JACOB AND SONS

A Biblical Understanding of Marriage

On Monday evening the Old Testament lesson at evening prayer was from Genesis, chapters 29 and 30, giving the story of Jacob and his children. Now we all know that Jacob has twelve sons, the progenitors of the twelve tribes of Israel (“Jacob, Jacob and sons” as Tim Rice had it), but the details just made me sit there open-mouthed as I read them. To remind you, this is how it was. Jacob’s first four sons are with Leah, the unattractive wife, whom he doesn’t love, but was forced to marry by his father-in-law. Then Rachel, the pretty wife, whom he does love, but who is apparently infertile, gets jealous and encourages Jacob to sleep with her maid Bilhah, who has the next two sons. At that, Leah gets in on the act and gives Jacob her maid Zilpah as well, with whom he has the next two sons. After that comes the strangest incident, when Reuben (the oldest son) picks some mandrake plants and brings them home to his mother, Leah, but Rachel wants some of them, and sells Leah a night with Jacob for some mandrakes, at which Leah conceives again, and again. After her sixth son, Leah also has a daughter, Dinah (who I’d forgotten completely). Then, finally, Rachel has her own son, which is Joseph. That was the end of Monday’s reading. Benjamin, who is Rachel’s second son, is eventually born five chapters later.

This is the story of one of the greatest of the patriarchs, one of the foundation myths of the people of Israel, and there is not the slightest suggestion that there is anything unethical or even problematic about what Jacob does. That, of course, is because polygamy is actually normative in the Old Testament, and concubinage is perfectly acceptable. This is a biblical understanding of marriage; fair enough, the eighth century prophets develop a high doctrine of marriage which emphasizes fidelity rather than fertility, but polygamy remains the norm, a fact that the rabbis recognized by giving a dispensation for monogamy in Judaism.  This makes me smile when other Christians announce to the world that they hold a biblical view of marriage, which turns out to be a conventional western view.

The fact of the matter is that marriage is a civil affair; that’s how scripture treats it, and how the Church treated it for the first thousand years. Christians routinely wanted their marriages to be blessed, and so that’s what happened, but the liturgical evidence is clear that other forms of partnership were blessed as well. The notion of marriage as a sacrament is, of course, very late to develop, and in the high middle ages the consecration of virgins was much more likely to be numbered as a sacrament; it is only with Thomas Aquinas that the classic list of seven sacraments is achieved, with marriage as one of them.

The Book of Common Prayer described marriage as “instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency”, but that is not what the Church of England teaches nowadays. The Common Worship marriage service (like its ASB predecessor) pointedly does not describe marriage as instituted by God; instead, it is described as “a gift of God in creation” (which means what, exactly?). This is important to see: the Church of England does not teach that God instituted marriage. Yes, we must recognise that the Prayer Book still has some standing, but the Prayer Book cannot be construed as meaning that literally or historically, because we have no belief in a literal or historical “time of man’s innocency”, rather the Prayer Book expresses a myth.  The seventeenth century view, in the Book of Common Prayer, is all of a piece with the reasoning of Sir Robert Filmer in his “Patriarcha” that since God had given men dominion over women, and fathers dominion over their families, then kings had the divine right to rule their people. Having said that, though, I am not entirely sure how literally all seventeenth century people took this. I am quite sure that Filmer and the Prayer Book’s authors are speaking mythologically, but they perhaps mean it literally as well. Filmer was an exact contemporary of Archbishop James Ussher, who famously used the Bible to work out the date of creation, which is today taken as the literal truth by Christian fundamentalists who disparage science, but Filmer and Ussher were trying to be scientific by their own lights; they were trying to bring a “modern” scientific approach to the best evidence that they had. Filmer was trying to give an anthropological basis for his political theory, and the authors of the Prayer Book likewise for their doctrine of marriage, while Ussher sought a rational universal history. That the Old Testament accounts were mythological, that is symbolic stories embodying important moral truths, would surely have been obvious to the seventeenth century authors, but I suspect they would have thought them true in a merely literal sense as well, and most likely would not have been clear about the distinction. Many of our problems today come from people who refuse to see a mythological dimension and read sacred texts only in a reductively literal way.

I don’t mean to expose to ridicule my fellow-Christians who regard their faith as “biblical”, but I would hope that they might read the Bible a little more intelligently, and perhaps not use it as a weapon to close down debate, particularly on a subject, like marriage, which is fundamentally societal rather than theological.

RIP Steve Hewlett

I was not surprised to hear on Monday’s PM programme that Steve Hewlett had died that morning, but it still made me cry. As I said last time, do listen to the interviews, and pray for him and his family.