Marriage and the Family
Thru Hebrew Eyes
Much of the distorted teaching about marriage and the family within the Church reveals little knowledge of biblical foundations. A genuinely Christian understanding of this topic, however, must be securely anchored upon the bedrock of the Hebrew Scriptures. Thus, we shall begin our study with the book of Genesis. This introductory book of the Torah affirms the dignity and purity of the marriage relationship in several distinctive ways.
The Goodness of Marriage and Sex
First, marriage and sex are from God and are therefore good. Our ability to establish a relationship with one of the opposite sex is directly tied to our creation in the image of God: "So God created man in his own image . . . male and female he created them" (Gen. 1:27). Everything that God made was "very good" (1:31; cf. 1 Tim. 4:4). Hebrew wisdom literature builds on this foundation of Moses by teaching that "He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord" (Prov. 18:22). But human beings distorted marriage, this gracious gift given by the Creator and pronounced "good," by sin. Maleness and femaleness are at the heart of human relationships; they are good gifts from a loving God. Building upon the Hebrew Scriptures, the rabbis affirmed the goodness of marriage by insisting that a man should first take a wife for himself and then apply himself to the study of Torah. Furthermore, the rabbis decreed that if wedding and funeral processions happened to meet at an intersection simultaneously, the wedding party was to proceed first.
1 In the light of the goodness of marriage in the history of Jewish tradition, it is not surprising that biblical Hebrew has no word for "bachelor."The Blessing of Children
Second, children are a gift from God and are an expression of his blessing. Of the 613 commandments found in the Law of Moses, the first is to "be fruitful and increase in number" (Gen. 1:28). The psalmist celebrates the goodness of a man’s family by singing, "Sons are a heritage from the Lord" (Ps. 127:3), and again, "Your sons will be like olive shoots around your table. Thus is the man blessed who fears the Lord" (Ps. 128:3b-4). By contrast, childless marriages brought hardship and discouragement (Gen. 30:1-2; 1 Sam. 1:1-20).
Contrary to a certain teaching within the Church, the first sin was not sexual intercourse. As David Hubbard has pointed out, "The Fall did not create passion; it only perverted it. In the Creation story, the man is drawn to the woman from the minute he sees her. They are naked and not ashamed."
2 In God’s eyes, sex is neither sin nor salvation. But in the context of marriage, God pronounces it a blessed gift because it is tied to the birth of children, an occasion for rejoicing (see 1 Sam. 2:1-10 and Luke 1).Companionship: "Leaving and Cleaving"
Third, the need for companionship is fulfilled by the God-ordained relationship of marriage. Genesis 2:18 states, "It is not good for the man to be alone." God created man and woman as social beings. He never intended for a person to be independent, cut off from the fulfilling relationship of being a companion to one of the opposite sex. Thus, "a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh" (Gen. 2:24). Adam and Eve had become partners for life. Commenting on companionship, the great medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides observes that the marriage partnership grows from that of companions for help to companions for burdens, and is brought to its crowning height when the partners become companions for destiny.
3In a real sense, the Song of Songs is a dramatic commentary on what Moses taught about marriage. Throughout the Song, the mutuality, reciprocity, and partnership of the relationship between the lovers is emphasized as the dialogue is initiated first by one and then the other. Symbolic of this relationship is the Hebrew expression Dodi li va-ani lo, or, "My lover is mine and I am his" (Song of Songs 2:16). This verse is frequently inscribed inside wedding rings of Jewish couples to show their togetherness and commitment to make marriage work.Thus, according to the Bible, the essence of marriage is togetherness; the reversal of marriage is separation (divorce). Marriage is symbolically described as being "glued" or "yoked" together (like two oxen; Matt. 19:5-6). For the person who is still single, however, this need for companionship must be satisfied through other fulfilling and creative relationships by which God’s grace can be manifested. These may include building friendships or working closely with youth, adults, or the elderly. Our point is that through community one finds fulfillment.
Matched to One Another
Fourth, through marriage one learns the uniqueness of maleness and femaleness by the one being matched to the other. Shakespeare, whose writings contain hundreds of biblical allusions, once wrote, "God, the best maker of all marriages, combine your hearts in one" (Henry V, act 5, scene 2). Jewish tradition teaches that marriage is a union whereby two people are matched by their Creator so as to form a unique oneness.
4 Accordingly, one of the vital functions of marriage is to complement (not to compete with) one’s spouse. Genesis 2:18, 20 state that the woman is created to be ezer kenegdo. R. David Freedman has pointed out that the word ezer, often translated "helper," actually means "power" (or "strength"), as demonstrated by its use elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. Furthermore, he takes kenegdo, an expression rendered "suitable for him" (NIV), as meaning one "equal to him," a rendering based on later Mishnaic Hebrew. Thus, when God says he will make a "helper suitable for him [i.e., the man]," he likely means that woman is a power equal to a man; she is his match; she corresponds to him in every way.5 Indeed, "woman was not intended to be merely man’s helper. She was to be instead his partner."6 Man and woman are symbolically matched to one another in a mutually dependent relationship—hence the expression "one flesh" (Gen. 2:24).Rabbinic literature describes God as the supreme Matchmaker, for whom the making of a successful match is as hard as the parting of the Red Sea (Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 2a). Similarly, in Peter Shaffer’s remarkable play Amadeus, Mozart observes to Salieri, "Making music is easy; marriage is hard." If marriage is one of the richest experiences, it is likewise one of the riskiest. It takes hard work and the encouragement of the community to maintain a successful match.
Love after Marriage
Finally, love comes after marriage, not simply before. Today, people living in the Western world are supposed to marry for love. Considerable emphasis is placed on romance and human emotion. The challenge each new couple always faces is how to mold this premarital feeling of romance into mature love.
For Hebrew men and women of Bible times, living in an Eastern society gave them a different perspective on love. To begin with, love was more a commitment than a feeling. It was seen foremost as a pledge rather than an emotional high. It was a person’s good word to stick with someone, to make that relationship work; it was not merely a warm sensation inside.
For centuries, Jewish people have pointed to one particular verse to illustrate the need for love to develop and deepen after marriage. The passage is Genesis 24:67: "Isaac brought her [Rebekah] into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he married Rebekah. So she became his wife, and he loved her." In a world of arranged marriages, it was not uncommon for each partner to see each other for the first time on their wedding day. This was the case of Rebekah and Isaac. The text above says that after she became his wife, "he loved her." In short, for the Hebrew patriarchs, love came after marriage; it was not a matter of falling in love and then marrying.
Thus, in the biblical world of the ancient Near East, couples were expected to grow to love each other after marriage. In the modern West, however, the emphasis has been more on marrying the person that you love rather than learning to love the one that you marry. Though both dimensions of love are important for modern Christian marriage, there remains a decisive lack of emphasis in Christian preaching, teaching, and literature about the need for love to blossom after the marriage ceremony.
Psychologist and pastor Walter Trobisch has effectively summed up the difference between Eastern and Western marriage in his best-selling work, I Loved a Girl. In stressing the need for love to come after marriage, not simply before, he cites an Easterner who once said to a European, "We put cold soup on the fire, and it becomes slowly warm. You put hot soup into a cold plate, and it becomes slowly cold."
7 It is this very emphasis on the need for love to grow warmer and to mature after the couple are joined that undergirds the biblical Hebraic concept of marriage.1For the above rabbinic material see Roland B. Gittelsohn, My Beloved is Mine: Judaism and Marriage (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1969), p. 178.
2David Hubbard, "Old Testament Light on the Meaning of Marriage," Theology News and Notes (Pasadena, CA: Fuller Theological Seminary, March, 1969), p. 6.
3See Maurice Lamm, The Jewish Way in Love and Marriage (New York: Harpe & Row, 1980), p. 163.
4See I. Abrahams, "Marriages Are Made in Heaven," Jewish Quarterly Review 2 (1890): 172-77
5R. David Freedman, "Woman, a Power Equal to Man," Biblical Archaeology Review 9 (1983): 56-58. See also Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Hard Sayings of the Old Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), pp. 23-26.
6R. David Freedman. "Woman, a Power Equal to Man," p. 58.
7Walter Trobisch, I Loved a Girl (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 93.
This article is an excerpt from Our Father Abraham, Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith. Used with the permission of the author.
