Biblical

It starts in Deuteronomy 22:13 . Suppose a man marries a woman but after going into her. And this is a euphemism for consummation, which is itself a euphemism for sexual intercourse.

It’s not much of a euphemism. It’s pretty—it’s pretty strange.

It’s pretty graphic. Yeah.

Innuendos are pretty hard is what I’m saying.

That’s another euphemism. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we’re increasing public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and we are combating the spread of misinformation about the same. How go things today, Dan?

Ah, things are going rocking and rolling. Having a good time. I’m—I’m looking forward to today’s show because we’re going to be talking about something that is becoming oddly a hot, hot-button issue.

In—in our—in these United States and—and elsewhere, I suppose. But—but it doesn’t feel like it should be cropping up right now, but it kind of is. It’s love and marriage today. And we’re going to be talking about marriage. And then also in the latter half of the show, we’ll do a—a Chapter and Verse about divorce. So in and out of marriage.

Might be a quickie.

But let’s start with our first segment which is Taking Issue. And today, Dan, we’re taking issue with biblical marriage.

Well, I understand that I have a biblical marriage. Don’t you have a biblical marriage?

I mean, I—I know my lady wife in the biblical sense. Is that what you’re talking about?

She is known to you?

Okay. Well, the adjective biblical gets slapped onto so many things these days.

By folks who want to insist there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about everything. And—and so there’s a lot of talk of biblical marriage. And in short, you don’t want a biblical marriage. But there are—there are also many different kinds of biblical marriages and you don’t want any of them.

Okay, all right, we’ll get to that. We’ll get to that. One of the things that I did when I was sort of researching this for the show was I reminded—I remembered that there’s this thing that’s happening in the U.S. Several states have already adopted this thing and other states are trying to push for what they’re calling covenant marriages. And what this is is a different type of like extra special marriage. When you file for your marriage license or whatever, you—you know, you check supersize.

Yeah, yeah. For—for covenant marriage. And the idea is that it’s a lot harder to get a divorce and you have to enter into the marriage—you have to have done counseling with a priest or like with—with some sort of religious person. It’s not with a marriage counselor, but that’s in there.

But it’s got to be someone who’s entirely unqualified to say anything at all.

About marriage, especially if it’s a—you know, if it’s a Catholic priest, someone who’s not even allowed to participate themselves.

Heard tell.

This is how—this is how it goes.

And then—and then it’s like, you know, you—you really can’t get divorced unless, you know, it kind of eliminates the idea of no-fault divorce.

Which I think a lot of very right-wing religious people have been hitting hard that like divorce is this great tragedy or whatever. And—and so what we do is we enter into this covenant marriage where it’s much—it’s—it’s—and they’re—they really are trying to make sort of the—the end goal is to make some form of biblical Christian marriage the legal standard.

Yeah. And—and I—I think there are a couple of different reasons for this. The—the end of no-fault divorce is something that I see a lot of Christian nationalists advocating for on social media, which is it’s basically men saying I should be able to be a garbage human being and my wife should not be allowed to take leave of our relationship.

Right.

Because, you know, no-fault divorce was implemented precisely to give women access to a little bit more agency within marriages and marriages for a long time there has been a significant power asymmetry. And—and when we get into the—the biblical stuff, you’re going to see that that’s even more entrenched in—in biblical marriage.

And, and so the, this is, this is basically just men saying, I don’t like women being able to make decisions for themselves. I should be the one in charge of, of them. Yeah. And these are the same men who are out there saying every household should have one vote. It should be the man who decides. And you know, it’s fair because his wife is allowed to share her feelings with him before he makes the decision.

And he will listen to her about as much as those guys tend to listen to their wives.

Yeah, yeah. And so it’s, it’s just garbage. Human beings who want their garbageness to be authorized by the state to.

Be enforced by the state.

Enforced by the state. Yes. Over and against the interests and the agency and the consent. These are the same folks who, who insist there’s no such thing as marital rape.

Which is also something we will talk about when we get into our discussion a bit.

But the Bible kind of backs them up on that.

Yeah, unfortunately. Yeah, definitely is a, a trump card in a lot of ways if you think the Bible is an authoritative text and, and you accept the way it is interpreted by the garbage humans that are out there right now, you know. Yeah, it’s, it’s an issue. And, and one thing I find funny about this is, is they, they use this word covenant because a lot of people think covenant is, is just this magical word for that, you know, Christians and Bible believers can use, because you’ve got covenant. The word is, you know, all over the, the Bible in particular.

It means more than just promise. It’s bigger. It’s, it’s, it.

And I think that’s the other reason people are trying to do this is because now gay marriage is legal. And so they’re like, well, I don’t want to be a part of this anymore. I don’t want regular marriage. I want extra super special plus marriage so that it is distinguished from gay marriage. Because I don’t want the ickiness and.

I want something that excludes them. I don’t want them to have. I want something that is my own, that, that they don’t get.

Right. Right. Because the, this is about access to power and resources. It’s about structuring power. So the garbage humans are on top and everybody else has to smell their garbageness and be subordinate to it.

Well, let’s, let’s dive into like biblical marriage. What is, what are we talking about? When does it. Yeah, I don’t know. You probably have a, a lot to say about it.

Well, and, and I, I brought up the word covenant because when you, when you look in the Bible, there’s a lot about covenants between God and humans and.

Right.

And the concept of covenants that we find in the Bible is actually derived from Neo Assyrian vassal treaties. And so the people tend to treat a covenant as a mutual agreement between two parties. But what is often glossed over, particularly by folks who want to appropriate the idea from the Bible is the fact that in the Bible these are not equal parties.

Right.

The vassal treaties are treaties that were struck between a, a sovereign nation and a subjugated nation. It was the, the one who was bigger and stronger and in charge, basically. Saying, oh, let’s draw up a little contract. Wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to this lovely little country you got going on over. So here’s what will happen. You will give us money and you will send us troops to fight in our wars for us, and then we will protect you from ourselves.

Basically, we will not destroy you. Yeah. And so it’s, and it’s, it’s framed as Esarhaddon was a Neo Assyrian emperor who framed it in terms of covenantal love. You will love me and then I will, you know, and that’s what, and that’s what’s being picked up in Deuteronomy. They’re basically copying what’s going on in, in the vassal treaties of these Neo Assyrians. And so marriage is, is very similar in the Bible. It is not two equal parties entering into a contract the way the legislation exists in, particularly in the Pentateuch. But we, we find it hinted at in stories and things elsewhere. The contract was between two men, and it was usually the man who wanted a wife. And whatever man had rights over the sexual availability and the procreative capacities of the woman. And usually that was her father, but it could be her master.

Right.

She could be enslaved and her father could sell her as a concubine or a sex slave. So there were different kinds of contracts that, that this could be, but basically the, the man was purchasing use and the bride price was the, the price of the, the transaction, her sexual availability and her procreative capacities, which were not her own.

Right.

So those were commodities that unfortunately she went along with, and he basically had control of that.

So in the Bible you say she went along with.

It’s not like, I mean, not, not.

In the sense of consent, but in the sense of physically she was a part of the transaction because those things cannot be decoupled from.

Right.

From her.

Yeah. She was not. She, she was not given the choice to go along with it. She was right. She was made to do it.

And, and, and women would have been conditioned to think of this as, as a great blessing, as something good for them, because in the ancient world, women were not really social agents of their own. They had, they had no real social autonomy. Their identity was subordinated to a man’s identity, whether it was the household of their father or the household of their husband. And like, even when we get down to Roman times, even in the Greco Roman world, they had, they would have, like, arrangements so that a woman could get married, but if her husband died or divorced or whatever, she could revert back to the household of her father. Whereas prior to these time periods, she was basically left adrift in a patriarchal world where she had no identity of her own. And, and so she was always tied to a patriarchal household of, of some kind or another.

Right.

And so yeah, she’s, she’s a commodity. And, and absolutely there are other dimensions to this. You have a lot of discussion of love and, and things like that in the Hebrew Bible. It’s not exactly the same as, as the way we think and talk about it today. But you can look in the Song of Songs for erotic poetry that includes a lot of very lovely poetry about desire and about love and care and intimacy and things like that. And, and you see other places, but like with Ruth for instance, this is not a love story. This is a story about convenience and meeting needs where Naomi’s like, here’s how you trick a man into marrying you so you can be a proper Israelite wife. And, and then Boaz is like, whoa, whoa, we don’t need to do all this. I will, I will take the high road and I will go ahead and facilitate this marriage so that you can be a proper Israelite wife.

Because I’ve seen the chesed that you have done for your mother in law and for the people. And, and so it’s a story of a bunch of people who are going above and beyond what’s expected and demanded by the law. Not because they have some deep and abiding love for each other, but they’re functioning as models of behavior related to social expectations. But I think we’ve talked about Deuteronomy 22 before.

You’ll have to remind me.

Deuteronomy 22 is some rules about marriage, sex, adultery and sexual assault.

Right. I’m just remembering there was a thing about a virgin who, who was proven not to be a virgin, was stoned to death, that sort of thing.

It’s something like that. Yeah. It starts in Deuteronomy 22:13 . Suppose a man marries a woman, but after going into her. And this is a euphemism for consummation, which is itself a euphemism for sexual intercourse.

It’s not much of a euphemism. It’s pretty, it’s pretty strange.

It’s pretty graphic. Yeah.

That hits pretty hard is what I’m saying.

That’s another euphemism. And, but after going into her, dislikes her and makes up charges against her, slandering her by saying, I married this woman, but when I lay with her I did not find evidence of her virginity. And, and this is authors of, of this part of Deuteronomy who do not have a rudimentary grasp of female anatomy and how that works. But, but basically the idea is because she’s a commodity, she’s expected to be in pristine condition. Gotta have that new wife smell.

New in the box. That’s right.

That’s right. And if someone else has already been there, then that is, for lack of a better phrase, tainted goods. And so his—the contract is—has been violated, basically. But here the story is that he’s made this up. He’s looking for an excuse to get rid of her, but even more to have her killed. And it says, “The father of the young woman and her mother shall then submit the evidence of the young woman’s virginity to the elders of the city at the gate.”

Good luck. Enjoy. Have fun with that.

Yeah. This is pre-presumed to be sheets.

Right.

That indicate there has been a, a hemorrhaging.

Right. Because everyone knows that there’s no chance, no way for a hymen to be broken other than through the initial coital act.

Yes. Yes. If the hymen is ever intact enough, integral enough that, that it is broken and, and there is any kind of bleeding. The father of the young woman shall say to the elders, “I gave my daughter in marriage to this man, but he dislikes her. And now he has made up shameful charges against her, saying, ‘I did not find—I did not find evidence of your daughter’s virginity.’ But here is the evidence of my daughter’s virginity.” Then they shall spread out the cloth before the elders of the town. Because, you know, you couldn’t fake something like that.

No. How would you? Impossible.

Yeah. The elders of that town shall take the man and punish him. They shall fine him 100 shekels of silver which they shall give to the young woman’s father.

Right.

Because he has slandered a virgin of Israel. What happens when you slander a virgin? You pay the virgin’s father.

Right.

She shall remain his wife. Oh, goody.

Right. There’s a lot of moments where it’s like, oh, this marriage is going to be fun. This is. Yeah, this is good for.

Yeah, it’s definitely keeping her agency and consent in mind. He shall not be permitted to divorce her as long as he lives. And then it goes, “But if, if it happens to be true, they stone her to death.” Because.

Yeah. There’s also this sense that like, unlike marriage of today, because, you know, a lot of sort of the Christian nationalist set, the ultra-right-wing Christian conservatives of now try to make it seem like this is the ideal. Like you should not be allowed to divorce. You shouldn’t. And the problem is that marriage is then, as you say, the woman is considered property, which I don’t think we think of—I don’t think even those people think of women as property anymore. At least they wouldn’t say it out loud.

Some of them have. But.

Oh, okay, well, there’s that. Yeah, I guess there is. There is the very extreme set. But the other thing is so, so like this is an economic institution. This is not a love institution. Yeah. Marriage in that environment had nothing to do with what we—how we determine how we see marriage now. It’s a totally different institution.

Yeah. And, and the folks who talk about, even within my own religious tradition there’s a discussion of the nuclear family, which really is phenomenally modern. Like it’s not even been a century that the nuclear family, as we conceptualize it, has been understood to be the fundamental unit of society. Yeah. And there are many parts around the world today where you go find multigenerational households and the nuclear family is not the fundamental unit of society. There’s an awful lot of ethnocentricity and an awful lot of myopia. A lot of Christian nationalists have the blinders on when it comes to how they understand love and marriage. It’s an institution—you can’t disparage this. I tell you, brother. Brother. Sorry. Got into my Hulk, Hulk Hogan.

Also an awful example of a family man.

Yeah, there you go. That’s right. I was going to say it’s funny because earlier you were talking about sort of ancient views on marriage and, you know, especially women in marriage. And it’s—like you say, it is a very new idea. Like there are people alive today who are married under similar ideas. You know what I mean? Like, it wasn’t until the 60s that women in the United States could get a loan without their husbands, you know, cosigning on it. It was like—this is not—the autonomy of a woman is so extremely new. It’s literally shocking to me.

Yeah. I—well, I, I remember the first time I heard that a woman couldn’t get a credit card.

Until the 1970s.

That, like, I, that just baffled me. And, and we are so not far removed from that, that the folks who, who were like, oh, we gotta make marriage great again by going back to the periods before women had any agency of their own. Yeah. Again, garbage humans and. Yikes.

I was gonna say that, like one of the things that we need to talk about when we talk about the idea of biblical marriage is that polygamy was a huge thing.

Yeah. It was normative. It was not the norm because you needed to be able to financially sustain multiple households. But yes, it was. It was normative in that if you could do it, you would do it. And, and there were no. Nobody had any concerns with it. And, and this raises such an interesting thing about adultery. Adultery was a very unequal

Right.

requirement because a man could have intercourse with an unmarried woman who was not his wife. That was not adultery. And, and that’s why sex workers were prolific

in this time period.

And, and, and it wasn’t. Yeah. I mean, there are multiple. I remember. Oh, gosh. Who was the, the character who, who was it? His daughter-in-law tricked him. Judah. Yeah.

The guy who was like, oh, is that, that looks an awful lot like my staff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like she, she acted as a sex worker. He partook and nope, at no point in the story is that the bad thing. Yeah. Even though presumably he’s a married man. So. So yeah, I think, I think that’s a, that’s a fascinating part of this.

Yeah. Sex in the ancient world was not a mutual act that was, that was engaged in by, by two equal partners. It was something that an active sexual agent did to a passive sexual object whose agency, whose consent was. Was really immaterial. And so as a result, any passive sexual objects who were not already claimed by another man were fair game. And, and later the idea would develop that the act of sex comprised the act of marriage. So they could just be like, hey, you know, go to the bar, have a few drinks, take somebody home, boom, married. And because that was the, the sealing of the deal, so to speak. And, and there was absolutely nothing untoward about that kind of activity because nothing said there were no rules that the man was only allowed to have one and only one wife.

Right. There is a. I mean, I, there’s also this idea of, I mean, you say there’s no consent, but there is kind of a consent issue because if a woman, if a man rapes a woman and she cries out, you know, there’s that whole thing about if she cries out, then that’s. Then, then, then he’s done something wrong, but if she doesn’t cry out, then she must have been okay with it. But, but then even then, the, the remedy, if she does cry out if he was taking her against her will is often that he has. He’s forced to marry her and pay the bride price to her father.

So that’s, that’s still in Deuteronomy 22 .

And the crying out is actually unrelated to the unmarried woman, the crying out is as if it is an engaged woman. So the betrothed woman. Yeah. So in between betrothal and marriage, which. And, and betrothal could last for like a year or more. Betrothal was basically the man and, and the father, inking the contract, basically.

But then there was hammering out the details.

Yeah, yeah. Entering into the negotiations and everything. And then there was a. There could be like a year or more period of betrothal. And at that point she’s in the eyes of the law, she belongs to her husband, even though it has not been consummated yet. And so the Deuteronomy 22:23 is like, well, let’s see what happens if a betrothed woman is. Is sexually assaulted. And, and it’s like if it happens in the city, then they’re both stoned because she should have cried out and, you know, obviously somebody would have come and stopped it.

Right.

And. But if it happens in the open country, then obviously she did cry out, but nobody was around to come and stop it, so she didn’t do anything wrong. So only he is stoned. And then we get to the. The woman who’s neither betrothed nor married. And that’s where if he grabs her and lays with her and, and a lot of apologists want to try to insist that. That the verb taphas there in Hebrew means it’s just a taking hold of. There’s no force implied. 100% false. It, yeah, is entirely about grabbing someone against their will and restraining them.

Right.

And so the restitution, the first restitution that is mentioned is 50 shekels to the young woman’s father and she shall become his wife. Again, obviously not really worried about what the woman thinks, because what she thinks doesn’t matter. It’s the, the people who are writing this law are trying to make it sound like they’re covering all the bases. We’ve. We’ve accounted for that. He has to marry her he can’t divorce her for the rest of his life that way. We’re taking care of her. She can be a good contributing member of society as a wife of, of her rapist. And, and a lot of people suggest the, the Bible requires the victim of rape marry her rapist. And that’s kind of, that’s kind of the, the consequence. That’s, that’s turning the, the law around. In reality, I don’t think that ever would have happened. One, Deuteronomy was not enforced. This was not actual legal code.

This is, this is propaganda. But two, we have a similar case in Exodus 22 , where if a man seduces an unbetrothed woman, he’s got to pay an elevated bride price to the father, but then the father has the prerogative to take the money and deny the man his daughter.

Oh, wow.

Can say, give me the money and I will also my daughter will be staying with me in my household. So you can all fade away. And I don’t know if anybody’s gonna.

Get that movie reference, but somebody’s gonna get it.

Somebody’s gonna get it. But, and, and, and that’s a, a slightly different law, but I think if any actual judicial rubber had hit any judicial road regarding a circumstance like this, the father would have been able, I, like, I have no doubt the father would have been able to be like, no, I’ll just take the money.

And, and yeah, I don’t want to see you.

And why wouldn’t.

Exactly. Yeah. Because hopefully the father actually has some care for his daughter.

Yeah. Be nice.

I mean, it’s, you know, the world doesn’t always work out in the, in the best ways.

Not always.

One of the kinds of marriage that we have already talked about on this show is Levirate marriage, which I don’t think anyone is pushing for that to come back that I’ve heard about yet.

No, no, not really because that, that’s one of the things that’s actually kind of handcuffing men a little bit.

Right.

And you want to know, in, in a lot of Spanish speaking countries, the, the slang term for handcuffs is esposas.

Oh, wives, wives. Okay.

But this here, the, the idea is that if a, if a man marries a woman and then he dies without having impregnated her, in order to ensure that his line is carried on and also that the property stays within his family, the. Any brothers that he has or the closest male relative has the obligation to marry that woman and raise children by her in the name of the deceased kin. And so that’s. That’s something that. And. And we see from the story of Onan. Onan was like, I’m getting a raw deal here.

Yeah. I don’t want my kid to be. To. To be my. My brother’s son.

Yeah. So he’s. This is. This is a quote from some movie. I don’t know what it is, but somebody says, I. I denied her my seed. But that’s. That’s basically what Onan is doing.

Right.

Because Onan is. Is a garbage human being. And. And. And God gives him the old. The old forearm shiver. Yeah. Into. Into Sheol, into the. The realm of the dead.

And. Yeah, because it was a requirement that was intended to keep, like, the society together, but didn’t really serve the interests of the individual. And so obviously, that one went away when. When people got tighter control of how marriage worked, they were like, well, we’re not doing that one. And. And it’s also. It presupposes polygamy because. Because, like, if. If I’m required to. So say a brother is there who’s not married yet. He’s required to marry her, his dead brother’s wife.

Right. And then he’s got one wife that produces his brother’s kids and one wife that produces his own kids.

And this is my deceased brother’s kids that I’m raising, and this is my other deceased brother’s kids. And yeah, I wonder if. If. To the degree that levirate marriage was widely practiced, I wonder if, if families had, like, the one guy where they were like, he’ll take her. He’s. He’s into this.

Let’s get Mikey. He’ll take any wife.

Yeah, he’s already got seven of them. He’ll take another one. Which would have been. I’m. I’m sure that would have been quite the relief valve for. For some people involved, but. Except for the wives, the wives were probably like, I heard about.

Yeah, I don’t want to belabor. You know, there’s. There’s that. There’s a meme that went around that was sort of making fun of the people who. Who talk about biblical marriage, and we have to get back to biblical marriage. And. And the way that the meme worked was just. It listed all the ways that a biblical marriage exists. And it’s like yeah, you know, a man, a woman and her slave or whatever, you know, referencing Sarah and, and Abram and their, and then. And Hagar and so I, I don’t want to go through all of those, but I think that the main comment that the main thrust of it is what we’ve been saying, which is just that it was it like how could any of this apply in a car, in a society where women aren’t considered property?

Yeah, they’re. And they’re, they’re trying to make it apply because again, the garbage people, they, they want to have control over, over other individual women. And, and I, I think they, they have to feel like they’re doing something right. I mean, certainly there are those of them who know this is garbage human activity, but, you know, just want to exploit it anyway. But I have to imagine that some of them at some level sincerely think they’re actually trying to restore something that’s important to God. But yeah, the, in, in that time period, marriages were phenomenally unequal. And to try to restore that is to try to revert us back to a society where women are property that are exchanged for money. And yeah, that’s as, as I am wont to say, pure and utter nonsense.

All right, well, to get to the, the, the remedy of this idea, I think it’s time for us to go to our chapter and verse.

Alrighty.

And, and, and what is the chapter and verse for. For this week? What are this. The reading this week comes to us from Matthew, Chapter Matthew.

From the Gospel According to Matthew. We’re going to be in. Yeah, this is the Sermon on the Mount. We’re going to be in chapter 5, verses 31 and 32. Concerning divorce is the, the section heading that we, that we generally see in Bibles that, that add chapter or section headings. If I, if I were putting this section in, in a book of mine, I would have to give it a, a song title or song lyrics or something like that as a name concerning divorce. They’re not a lot of songs about divorce.

No, there should be.

Or, or if there are, they. They’re not. The word divorce is not in the title.

No, no, it’s not. There are a lot of country songs I can think of like some Toby Keith songs.

The My Wife Left Me and My Dog Left Me and My Truck Left Me Now I’m Sad.

Well, yeah, I think there’s a song That Ain’t My Truck in the Drive or something like that. So. From the NRSVUE, it was also said and this is Jesus who’s basically saying, here’s what’s written, and I’m overruling.

That, or, yeah, yeah, here’s what’s written. Yeah, in this case, here’s what’s written. And also. And I. I raise you. Well, and.

And that’s what’s going on in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is. Because Jesus says, unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. So a lot of people are thinking Jesus is replacing the law of Moses with the law of the Gospel. No, not in Matthew. Matthew is a Judaizer. Matthew is saying, I see your law of Moses. I raise you. Don’t even think about it. And here he says, it was also said, whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce. But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality causes her to commit adultery.

And so that is bonkers to me. First of all, first, will you walk me through something? Because I— when I first read this passage, my brain immediately assumed that it knew what sexual immorality was. And then I thought, you know what? This is the Bible. I might not know what that’s referring to. Like, I, I don’t think I should just automatically assume that I understand what we mean when we say sexual immorality.

And that’s— and that’s a hurdle that you have cleared that probably 95% of Bible believers either struggle with clearing or just refuse to even try to clear. And, and that’s a wonderful point. So the word here should be porneia. Let me just make— yes, logou porneias. Porneia, p-e— so porneia refers to, like, sexual immorality is a fine translation. The word is most closely related to the term for a sex worker. And so they’re the two, like, central kinds of sexual indiscretions that were associated with porneia in this time period would have been sex work and adultery. Now, we talked just a minute ago about how sex workers were prolific in ancient West Asia in the, you know, the first half, probably most of the second half of the first millennium BCE. They’re a little more stigmatized in this period.

They’re not quite as prolific. Like, polygamy is not outlawed within Judaism, but it’s kind of— most folks are like, we don’t really do that that much anymore. So that’s kind of— that’s not really going on. But so adultery, sex work, and then anything else that was considered sexually immoral by whatever group is using the term.

So you, you can’t go back and find a list of everything that constituted porneia. It was, was basically again, another example of choose your own adventure. It was whatever the group decided was, was problematic.

I think that that’s a really interesting and useful point. It’s inter— it’s— I think it’s useful to point out that even within the Bible, the mores change over time and it becomes a— and— and so like to say that the Bible says X about how, how marriages should work is ignoring the fact that that has, that actually modifies itself even throughout— through the Bible as, as the, as it— as their society progressed through time.

Yeah. And there— and when you look in the Bible, you, you brought up polygamy earlier. Like, if you just go by the numbers, it’s like a thousand to, to zero. There’s no part of the New Testament that prohibits or even badmouths polygamy.

Right.

And there are a bunch of passages that treat it as normative, that presuppose its normativity.

Right.

And, and yet Christians will be like, oh, no, no, no, I can’t do polygamy. That’s, that’s against the rules. It’s like that’s, that’s not a biblical principle.

Right.

I mean, at best, you’ve got a passage in the Pastoral Epistles that, that says a— an overseer will be the husband of one wife, which could mean monogamy. If you want to be an overseer, then you have to adopt this higher law. Or it could just mean they didn’t get remarried after divorce or after the death of a spouse or, or something like that. So there’s even— that which is the best they have is not crystal clear. So, yeah, it’s not univocal. And if you’re going by the numbers, polygamy way outweighs opposition to polygamy. And so the— yeah, this probably is a reference to— I mean, somebody in the first century CE heard this, their assumption probably would have been, oh, adultery. Okay. And, but yeah, it could include—

And again, adultery in this case. Because I mean, what we talked earlier about how adultery didn’t mean what we assume it to mean now, at least in older times. What does adultery mean in this case?

Just by this time period? There’s more, there’s a lot more parity so that a man was, was not supposed to engage in sexual intercourse with someone else because polygamy is kind of on the outs a little bit. Right. That was not your relief valve. That was not like, whoa, I can do this if I want. Now, whether or not that was the case, that’s a different story. Whether or not anybody ever would have actually gotten in trouble for that. The only examples we have of somebody getting a scriptural finger wagging in the New Testament for adultery, it’s when— it’s the woman, right? When the, in our story of the woman taken in adultery, the dude was presumably just left there like, all right, I’ll, I’ll take care of myself. And—

And the mob grabbed the woman and.

To stone her. Yeah.

And so they had no concern for his culpability. But also, this was a time period when slavery was also normative. And whatever someone’s position would have been about a man having sexual intercourse with a, an unmarried, unbetrothed, free woman, their concern would have not even been a fraction of, of that concern if he was engaging in intercourse with a, an enslaved person.

Right.

One of his own slaves. That would have been like. They would have been like, yeah, not my business, not my business. And, and so there were, there were ways for men to get what they wanted.

So, so, okay, so. So we have this idea of Jesus saying sexual immorality is the only reason that he accepts the. For a divorce.

Right.

But he clearly, just by the context of what he’s saying, that’s not, that’s not the, the social norm. The social norm is someone can get like the. There we have the concept of a certificate of divorce. So that exists.

Yes. And that’s. We don’t have a, a piece of law legislation in the Hebrew Bible that’s like. And now we’re going to talk about certificates of divorce. But we do have in, in Deuteronomy 24:1 , suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman, but she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her. And there’s a lot of debate about what this means. If, like, he had to have really good reason or if he just didn’t want, like, the way she cooked or something like, we, we don’t know. Presumably he could have gotten away with just about anything. And so he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house. Then she leaves his house and goes off to become another man’s wife. Then suppose the second man dislikes her, writes her a bill of divorce, puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house. Or the second man who married her dies. Her first husband who sent her away is not permitted to take her again. To be his wife after she has been defiled. I imagine the verb there in Hebrew is. Is ana, but I did not look this up.

We’re all very disappointed in you, Dan.

Verse four. Oh, no, it’s not. It is the. It’s the Hophal of tame to. To be unclean. So she has been rendered unclean. Excuse me, for that would be abhorrent to the Lord. And you shall not bring guilt on the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a possession. And. And again, we’re going back to this idea that these actions generate some kind of metaphysical contamination that gets out onto the land. And it’s the land itself that cannot tolerate these things because it’s going to barf you out. It’s gonna get all Barf-olomew on you. Hopefully you. You get that movie.

That one I got.

Okay, good. Thank you. And. And so we have this weird thing where they’re basically saying she leaves one guy, goes and marries another guy. She can’t go back to the first guy because she’s been, you know, she’s tainted goods all over again or something like that. There. There’s a lot of debate about all the different aspects of this, but we get this idea of, he can be like, all right, look, I’m writing you a certificate. Take it and go. But one. One of the things that this kind of contributes to is. Is the idea that the man had unilateral authority over divorce. And even in the New Testament, it is the woman who is the victim of this. And in fact, a lot of folks think this is precisely what Jesus or the author of Matthew is doing in these passages, because you have this here in. In Matthew 5 and also in Matthew 19 , where Jesus is talking about how men cannot divorce a woman because that then sets her adrift without this patriarchal anchor or buoy or whatever for to exist in the ancient world.

And this kind of turns the tables on the folks who are trying to restore this concept of marriage for today, because these are the folks who are like, I don’t want my wife to be able to divorce me right now. Back then, they weren’t allowed to at all. And all of the concern about divorce was concern for the abuse of women on the part of men. Jesus is basically saying, no, you can’t just divorce your wife for whatever reason because that’s gonna, you know, royally screw her over, right? And so we’re making this rule. And the. The thing that. That I always come back to is, is when you’re. When you’re trying to change behavior, you got to look at what’s motivating the behavior. Because if you just try and implement a law saying don’t do that, that’s frequently not going to be incredibly helpful.

Right.

And the problem underlying the, this issue is garbage humans.

Divorce, you mean?

Yeah, yeah. Well, at least the, the issue with people today trying to implement these, these covenant marriages.

Right.

Just to, to institutionalize their garbage.

It is funny to me, we got.

To find a vaccine for the garbage humans. They will refuse to take it.

Right.

Obviously, that’s the problem. Yes, but there’s got to be some way to, to help them out.

But yeah, it’s. It’s fascinating to me. The other thing that’s weird that I wanted to get to, going back to Matthew, is the idea that divorcing a wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality causes her to commit adultery. Like it causes her to what, the thing that you’re doing makes her a sinner? Yeah, like what the heck?

And, but it also makes. Yeah. Logou porneias. And, and also whatever man marries her is also committing adultery.

Yeah, it’s. That’s kind of that by my standards, that, that feels a little messed up and I don’t think I understand it at all. I don’t know. So.

So yeah, the idea there is that that marriage, that contract is so sacrosanct that the only thing that legitimately breaks it or annuls it would be that porneia would be that sexual immorality. And so if you divorce and, and it’s kind of addressing the way things were at that time. Jesus was not saying, you know, I’m now making it illegal for you to do this. He didn’t have that authority socially.

Right.

What he was saying was, if you do this, just know in the eyes of God you’re still married. God has not annulled that relationship. And therefore, if she goes off and goes and marries somebody else, she’s getting married for a second time, she’s committing adultery. If anyone marries her, they’re marrying somebody who’s already married, they’re committing adultery. And additionally, the implication is that the man himself, if he went off and, and tried to marry someone else, would also be committing adultery. Even though that’s not explicit. But I think in, in Matthew 19 , you have a little more explication there. Okay, so this is where they say some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause? And Jesus cracked his knuckles because he had recently gotten done explaining this. He answered, have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning, made them male and female and said for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh?

A bit of a fallacy here. The, that argument. That scripture has nothing to do with this. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate. In other words, the marriage is. That link is something that God has created.

Right.

And you don’t have the authority to annul it. They said to him, why then did Moses command us to give a certificate of dismissal and divorce her? And so they’re basically saying, hey, the scriptures say that we can do this.

And Jesus is, and Jesus appeals to a rationalization that a lot of apologists appeal to. It was the time they were, they were products of their time. He says it was because your hearts were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives. But from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another. So here we have the dude doing the divorce, the divorcing is, is shackled to this as well. And marries another, commits adultery. And he who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. So in Matthew 19 , both of the adulterers are the men involved. The disciples said to him, if such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry. And then that’s when he goes, get ready to live. Because you got to be a eunuch. Or you know, the real ones are going to make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.

And they all go, okay, right? Not me. I’m not the one.

No, thank you. I don’t, I don’t want that.

You know, I can see why people who are trying to follow Christ would then go, going by these scriptures that we’ve just read, this is red letter stuff. This is like straight out of the man’s mouth. I can see why they would think this is what we have to do. Like we, we need to lock down this divorce thing because it’s not okay. So, so I don’t know. I’m like, it’s not my aesthetic, it’s not my. More like morally, I think that it’s wrong. The, the, the. We have to think of this as a much more. In a much more modern way. But I can see why when it’s out of Jesus’s own mouth, they’re, they’re preaching this.

Yeah. And, and I, and I don’t think they understand it the way it was intended as a way to provide a little bit of relief for the women of that time period who were getting the short end of the, of the social stick. Today. It’s, it’s primarily one. It’s an identity marker for Christian nationalism, and they’re trying to structure power and everything, and it’s two and two. It’s a bunch of dudes who want more control over the women in their lives.

Yeah, but it is, I mean it. I would say that their position is pretty strongly biblically defensible. Yes.

As long as we, we gloss over all the, the different approaches to marriage that we’ve discussed and, and we just go to this idea that marriage ought to be. Be something that is not so. Not so flippantly entered into and, and departed from. Yes. I, I think that would be, that would be something that has biblical support. I don’t know if I would unilaterally call it biblical because you do have a lot of other folks who, like Paul, for instance, was not really riding the marriage train.

Right.

Paul was like, hey, only if you can’t hack celibacy. If you’re weak and you can’t hack celibacy, go ahead and get married for your, your occasional prophylactic passionless sex. But you know, don’t be thinking about kids or anything like that because Jesus is coming.

Right. And Jesus himself never married, so that, that says a lot as well, I suppose.

At least there, there’s, there’s nothing about Jesus getting married for sure. And, and if he was like Matthew portrays him as an apocalyptic ascetic, an apocalyptic, ascetic Jewish person.

And if he, if he was those things, then it makes sense that he would not have married. He would have been celibate. But the degree to which that reflects the historical Jesus’s actual circumstances versus being a literary creation or a traditional creation of, of the time following his death, I don’t know that we can reconstruct that.

Yeah. I just think I, you know, I think if nothing else, you know, one of the, One of the articles that I read on this was, was a blog post that titled Take it from Me, don’t get a Divorce. And it was a woman writing to ostensibly another woman that she knew, say, you know, just sort of talking about how she had been divorced and how hard it was on her and on her family and blah, blah, blah. And, and basically the advice was, yes, do it. Oh, it’s too hard, it’s too impossible. Don’t do it. And every step of the way she kept saying, I mean, it worked out for me in the end. It was fine for me, but it won’t be. It might not be for you. And you know, yes, it was. Yes, my family’s fine and we all love each other and we, we’re all, we’re all doing well, but we might not have been. So don’t you. It, it’s a very strange position to take.

Well, well, certainly divorce causes a lot of trauma, particularly for, for children. And, and a lot of people are never the same and a lot of people never get over that. And at the same time, divorce saves lives.

In a lot of instances. And so.

Because marriage often causes trauma.

Because people, not everybody marries somebody who is good at marriage. Yeah. And, and, and not all marriages are, you know, like, you don’t know if you’re going to be, if your marriage is going to work. The only way to test whether your marriage is going to work is to get married and then it’s too late. So there’s no, there’s no way to know for sure. I think it’s, I think, I think I personally feel like divorce is. If I were a believer, I would think it was a gift from God because there’s so many people for whom it is the savior of their lives. It literally makes their lives tolerable again.

Yeah. And to try to, to try to compel people or try to make it seem like you’re not a, you’re not a real Christian or you’re not really married or you’re not a real American unless you enter into this, this double super secret covenant marriage like that.

Who have, have always had a lot less power when it comes to marriage. And, and particularly divorce. And so I think that divorce serves the interests of, of women far more than it does the interests of, of men. But to, I think that is an, that is something that people need. They need that available and you know, maybe people make the wrong choice by it, but yeah. Just as many people make the right choice by it. And I think even if there’s trauma involved, who’s to say that the trauma would not have been multiplied had, had a couple stayed together.

Right.

Yeah. So I, I think the retreating to kind of blanket counsel for, for all people. Divorce is unilaterally a bad thing or unilaterally a good thing? I, I, I think is more ideological, is more dogmatic than data based.

Well, as, as the comedian said, no happy marriage has ever ended in divorce. So there you go. I, I again, I think what we’ve done is, is muddy the waters and, and not anyway and anyway, so let’s move on. Thanks.

Before we go, just, just to make it a little personal. Yeah. I, I have very little connection to divorce. My parents are still married. However, all four of my grandparents divorced and, and were with other people. All that happened before I was born, so I only got, you know, I got to know four different sets of grandparents. Have you had any interactions with, with divorce?

My parents divorced when I was, when I was in my late teens and I’ve been divorced. So yes, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve been touched by it in many different ways.

Okay. So, so we, some of us are, 50% of us at least are speaking from direct experience. Yes, indeed. Okay. I just wanted to, to just in case anybody was wondering if, if, if any of us had any, any leg to stand on.

In that regard.

Absolutely.

Well, and, and, and sorry to out you if, if that was not something.

That, No, I mean, I, I’m, you know, I think you, you felt okay doing that because, you know that I’m kind of an open book about these sorts of things. But yeah, I mean, I, you know, I had a previous marriage. My wife was part of a previous marriage, so I guess I’m causing her to commit adultery. I just realized that according to.

Jesus, that’s a little, it’s a, it’s quite a pyramid scheme.

Yeah, it is, it is. We’re all, there’s a whole bunch of adultery happening apparently. Yeah, but, but yeah, I mean, for both of us and for, you know, and, and, and I think I won’t speak for our former partners, but for both of us, divorce was absolutely the right thing and, and a very positive step. Even though, like, we both continued to love our partners. Like, it wasn’t, it wasn’t that, you know, but it was. I, you know, and, and you know, my wife is her, her, her ex is one of her best friends. She loves him. So, you know, doesn’t have to, it can be this horrible, traumatic, very difficult thing. It can also be just exactly the right thing and what is called for. Yeah. And I don’t think that anyone, as you say, I don’t think that any one rule can encompass what this thing is.

So there you go. And there you guys go. We’ll leave it at that. Thanks so much to all of you. If you would like to become a part of helping to make the show go and you would like to be a friend of us and get early and ad-free versions of every episode and then at a certain level get the after party, which is bonus content. Every week you can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma where you can sign up to be one of our patrons. If you need to reach us about anything, it’s contact@dataoverdogmapodcast.com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.

Biblical

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology