Juan Cole: No, GOP, Biblical Marriage Was Not Between One Man and One Woman

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/31005-focus-no-gop-biblical-marriage-was-not-between-one-man-and-one-woman

The freak-out by the Republican presidential candidates over the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage provokes me to revise and reprise the points below. Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee have formally pledged: “We will not honor any decision by the Supreme Court which will force us to violate a clear biblical understanding of marriage as solely the union of one man and one woman.” Sen. Ted Cruz also called on Americans to ignore the SCOTUS ruling.

Does that mean the rest of us can repudiate the decision making W. president in 2000, and can refuse to recognize corporations as persons?

In any case, the Bible doesn’t actually say anything at all about homosexuality, since it is a form of identity that only came into being in modernity. (Same-sex intimacy has been there all along, but in most premodern societies it was not a subculture, though medieval male bortherhoods were common and in South Asia there were hijras).

But wackiest of all is the idea that the Bible sees marriage as between one man and one woman. I don’t personally get how you could, like, actually read the Bible and come to that conclusion (see below). Even if you wanted to argue that the New Testament abrogates all the laws in the Hebrew Bible, there isn’t anything in the NT that clearly forbids polygamy, either, and it was sometimes practiced in the early church, including by priests. Josephus makes it clear that polygamy was still practiced among the Jews of Jesus’ time. Any attempt to shoe-horn stray statements in the New Testament about a man and a woman being married into a commandment of monogamy is anachronistic. Likely it was the Roman Empire that established Christian monogamy as a norm over the centuries. The Church was not even allowed to marry people until well after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, since it was an imperial prerogative.


<snip>

And as for getting married biblically, you can do that in all kinds of imaginative ways– take two wives and someone else’s sex slave as Abraham did, or 300 sex slaves as Solomon did (not to mention the 700 wives), or your brother’s widow in addition to your own wife. And remember, if your sex slave runs away because you’re cruel to the person, the Bible (Philemon) says that other people have the duty to return the slave to you, i.e. basically imposes the duty of trafficking slaves back to sadistic sex maniacs who exploit them. But if the owner is nice and a good Christian, he might consider letting the sex slave go. But he doesn’t have to.

[merrily]

1. The Bible mentioned husbands and wives, but not many weddings.

The only thing I know about a Biblical wedding is, serve the best wine first at the reception. And, unless a miracle worker is on your guest list, don't run out of wine before you run out of drinking guests.

Fun facts: Sara, the wife of Abraham, a man so beloved of God that he was chosen to found Judaism, was Abraham's half sister. The Bible mentions no marriage ceremony, though.

Rather than risk some lust filled ruler's wrath by acknowledging Sara as his wife, Abraham stayed silent, knowing the ruler wanted to bang Sara. When Sara could not give Abraham a son, Abraham knocked up his wife's, um, handmaiden (personal slave). When his wife did give him a son after all, he threw out his wife's slave and his own firstborn son to try to fend for themselves on a road, in an era where females of any kind did not fare well for themselves, even without being unwed mothers with a babe in arms

David, so beloved of God that God chose David to be an ancestor of Jesus, saw a married woman bathing, lusted, and then tried to arrange things so that her husband would die on a battlefield, presumably so that David could bang Bathsheba with a clear conscience.

Biblical family values, including marriages, may not be exactly as the RW may want us to imagine.

[ladyVet]

8. Talk about your revisionist history! nt

[trusty elf]

2. 1 man and 1 wombat

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[Martin Eden]

4. Or 1 beagle & 1 racoon???

Methinks that was photoshopped.

[liberal N proud]

3. Modern Christianity cherry picks, morphs and twists the scripture to meet its needs

And it is all about controlling the flock.

[Igel]

5. Yes, sadly, it does.

So is Krugman Xian and talking about one who actually is working within that belief system or is he "atheist-splainin'" or playing some other "I'm not one of you, but I'll tell you what I think it is you actually believe and why it is you have to believe it&quot and doing the manipulating?

Because what a lot of people do is precisely "mansplaining" and such transposed to religious systems.

[vinny9698]

6. The practical reason for polygamy in ancient times

When warriors were getting ready to go to war, they knew some were surely going to die. They would make pacs among themselves to take care of each other's families.To treat them like their own family. So, after the battle, the widows would move in with the surviving warriors.

[Orsino]

7. The Bible does indeed say things about homosexuality.

Stupid, cruel and dismissive things.