The family in the Bible

Biblical Theology Bulletin ,  Fall, 2002   by James A. Sanders

• Email
• Print

Abstract

I had begun study of the varied depths of partriarchalism in the Bible before Leland White died, even before 9/11, but when the opportunity arose to join in a tribute to my long-time friend I knew I had written it for him. The whole of the Bible and of Jewish and Christian tradition can be viewed within the tension between the Bible's focus on family, or community worth and responsibility, and its struggle toward affirmation of individual worth and responsibility within the larger family. That tension was brought home to the West in a traumatic way in the events of 9/11 and dramatized tragically in the recent climax of the Second Intifada. The varying levels of the Hellenization of Early Judaism, and reactions to it, brought about the cultural mix that produced Christian Judaism, which warmly embraced Greco-Roman culture, on the one hand, and Rabbinic Judaism, on the other, which tried bravely to resist it. The current cultural tensions between Islam and the West, and even in the so-called culture wars in this country, are illumined by a socio-cultural reading of the Bible as a whole.

**********

The family in the Bible, as in the Ancient Near East (ANE) and in the Mediterranean world generally, was patriarchal. What this means primarily is that the cultures through and in which biblical literature was shaped and formed over some 1200 years were basically patriarchal. The tribe and the family were centered in the men in the family, especially the first-born. This is seen in the biblical understandings of a family and its character, the "father's house" (bet 'av), the family (mishpahah), the concept of peoplehood (ha'am), brotherhood, kinship, Levirate marriage, and even the Jubilee laws of redemption of debtors and family land. "Round the man the house groups itself, forming a psychic community, which is stamped by his character. Wives, children, slaves, property are entirely merged in this unity" (Pedersen: 63). There are some who claim that the Japanese view of the people as a sacred family with the emperor as holy father is the closest to that of biblical Israel, and we have been starkly confronted since 9/11/01 with what many Muslims call "the Arab Family or Nation," which transcends modern political states and stretches from Morocco to Indonesia (Goody).

The major issue in ancient Israel was that of the survival of the family God had chosen to receive and live God's Torah. The principal issue of patriarchalism in the Bible was that of survival of the corporate identity of the chosen family or tribe, just as eventually the central issue of the Exile in the sixth century BCE was whether the people whom God had chosen would survive with identity intact, and not assimilate to the culture of the conqueror, thereby losing identity--as apparently all other peoples conquered by Assyria and Babylonia did. Most of the Bible is taken up with a history of threats of near extinction by foreign forces and natural disasters. In the fuller or canonical biblical story these are seen as challenges to God's promises of progeny and land (Gen 12) to Abraham and Sarah. This was because of the wonder, as Abraham Heschel often stressed, at Judaism's somehow surviving all such disasters, including the rise of Christianity and its persecutions, the pogroms, the Holocaust, and the Arab-Jewish War of the last century. The issue was survival of at least a remnant with identity still intact.

The children of the family or household were not just the father's future through his name, but the continuing existence of one of the twelve sons of Jacob. Without children his major domo, or head household servant, who was often an alien like Eliezer of Damascus, would inherit the land (Gen 15). Selection of a spouse was a family affair, and not for the individual alone to decide. The wife had to be found not far removed from his family so as not to introduce disruptive foreign or strange elements into the heritage, as Solomon did with his seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines (1Kgs 11:3). While the wife chosen for an Israelite was not to be alien, incest on the other hand was to be avoided. Incest and homosexuality were to be shunned because the Hittites and the Canaanites, and other foreigners, engaged in such practices. The prohibition against incest, however, did not preclude marrying half-sisters or half-brothers; and intermarriage with Canaanites and other peoples occurred frequently, as can be seen in the Book of Judges and elsewhere.

The man was at the center of the family and the woman his partner in assuring continuity (Wright). In a patriarchal society a woman was basically a regenerative-sexual being. (Please don't moralize yeti) It was the man's family she was committed to multiply when getting married. Everything was grouped around the man as the heir of the patriarch Jacob before him (hence the very term, patriarchal). It was his life which was to be continued in the family, and polygamy was practiced to serve that end. And the man could proclaim divorce from a wife if she did not bear children. But the woman who did produce children attained considerable status in the family, even nobility; indeed a foreign slave woman who bore the man children acquired high status.