Next
Here are some relevant divine guidelines concerning marriage.
(27)And Deity created man in his image, in the image of Deity he created him; male and female he created them. (28) And Deity blessed them, and Deity said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the heaven, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. (Genesis 1:27-28)
(23) And the man said, Now this is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; this shall be called Woman, because this [one] was taken out of Man. (24) Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother, and attach himself unto his wife, and they become one flesh. (Genesis 2:23-24)
It is implied in Genesis 1:27 that procreation is given to man and woman together, amongst other responsibilities they have. This means that getting children is meant to be done between a man and a woman. This may seem simple for anyone to grasp just looking at the differences between the body of a man and that of a woman, but unfortunately, in this day and age, it has to be explicitly stated.
But then the foundations of the family structure is further clarified by the end of Genesis 2 which shows the principle that man and woman should come together to form an independant unity, independant of family. That is not to say that the man despises his parents, but rather that he leaves their home, or responsibility to make a home for himself and his wife. This is the foundation for the divine institution of marriage.
And it is evident that there is a great deal of intimacy between the man and his wife in this state of marriage. It is a union. The scripture does a number of things to emphasize this union.
From this, and from other relevant verses (see Genesis 2:18,21-22; 3:16), several general principles can be derived about how a married couple are supposed to be.
[ASIDE: Previously, I had said that from the punishment put on "Eve" we can see that women are obligated to be ruled by their husbands. Yet I see now that this is an error. If you look at any of these punishments given to the snake, "Eve", and Adam, you will see that none of them are obligations, i.e., things that they must do. Rather, they are now the natural state of things. For example, the snake is not obligated to walk on its belly; that is just the state of its existence from then on. Man is not obligated to make sure that he sweats whilst he works. That's just the normal way of life we have now. Women are not told to make sure they are in pain whilst having children. That's just the normal way of life. It is not a sin if man doesn't sweat whilst work, or if women have medication to help ease the pain whilst in childbirth. But with regards to a wife's status in marriage, that can be seen throughout the scriptures, in the lives of the followers of Deity, the proper roles of man and wife, like in the case of Abraham and Sarah which will be discussed further on in this chapter.]
There are other deeper principles of wisdom that govern marriage, both getting into it and maintaining it, such as the need for some sort of similarity between the two people getting married. But this essay is not to go in-depth into the subject, just to define some edges and boundaries that can be seen as being applicable to non-Jews. There are good resources to help with finding out more about marraige such as http://www.aish.com/family/marriage/ and the section about marriage at http://www.chabad.org/search/keyword.asp?kid=233. These are just examples.
Now it is important that I state the biblical union of man and woman as thus, "the divine institution of marriage", something fairly different from the modern western idea about the union. To many minds in our modern times, marriage is simply a union of two people who love each other. This is not the case in scripture. Marriage is the union of a man and his woman, i.e., the woman of his choosing. The man-made idea of today can incorporate any human physically intimate union, such as those between man and man, and woman and woman. With the corrosion of objective standards and the elevation of moral relativity (i.e., nothing is really wrong unless it hurts someone else), such unions have begun to be called marriage by not just those small parts of society, but also by higher officials in politics. But such unions are simply manmade, having no divine authority to it. In fact, because it is outside of the biblical principles about the proper "marriage", it is not merely in a void of "it doesn't matter", but it becomes illegal biblically. The Torah tells you what is right and proper. If you do not do what is right and proper, within Torah confines, it becomes "not right", wrong, and improper. I'll go more into the sexually immoral part of it in the following section.
Here is a pertinent verse on adultery:
But Deity came to Abimelech in a dream that night, and said to him, look [at] you, dead, because of the woman whom you have taken; for she is a man’s wife. (Genesis 20:3)
The context of this is that, through deception on Abraham's part, Abimelech had taken Abraham's wife, Sarah, to his house in order to marry her or have sex with her. The verse I just quoted tells us the Creator's response to this. What makes this verse important in helping us see the universal immorality of taking another man's wife (which is adultery biblically) is the way that the Lord tells Abimelech his serious crime. The Almighty does not say "Look, you're dead .... for that woman is Abraham's wife". No, the charge is that she is a man's wife, or literally from the Hebrew, she is married to a husband.
[Just a little aside - both renditions "man's wife" and "married to a husband" takes away from the fact that the Hebrew uses two different forms of the same word. If I was gonna be really really literal, and attempt to show that fact, it would be rendered as "she [is] owned by an owner" or "mastered by a master", i.e., she belonged to someone else. The Hebrew word we translate as husband is actually from a root word meaning "to master, take possession", showing that a husband owned and mastered his wife. Unfortunately we have narrow-minded people who interpret this out of biblical context and say that a wife is equal to any other possession that a man has, like a horse or a donkey, or a dvd player. Those who actually pay attention to the whole context of scripture would first note the conclusions derived above that the wife and the husband are one flesh and should treat each other as such. Then they would see that women still had power and voice in a relationship like Sarah and Rachel. And they would understand that the word master doesn't necessarily imply tyranny and domination, but actually more responsibility and obligation especially in married life. People who decide to treat the concepts and positions in the Jewish Bible in such a superficial and narrow way, which is essentially foolishness and misuse of scripture, simply show their own disrespect for the wisdom and authority of scripture and the Deity who wrote and inspired it, whether they claim to believe in that Deity or not.]
So, to get back to the point, Deity Himself showed that taking another man's wife is a crime guilty of death. This is confirmed in the Israeli Divine Law in Exodus 20:13 and Leviticus 20:10, showing that the penalty is just the same. So adultery, the taking of another man's wife, is forbidden to a non-Jew.
To finish this little section, a question may be raised about divorce. Is it permissible for a non-Jew? How is it meant to be viewed? Well, looking at scripture and reading Karaite and Rabbinic literature which agrees with scripture and clarifies the subject, then it is apparent that divorce is permissible. This can be seen in Genesis 16 and 21. Abraham marries a second wife, Hagar (Genesis 16:3). It should be noted that she does become a wife, whether people say it was just a lesser wife or not, scripture says that she became a wife. In chapter 21, because of the tensions between Hagar and Ishmael, and Sarah and Isaac, Abraham decides to send Hagar away, with Ishmael. This is a divorce, sending a wife away, out of the husband's house in a permanent fashion in order to sever the marriage ties. This is confirmed in the way the Israeli Law Code mentions the active part of the divorce, or cutting off ("and he sends her out of his house" Deuteronomy 24:1f). It is the formal sign of a permanent separation. So divorce is permissible (see also http://www.karaites.org.uk/divorce_according_to_the_tora.shtml).
What about remarriage? Well as long as the woman hasn't married and divorced someone else during the time of divorce, remarriage is more than possible. But if the woman has been married to someone else and been divorced in the space of time after the first divorce, then there is some doubt about that. There are two different thoughts on this, and it depends on how you interpret Deuteronomy 24:4, which says:
... her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after that she is defiled; for that is abomination before YHWH; and you shall not cause the land to sin, which YHWH your Deity is giving you for an inheritance.
One thought, which is the opinion of the rabbis, is that remarriage is possible even if the woman has married and divorce someone else during the time since the first divorce (see Question 72 at http://www.asknoah.org/HTML%5Cq&a_general.html). This interpretation appears to take the phrase "for that is an abomination before YHWH" and links it tightly to the next phrase about causing the land, the land of Israel, to sin. Thus it limits the prohibition, that of marrying a woman who you've divorce but who has been remarried, to just the Israelites. But regardless of the basis, rabbis see it as ok for a non-Jewish man to remarry such a woman.
The other thought, my own thought, is that the phrase "it is an abomination before YHWH" is an absolute statement. Although the next phrase does follow it, it doesn't mean that they are inseparable. It is read as "This is an abomination before YHWH and since the land is holy, then doing such things causes a horrible sin to occur in it". The question is this: if it is an abomination before YHWH, does it matter if such a thing is done elsewhere in the world? If it is abhorrent to Yahweh, then regardless of where you are, it is simply abhorrent. If a Jew was to do this "abhorrent thing" in a different land, would that make it better? No. This way of thinking does not discount the importance of the land of Israel. This clause would be given to emphasis the need to respect the land. But it still seems that for a man to marry a wife who he had divorced, but who had been married to another and divorced from that other one, would seem abhorrent to Yahweh regardless who did it. So I would see that as wrong.
But how should we see divorce? Should we take it as lightly as the modern western culture seems to? I believe the metaphor of the man and the woman being one flesh really helps here, and a teaching from a rabbi I respect, I believe it was Dovid Gottlieb, brought out the simply truth and biblical derivation of this idea. If man and woman is one flesh, then divorce is the same as cutting off some significant part of your body. Who would really chop off a limb cheaply? What about stabbing out your eye, simply because it had a hair in it? No, most people have their limbs amputated if it is horribly and terminally diseased in a way that could spread through the body, like gangrene or some forms of cancer. It is only when things become that grave, and when much attempt has been made at saving that part of your body through medicines, should that limb or body-part be cut off. It is the same with marriage and divorce. If it is that serious and grave (and I would never limit it to just sexual sins as christians do), be it that one of the spouses becomes an unrepentant idolator and much time has been spent trying to persuade them, or that one spouse habitually and unrepentantly (and I mean true repentance) abuses, crushes, mutilates, manhandles the other, physically or mentally, (these are only examples), then divorce should become an option that can be taken. If the marriage was really taken, at any time, as the two becoming one flesh, then divorce, the cutting off, has this seriousness as well.
Back
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.