Pastor's Perspective

What's a marriage supposed to look like?  With so many questioning whether same sex couples should be allowed to marry, many are turning to the Scriptures to see if they can shed any light on what qualifies as "marriage."


If you're looking for a single answer I can tell you right now to forget it.  The Bible portrays many examples of marriage and family customs, all of which, apparently, were OK with God.  You might think we'd start with Adam and Eve but we can't.  The word 'marriage' is never applied to Adam and Eve.  As a social convention, marriage doesn't make any sense --given that there was no society around them.


Let's start with Abraham's time (still pre-history).  People were encouraged / required to marry within their own tribe.  How they defined 'tribe' is unknown to me.  How closely were these people related?  Sounds dicey.  


Later on we see polygamy with multiple wives or with concubines (child-bearing slaves).  Then there was the custom of "Levirite marriage," whereby a man marries his late brother's widow (probably as a second wife) in order that the widow bear children considered heirs to the late first husband, even though fathered by the brother.  


King David is supposed to have had 1,000 wives -- hundreds of which were married in order to form political alliances.  David's son Solomon only had a few hundred wives.


The practice of polygamy faded after the Israelites landed in the Holy Land.  As a form of tribal survival it was more suited to Israel's days of wandering than to a more stable, landed society.


Throughout Biblical times, and up to the 19th century, families tended to be extended families.  Odd aunts, uncles, cousins, orphaned 3rd cousins twice removed, random individuals picked up along the way -- all could be absorbed into one's family unit.  The first and only time that the nuclear family (mom, dad, and their offspring) that we are so accustomed to as our model of family existed, was in post-WWII North America.  It was the only time that economics of a society could support the nuclear family on a wide scale.  Part of that economic picture is also the industrialization of society, which encouraged people to leave the family farm and form their own nuclear families elsewhere.


In short, throughout the Bible we see marriage and the family shaped by economics.  And until Jesus came along, women and children were extremely vulnerable in all these models.


So does the Bible give us any useful guidelines for how we should understand marriage and family in our time?  Not as such.  But we are inheritors of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, who calls us to live in peace, to love, to practice justice, to generously care for the most vulnerable in our society, and  to grant dignity to all.  It is not in the light of the Bible, but in the light of the GOSPEL that we should decide how to order our society.