Jump to content
  • Welcome to the TransPulse Forums!

    We offer a safe, inclusive community for transgender and gender non-conforming folks, as well as their loved ones, to find support and information.  Join today!

Has Biblical Marriage Always Been Only 1 Man + 1 Woman?


Guest DesiB

Recommended Posts

Guest DesiB

My Sunday Bible Study: Has marriage really always been only “1 man + 1 woman,” even Biblically?

[Note: All quotes are from my NRSV Study Bible.]

Abraham’s wife’s slave Hagar gave birth to Ishmael (Gen. 16), then his wife Sarah gave birth to Isaac (Gen. 21).
“Abraham gave all he had to Isaac. But to the sons of his concubines Abraham gave gifts, while he was still living, and he sent them away from his son Isaac, eastward to the east country.” (Gen. 25.5-6)

“When Esau was forty years old, he married Judith daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Basemath daughter of Elom the Hittite.” (Gen. 26.34) . . . “So when Esau saw that the Canaanite women did not please his father Isaac, Esau went to Ishmael and took Mahalath daughter of Abraham’s son Ashmael, and sister of Nebaioth, to be his wife in addition to the wives he had.” (Gen. 28.8-9)

Jacob fell in love with Laban’s second daughter Rachel and promised to serve him for seven years to earn her hand in marriage. But on the wedding night he was tricked and got the eldest daughter Leah. So he had to work another seven years to earn Rachel as a second wife. (Gen. 29. 15-30) The next chapter describes how Leah gave birth to four sons, but Rachel was barren from the start and had Jacob use her maid Bilhah to bare sons on her behalf.
“When Leah saw that she had ceased bearing children, she took her maid Zilpah and gave her to Jacob as a wife. Then Leah’s maid Lilpah bore Jacob a son.” (Gen. 30.9-10)

[i’m sure there are tons more ‘Old Testament’ examples, so I’m just going to jump ahead to the ‘New Testament’ for now.]
From the above it is clear that Biblical marriage has not always been only 1 man + 1 woman. And in what follows we see that even divorce laws evolve.

“Some Pharisees came to him, and to test him they asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?’ 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?” So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” They said to him, ‘Why then did Moses command us to give a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her?’ He said to them, ‘It was because you 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 unchastity, and marries another commits adultery.’” (Mat. 19.3-9)

Next is where it gets really interesting.
“His disciples said to him, ‘If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.’ But he said to them, ‘Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.’” (Matt. 19.10-12)

There are 3 types of eunuchs: 1) Born that way—various types of intersex births, 2) Manmade—medical intervention for various reasons. In those days it was most likely for reasons such as to guard female royalty or even to preserve high singing voices. Regardless, Jesus referenced the practice without any negative connotation. 3) Self-made—voluntary permanent chastity.

“Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife. But if you marry, you do not sin, and if a virgin marries, she does not sin.” . . . “If anyone thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his fiancé, if his passions are strong, and so it has to be, let him marry as he wishes; it is no sin. Let them marry.” (I Cor. 7.27-28, 36)

Link to comment
Guest Mickey

In Biblical times there were 6 different, recognized, and accepted genders. Saris, MtF trans* people, was mistranslated to eunuch.

Link to comment
Guest DesiB

In Biblical times there were 6 different, recognized, and accepted genders. Saris, MtF trans* people, was mistranslated to eunuch.

You have to be more specific about Biblical times since it spans so many centuries, but since you're referring to the Hebrew word "Saris" that at least tells me you're talking about 'Old Testament' times. And there are ongoing scholarly debates over the physical condition of 'bedchamber attendants' who were used during various times and places throughout that broad period of writing. It's a fascinating topic in and of itself.

But the word "eunuch," which is a Greek word used in the verses I quoted from Matthew 19, originally written in Greek during the Roman Empire, was not "mistranslated."

Link to comment
Guest Razilee

Jesus recognized five, that I can see, male, female (Mt 19:4) and three kinds of "eunuchs", those born that way (intersex). those neutered by others (transsexuals) and those who who refrain from sexual activity voluntarily (asexuals). (Mt 19:12) Another favorite verse of mine is: "To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant -- to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever." (Isa 56:4-5) It makes me feel better about being unmarried and childless. :D

Love,

Raz

Link to comment

Ok, I'm struck for the first time about "male and female he made them...And the 2 shall become one flesh" I'm still trying to put both pieces together and become one me.

Sorry, it's odd and not in context but thats me

Link to comment
Guest DesiB

Ok, I'm struck for the first time about "male and female he made them...And the 2 shall become one flesh" I'm still trying to put both pieces together and become one me.

Sorry, it's odd and not in context but thats me

A male and a female can join in sexual intercourse to "become one flesh" in the form of offspring. But this understanding of the metaphor does not really help in the application to a question on divorce and whether the two can or should ever be separated. And I'm certain it did not mean one individual getting the masculine and feminine sides together internally.

My theory is that just as the religion had evolved into one of monotheism, the sexual ethic had also evolved into one of monogamy (as a second best option for those who could not handle becoming eunuchs either physically or just in practice, since they believed they were living in the final days and there was no need for reproduction).

Link to comment

Jesus recognized five, that I can see, male, female (Mt 19:4) and three kinds of "eunuchs", those born that way (intersex). those neutered by others (transsexuals) and those who who refrain from sexual activity voluntarily (asexuals). (Mt 19:12) Another favorite verse of mine is: "To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant -- to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever." (Isa 56:4-5) It makes me feel better about being unmarried and childless. :D

Love,

Raz

Raz, I brought this question up somewhere a few years back when the procreation debate came up. Some quarters of society dogmatically believe that procreation is why people are created for. I questioned what about people who for one reason or another cannot bear children. What about folks who should not to have children and abstain from sexual relations. I asked does that make them 'less than worthy' of God's mercy and goodness? My answer was a resounding NO.

Link to comment
Guest Mickey

I guess my point with that pic showing the different genders was that in those times, they didn't understand orientation and gender identity the way we do now. For them in those times, and yes this would still be in the New Testament times as well, and even after that, it was just about gender variation. But even in the first century after the Cross, there were marriage certificates showing the marriage of 2 men, in the church. Just some of the stuff I've learned over the last 2 years or so.

Link to comment
  • Admin

We also seem to have a little problem when it comes to God, who is neither male or female, but transcends gender in the Image put into us. This is a spiritual image and not a bodily likeness, since God has no "body" per se, until we come to Jeshua Bar Abbas. Even there, Jesus is and showed two spirits which culminated on the Cross. In my rite of re-naming back on June 7th, even my Bishop recognized the transcendence of the image that was placed in me. It is not the body that adores and communes with God and Jesus, but the inner image which also transcends a single gender. "And" as in "male and female" is inclusive, whereas if it had been "male or female" makes them exclusive. This is tough for the pseudo-literalists to even get on board with, since they even mistake the literal meaning of some of it.

Link to comment

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Who's Online   10 Members, 0 Anonymous, 92 Guests (See full list)

    • Jet McCartney
    • rachel w
    • missyjo
    • Ashley0616
    • Lydia_R
    • Abigail Genevieve
    • MaeBe
    • Karen Carey
    • SamC
    • atlantis63
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Forum Statistics

    • Total Topics
      80.7k
    • Total Posts
      768.8k
  • Member Statistics

    • Total Members
      12,038
    • Most Online
      8,356

    Justine76
    Newest Member
    Justine76
    Joined
  • Today's Birthdays

    1. April Marie
      April Marie
    2. daniela...
      daniela...
      (59 years old)
    3. Emily May
      Emily May
    4. Felixr
      Felixr
      (20 years old)
    5. Leann
      Leann
      (56 years old)
  • Posts

    • Ashley0616
      calmness:  : a period or condition of freedom from storms, high winds, or rough activity of water : complete absence of wind or presence of wind having a speed no greater than one mile (1.6 kilometers) per hour see Beaufort Scale Table : a state of tranquility
    • Ashley0616
    • Ashley0616
    • Ashley0616
    • Lydia_R
      And I love your new profile pic @Ivy!  Wow, looking great!
    • Jani
      I hadn't heard about the John Sebastian invite.  Interesting.  He certainly would have blended in well with the other three. 
    • Lydia_R
      Thanks for responding @Vidanjali!  You rock!   Yes, I'm really good at trig and most of what you were writing about is old hat to me.  I studied trig while I was living on the streets in 2004.  After about two weeks of studying the Plane Trigonometry book that I had checked out from the Seattle library, I woke up at 3am on the sidewalk and realized that .5 is the sine of 30 degrees and .523 is the circumference measure in radians up to 30 degrees.  After that, it all opened up for me and a few weeks later I coded an animated webpage slinky.  I started getting into coding perspective properly.  And then after a month or two of that, I went back to applying my new trigonometry skills to the collision detection I was coding previously only with ratios to make a video game I was calling Micropede, a Centipede type of clone.   And then a few months after that I coded an Asteroids type clone with shields in about 4 hours that I called Bumper Bubbles.  And with a bunch of effort of getting off of the streets and more studying, I went on to have a computer programming career for the last 20 years.  I always get a kick out of getting paid to do trigonometry, but I'm certainly not doing it every day.   This line of thought recently has come around to the old question of how to code the trigonometric function.  What is the code inside of the multiplication, division and trig functions in a calculator?  It seems that multiplication has the 10x10 multiplication table coded in as constants and then it loops to do numbers larger than 100 (for base 10).  Division is just like how you would solve a division problem.  It involves guessing.  So a computer function to do division would have to go through loops while it guesses and uses multiplication.   Then comes the trigonometric function.  I've been thinking a lot lately that pi is calculated by producing a large physical wheel and rolling it out on a flat surface and measuring it.  When I was on the streets, I would take a Starbucks stir stick and put a hole in either end of it.  I'd put a push pin in one end and then my pen in the other end.  That is one way to draw a perfect circle and it doesn't matter whether the stir stick is straight because the line between two points is always a perfect line.  The other way to do it is with a string instead of the stir stick.   When I was on the streets, it made me wonder how humans made perfectly straight, flat objects.  My theory is that it evolved over time.  Once you can create a perfect circle or saw blade, then you can use that to make a flat surface.  But the trick is a crap in crap out deal.  You have to start with a really perfect circle.   But you have introduced a new concept here with the square root deal.  Andy has been mentioning square roots with a song called the square root of two that he listens to.  And that brings up irrational numbers and personally, with where I am at in math, I don't place a huge significance on "irrational" yet.  I mean, would the same number have the same infinitely repeating pattern if it were expressed in a different base?  Maybe it does.  I don't tend to find the concept of that all too interesting.  But how you mention sqrt(3)/2 is interesting and is something I haven't considered yet.   You know, I could have been doing drugs on the streets, but I figured that I'd have a better chance at making a good life for myself if I studied this stuff and well, I was 33yo when I wound up on the streets and it's not like I felt I was missing out on some big drug experience that I hadn't experienced before.  I got to the point where math and programming were more fun that drugs, so like that, I guess math became my drug of choice.  Or work.  Math is an inexpensive hobby.   Hugs, Lydia_n  
    • Abigail Genevieve
      Right now I am more concerned about tornadoes than anything else, but then I am not all that concerned about tornadoes.   If there is a watch or a warning I will take appropriate action.   I take the precautions any woman takes when out in public in general. 
    • Willow
      @KymmieL yes you’d better avoid the Snap on Truck EXCEPT. (Oh oh) when you need a special tool.  They are very good at having all the Dealerships only tools.  They somehow get ahold of one (or made it in the first place) those things that keep dealers in that special place of being the only place certain things can be fixed.     I once had a FiAT X1/9. Mid engine sports car.  To adjust the timing, a relatively simple thing to do back in the 70s, you had two choices, cut a hole in the firewall to put a wrench through or buy or make a special wrench.  Parts department at the dealer swore there was no such special wrench.  After much research I found the part number.  (Internet did not exist yet). It was before IBM made the first PC. The parts manager finally agreed to get me the part but only if I paid up front and it was mine, regardless of what came in.  It was exactly what I needed a 14mm wrench with a specially shaped handle. That went around the distributor cap and turned backwards.  Looked somewhat like the letter C with an open wrench head at the bottom.     Fix It Again Tony  
    • Ashley0616
      It depends on the circumstances. 
    • atlantis63
      if I can eat it, sausages wrapped in bacon   I say if I can eat it, I've been eating chocolate this afternoon.. lots of chocolate
    • Vidanjali
      After I put on a binder I lie on my back on my bed and let gravity do its thing while I adjust the binder. This helps to make the chest flat and uniform. However its not perfect. If you have any sizeable chest, which I definitely do, there's going to be some bulge and I think that's unavoidable. But I have found letting the boobs drop off to the sides to be better than the mass of them being front and center. You will get some bulk along the sides, but I think that's easier to obscure with clothing and posture.   Of course it helps to have a properly sized binder. The one you were given, is it too small or too big? If it's too big and if you have some sewing skills, you can try altering it.
    • Willow
      Good morning    it’s back to work today. Noon.  Turned down another car.  Yes it was everything they said it was but not exactly what I wanted.   @awkward-yet-sweet you are right, when tools were made in the US like the Black and Decker/DeWalt line made in Baltimore or Rockwell Delta Milwaukee and so many others.  But now they are all made in the same factories overseas using the same parts.  It is really difficult to get good tools anymore.  I am slowly switching any power tools to battery operated, but that also means you have to stick to one brand so that you don’t have lots of incompatible batteries and chargers.  In some cases like DeWalt verses Black and Decker.  I started with DeWalt so there I am.  And now they are moving from 20v to 40v.  Anything to keep you buying new.     As for craftsman they always had a warrantied for for life and a line that wasn’t, they just didn’t tell customers that until you tried to get it replaced.  My wrenches are all from before Sears went out and had a lifetime warranty but that is worthless now because it would be replaced the junk.   Willow
    • Vidanjali
      Oops don't know how that second diagram got in there at the end. Forgive the redundancy. 
    • Vidanjali
      I may be telling you things you already know, but I enjoy the discussion.   The .523 is the angle measurement in radians. The .523 is actually a truncated irrational number (a number with infinitely long, nonrepeating decimal expansion). To six decimal places, it is 0.523599. Therefore, rounded to three decimal places, we actually have 0.524 as the 4th decimal place is 5 or greater. It is an irrational number because the conversion from degrees to radians entails the value pi which is irrational. The conversion is 30 X pi/180 because the angle measurement pi radians is equivalent to 180 degrees.     If .577 were a rational number, you can read the decimal, "five hundred seventy seven thousandths" and then write the fraction, 577/1000. From there you would try to simplify the fraction, but this fraction does not simplify because 577 is a prime number (i.e. therefore, 577 and 1000 have no common factors to cancel). But .557 is also a truncated irrational number whose origin is tan(30 degrees) = 1/sqrt(3), where "sqrt" is an abbreviation for square root. It is irrational because sqrt(3) is irrational. (In fact, the square root of any prime number is irrational). Irrational numbers are so called because they cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers. You can, however, acquire approximate values working with truncated irrational values such as .524 and .577.     True that trig requires some memorization, but you can develop intuition as well. Do you understand trig in terms of the unit circle (circle with radius 1) centered at the origin of a rectangular coordinate system? And have you worked with calculations using angles measured in radians? This helps with visualization and makes memorization of values less critical. But it is critical to realize that most of the decimals which arise from trig calculations are irrational and their expressions are approximate. It is a lot of fun and indeed there are many applications in the arts.     It's all about revolution and rotation. So is the concept of trig from the point of view of the unit circle. Consider how sundials were developed. Some time ago I watched a documentary series on ancient American civilizations and was impressed about their advanced knowledge of astronomy. There was one ancient site which was built like a sun dial. At specific hours of the day, the sun would align in such a way as to shine through specific constructions of the site creating stunning displays of symmetrical light and shadows. There were other sites where astronomical calendars were discovered showing the position of the sun during the solstices and equinoxes. In particular, this demonstrates the relationship between rotation of radius about a unit circle and the graph of the sine function which is a waveform.          To reiterate, tan(30 degrees) = tan(pi/6 radians) = 1/sqrt(3) which is approximately equal to .577.  And 30 degrees which is equivalent to pi/6 radians is approximately equal to 0.52359877559 which rounded to three decimal places is actually .524 (not .523). See if you can visualize this. Draw a set of axes, one vertical, the other horizontal. The point at which the axes cross is called the origin. Mark an arbitrary unit of 1 to the right, left, above, and below the origin on the axes. Now draw a circle whose circumference touches all four of those points. You have a unit circle. Now consider the radius of the circle which coincides with the right side of the horizontal axis as the base of a right triangle. Rotate the radius from its initial position counterclockwise by 30 degrees. Now drop a vertical line from that point on the circle and you have a right triangle with one angle of 30 degrees. It looks like this.   tan(30 degrees) = length of opposite side / length of adjacent side. Well, we know the length of the hypotenuse of this triangle because we designed it using the unit circle. The coordinates noted on the above diagram give the cosine and sine of 30 degrees, respectively. Note that sine(30 degrees) = opposite/hypotenuse = (1/2)/1 = 1/2. cosine(30 degrees) = adjacent/hypotenuse = (sqrt(3)/2)/1 = sqrt(3)/2. And tan(30 degrees) = opposite/adjacent = (1/2)/(sqrt(3)/2) = 2/(2sqrt(3)) = 1/sqrt(3) which is approximately equal to .577     Sure enough. You just need to consider that you're working with approximations of irrational numbers. I suggest using the numbers as ratios involving pi. I believe you will have better results.     It is fun stuff. 
  • Upcoming Events

Contact TransPulse

TransPulse can be contacted in the following ways:

Email: Click Here.

To report an error on this page.

Legal

Your use of this site is subject to the following rules and policies, whether you have read them or not.

Terms of Use
Privacy Policy
DMCA Policy
Community Rules

Hosting

Upstream hosting for TransPulse provided by QnEZ.

Sponsorship

Special consideration for TransPulse is kindly provided by The Breast Form Store.
×
×
  • Create New...