that was just a hot mess from start to finish? Similarly, David having multiple wives contributed to the downfall of his family. He was so busy with the kingdom, with making political marriages, etc., that he neglected the oversight of his sprawling family. Which leads us to Absalom raping David’s concubines...and later Solomon, younger son and brother, becoming king, all part of God’s judgment on David for stealing another man’s wife when he had plenty of his own.
When Absalom rapes his father’s concubines (who are essentially David’s wives) in public, he’s wrong on many levels. First and foremost: he’s raping these women! We could start and end there, quite honestly, but there’s a lot more going on. By raping David’s concubines in public, where he could be seen, Absalom is showing the nation that he is now king of Israel, and not his father. If you were a conquering force in the Ancient East, one way you established your kingdom was by wiping out the previous monarch’s entire family, from the king to the babies, and/or by taking his wife/wives for your own.
And why was Absalom taking over his father’s kingdom the hard way, instead of waiting to inherit it? It was the culmination of a revenge plot against his father and the half-brother, Amnon—Amnon who had raped Absalom’s full-blood sister, Tamar .
Amnon fancied himself in love with his half-sister Tamar, but instead of asking their father David if he could marry her (which would have been incestuous but not an atypical practice in the general culture) he hatched a plot to rape her. He was wrong to want his half-sister in the first place, and wronger still for acting on his desire, particularly by raping her. As you can imagine, Tamar was devastated, and her full-blood brother Absalom was pissed as a kicked hornet. When David, the king and their father, found out what Amnon did he felt bad about it. And that was it.
If you were Absalom and your beloved little sister was raped by a half-sib, and your Very Important Dad didn’t do anything about it, how would you feel?
So Absalom’s not wrong in wanting justice for sister. Not at all. But Absalom took it way, way, waaaaaaaaaaaay too far. By the time all was said and done, Absalom had not only hatched a plot to kill Amnon who’s wrecked his sister’s life (their sister), but also steal his father’s kingdom.
Absalom waited two years before acting on his revenge plot with Amnon, then he fled to a nearby kingdom. While he was in hiding out from his father’s possible wrath (non-existent, but he didn’t know that), Absalom started his plan to steal David’s kingdom by first stealing the heart of the people. Read the story. It’s truly fascinating and reads like televised family drama. Seriously, someone could televise the life story of David and his family with very few modifications to the original Biblical story with great success. The man’s life ran the full gamut.
At some point it turned into full on war between Absalom and his father. Despite that David loved, loved, loved Absalom. With his whole heart he loved Absalom, and so instead of fighting him like a usurper, David fled from him taking most of the household and his wives with him. He left behind a skeleton staff and his concubines to take care of the house, probably presuming that his son wouldn’t hurt them.
Instead David has left them defenseless. Absalom raped the women in public as a symbol of his dominance over his father, and his rulership—and probably as a way of further needling his dad. Now, in all honesty, this scene isn’t specifically described as rape in the Bible, but if you’re married to one man and his son runs him out with an army, then that son comes and decides he wants to have sex with you... I’m going to say that the women were coerced, or, at the very least, their hands were tied.
So...no biblical marriage here. No marriages at all!
In case we weren’t sure that none of this was godly, Absalom ends up being killed when the long, gorgeous hair he was so proud of got caught in a tree. Seeing him all tangled up, David’s chief advisory killed him with spears. The kingdom he’d stolen and the little sister he’d tried to protect? Gone and, possibly, unprotected. David wept bitter tears over his death. (But not the rape of his daughter! I’m just sayin’...)
Last but not least, especially not in numbers, is the example of Solomon’s Biblical marriage(s). The video puts it as being between “one man, and frankly enough women to make a Mormon compound seem quaintly understaffed.”
However, after all that I’ve already written I think it’s a moot point to say that Solomon’s many marriages, both to the high-born women who were called wives and the lower-born women who were called concubines, went against God’s law. He was in sin and he was wrong. His marriages were in the Bible, but they weren’t of God. How do we know? Because God got mad.
Solomon was the prime example of the consequences of the Mosiac law coming to fruition. Laws that had been given out hundreds of years before Solomon was born. Near the end of his life, the Bible records that Solomon was led away from God by his wives and trying to appease their various religious views, some of which included child sacrifice. Even Solomon himself at one point in his life said in Ecclesiastes that chasing after pleasures (and he meant all kinds, not just physical) as a way of life is vanity. Like his father before him, Solomon’s disobedient chasing after women led to trouble not only for him but for his children. His son, Reheboam, would cause the nation of Israel to be split in two—from which it would never recover.
So were there any biblical marriages here, of the godly sort? None that we could see. The law stated quite clearly to only have one wife, especially if you were the king. King David had many wives, one of whom he stole from a good man who only had one causing unending strife to come to his family. His son Absolom slept with his father’s lesser wives as part of laying claim to the kingdom and eventually lost his life. His younger son Solomon followed in his father’s footsteps where it concerned having many (many) wives, but proved the law right by also turning away from the God that had put him in power in the first place. These examples were all found in the Bible, but not one of them is godly.
Next up: Sheshan, his daughter and his servant. We’ll see...
1 - "Abraham and Sarah" and "Abraham, Sarah and Hagar" are covered in the same essay, hence the same link.
The thing is, though, that very few of the examples given are actual Biblical marriages. So with that in mind, I’m examining the examples of so-called “biblical” marriages (or “godly” marriages since that’s what we all mean when we use the word biblical) given in the YouTube video to show how they are, in fact, rarely biblical in nature. Unfortunately, of the examples given, the marriages that are biblical are also kinda messed up. It’s not the institution of marriage that’s at fault in these relationships, but the way the marriages are lived.
To date I’ve written about “one man, one woman, and the son she seduces after he’s killed his only brother” (Adam, Eve and Cain), “one man and his sister” (Abraham and Sarah), “one man, his sister and the help” (Abraham, Sarah and Hagar)1, “one man and the table salt” (Lot and his wife), and “one man, [and] a gal who’s kidnapped and raped right after her brother, father, mother and slutty sister have been slaughtered” (the tribe of Benjamin and 400+ virgins).
It’s been a wild and crazy ride.
This essay will look at three related “biblical marriages” all from men in the same family, with nearly similar issues: they loooooved the ladies. Or as the YouTube video puts it, marriage is between “one man, one woman, another woman, yet another woman, a few more woman, an adulterer and a pack of raped whores!”, and also between “one man, and frankly enough women to make a Mormon compound seem quaintly understaffed.”
Who and what are the video talking about? The first quote is referencing King David, his wives and concubines, as well as his rebellious son Absalom who raped his father’s concubines. The second quote references King Solomon (David’s younger son) and his 700 wives and 300 concubines.
First things first: What’s a concubine? In ancient Israel, a concubine was a little lower than a wife, although she had all the rights and privileges of a wife. Her wifely status could have been lower because she came from a much lower social status than her husband and had no dowry. A concubine in ancient Israel wasn’t a slave. You couldn’t give her back or sell her. If you wanted a divorce, you had to go about it the same way you would for a wife. It was common practice at the time to have a wife and a concubine, but, like a wife, a man was only supposed to have one or the other. In any story where the main characters are part of a multi-wife household, there’s trouble with all of the relationships to varying degrees. All of them. I’ve already discussed the trouble with Abraham, his wife Sarah and her servant/his concubine Hagar. Lest you think they’re the only ones, see also Hannah, Peninnah and their husband Elkanah, as well as the more famous rivalry between sisters Leah and Rachel and their husband Jacob.
What’s more pertinent to this essay is a little verse found in Deuteronomy 17:14-17, written by Moses loooong before Israel had a ruling monarch. It specifically forbade their future-king to have multiple wives (and, remember, concubines count as wives even though they don’t have the same status). And just so the king couldn’t claim not to know what his instructions were, above and beyond this one, the very next verse declares that he is to write out the book of the law with his own hand and keep it close to him. He was supposed to study it and meditate on it, and use it to help him remember to have a healthy reverential fear (awe) of God.
Even if David, the first of our three kings, hadn’t done those things, David had two prophets of God as part of his royal court during his reign: Samuel and Nathan. A prophet is a person who speaks for God to the people. (While a priest goes to God on behalf of the people.) Neither of the two men were known for being spiritual slackers. Samuel had anointed Israel’s first king, Saul, and when he turned out to be more concerned with what people thought of him than what God told him to do it was still Samuel that God sent to anoint David. Before that, Samuel had been the one to tell his mentor that God was displeased with him and his sons, and that their entire line would be wiped out for their sin. After Samuel had died, it was Nathan that went before David and called him out on both his adulterous relationship with another man’s wife, and then having the poor guy killed. Yeah, no slackers there.
(It’s also important to note that David’s sin with Bathsheba (Solomon’s mom) starts this whole mess. He had an affair with another man’s wife, got her pregnant, tried to trick the man into thinking the baby was his, killed him when that didn’t work, then married her. Does any of that sound godly to you? As part of his punishment, God declared that violence would always plague his family, and all the women he loved so much would be taken from him publicly.)
So without needing to go any further we have the answer to our question of whether or not any of these “marriages” are biblical (godly) marriages.
No, heck no.
What’s a biblical or godly marriage? It’s one man and one woman leaving their parents, joining together to become one new entity, and living according to godly standards. That’s a biblical marriage. Nothing more and nothing less. That’s the standard all of these marriages have to live up to, and honestly that’s more than enough work on its own.
David fails at this so hard. So hard. His first wife, who was the daughter of the previous king and his best friend’s sister, should have been his only wife—but as I Chronicles 3:1-9 illustrates that she wasn’t. (She’s not listed here because she never had any children, and this is specifically a list of David’s kids.) David married these women for a variety of reasons. Some because they impressed him, some for political reasons, and some out of pure lust.
Remember my earlier example of the relationship between Abraham, Sarah and Hagar and how that was just a hot mess from start to finish? Similarly, David having multiple wives contributed to the downfall of his family. He was so busy with the kingdom, with making political marriages, etc., that he neglected the oversight of his sprawling family. Which leads us to Absalom raping David’s concubines...and later Solomon, younger son and brother, becoming king, all part of God’s judgment on David for stealing another man’s wife when he had plenty of his own.
When Absalom rapes his father’s concubines (who are essentially David’s wives) in public, he’s wrong on many levels. First and foremost: he’s raping these women! We could start and end there, quite honestly, but there’s a lot more going on. By raping David’s concubines in public, where he could be seen, Absalom is showing the nation that he is now king of Israel, and not his father. If you were a conquering force in the Ancient East, one way you established your kingdom was by wiping out the previous monarch’s entire family, from the king to the babies, and/or by taking his wife/wives for your own.
And why was Absalom taking over his father’s kingdom the hard way, instead of waiting to inherit it? It was the culmination of a revenge plot against his father and the half-brother, Amnon—Amnon who had raped Absalom’s full-blood sister, Tamar .
Amnon fancied himself in love with his half-sister Tamar, but instead of asking their father David if he could marry her (which would have been incestuous but not an atypical practice in the general culture) he hatched a plot to rape her. He was wrong to want his half-sister in the first place, and wronger still for acting on his desire, particularly by raping her. As you can imagine, Tamar was devastated, and her full-blood brother Absalom was pissed as a kicked hornet. When David, the king and their father, found out what Amnon did he felt bad about it. And that was it.
If you were Absalom and your beloved little sister was raped by a half-sib, and your Very Important Dad didn’t do anything about it, how would you feel?
So Absalom’s not wrong in wanting justice for sister. Not at all. But Absalom took it way, way, waaaaaaaaaaaay too far. By the time all was said and done, Absalom had not only hatched a plot to kill Amnon who’s wrecked his sister’s life (their sister), but also steal his father’s kingdom.
Absalom waited two years before acting on his revenge plot with Amnon, then he fled to a nearby kingdom. While he was in hiding out from his father’s possible wrath (non-existent, but he didn’t know that), Absalom started his plan to steal David’s kingdom by first stealing the heart of the people. Read the story. It’s truly fascinating and reads like televised family drama. Seriously, someone could televise the life story of David and his family with very few modifications to the original Biblical story with great success. The man’s life ran the full gamut.
At some point it turned into full on war between Absalom and his father. Despite that David loved, loved, loved Absalom. With his whole heart he loved Absalom, and so instead of fighting him like a usurper, David fled from him taking most of the household and his wives with him. He left behind a skeleton staff and his concubines to take care of the house, probably presuming that his son wouldn’t hurt them.
Instead David has left them defenseless. Absalom raped the women in public as a symbol of his dominance over his father, and his rulership—and probably as a way of further needling his dad. Now, in all honesty, this scene isn’t specifically described as rape in the Bible, but if you’re married to one man and his son runs him out with an army, then that son comes and decides he wants to have sex with you... I’m going to say that the women were coerced, or, at the very least, their hands were tied.
So...no biblical marriage here. No marriages at all!
In case we weren’t sure that none of this was godly, Absalom ends up being killed when the long, gorgeous hair he was so proud of got caught in a tree. Seeing him all tangled up, David’s chief advisory killed him with spears. The kingdom he’d stolen and the little sister he’d tried to protect? Gone and, possibly, unprotected. David wept bitter tears over his death. (But not the rape of his daughter! I’m just sayin’...)
Last but not least, especially not in numbers, is the example of Solomon’s Biblical marriage(s). The video puts it as being between “one man, and frankly enough women to make a Mormon compound seem quaintly understaffed.”
However, after all that I’ve already written I think it’s a moot point to say that Solomon’s many marriages, both to the high-born women who were called wives and the lower-born women who were called concubines, went against God’s law. He was in sin and he was wrong. His marriages were in the Bible, but they weren’t of God. How do we know? Because God got mad.
Solomon was the prime example of the consequences of the Mosiac law coming to fruition. Laws that had been given out hundreds of years before Solomon was born. Near the end of his life, the Bible records that Solomon was led away from God by his wives and trying to appease their various religious views, some of which included child sacrifice. Even Solomon himself at one point in his life said in Ecclesiastes that chasing after pleasures (and he meant all kinds, not just physical) as a way of life is vanity. Like his father before him, Solomon’s disobedient chasing after women led to trouble not only for him but for his children. His son, Reheboam, would cause the nation of Israel to be split in two—from which it would never recover.
So were there any biblical marriages here, of the godly sort? None that we could see. The law stated quite clearly to only have one wife, especially if you were the king. King David had many wives, one of whom he stole from a good man who only had one causing unending strife to come to his family. His son Absolom slept with his father’s lesser wives as part of laying claim to the kingdom and eventually lost his life. His younger son Solomon followed in his father’s footsteps where it concerned having many (many) wives, but proved the law right by also turning away from the God that had put him in power in the first place. These examples were all found in the Bible, but not one of them is godly.
Next up: Sheshan, his daughter and his servant. We’ll see...
1 - "Abraham and Sarah" and "Abraham, Sarah and Hagar" are covered in the same essay, hence the same link.