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1: When does marriage begin? - Sex

Just associations across the different passages. It appeared to utilize the different words for those different categories or make the distinctions sometimes within the same verse as I went through them. At least in the OT, but it seems to bear out in the NT as well.

I’m open to being incorrect, thats just what the majority of the passages seemed to indicate.
 
Quick check:

Greek: Harlot and whore both appear to derive from pornos, so basic sex trafficking.

Hebrew: Appears to have a couple of different words, but not used strictly one-for-one and one-for-the-other. Most interesting find was the idea of being "well-fed therefore wanton", perhaps pointing to a difference between the single woman trading sex for sustenance and the married woman that has a sex partner but is just bored.

Or something. Gotta run at this point. Something to dig into later.

@IshChayil, any thoughts?
 
Is Jesus referring to sexual desire specifically or coveting her, there?

Romans 7:7 KJV
[7] What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.
I might call that a distinction without a difference, especially since Romans 7:7 interchanged the words.
 
S
Any woman? Or just a married woman? I thought adultery could only happen with a married woman? It would help if you would be more precise in your arguments Zec. Apparently you’re finding satisfaction dunking on the kiddie goal.
Petty. You know what I meant. Obviously I meant a married woman. Moving on.

Genesis 34:7, 8 . . . . because he (Shechem) had wrought folly in Israel in lying with Jacob's daughter; which thing ought not to be done. And Hamor communed with them, saying, The soul of my son Shechem longeth for your daughter: I pray you give her him to wife.
This is yet another passage that doesn't indicate that she was his wife just by sex alone, and he was even holding her hostage at the time so the sex + cohabitation clause could be argued. Still not his wife yet without the permission of the father. Sex + cohabitation - consent of the father for a maiden = no marriage.

This passage is entirely silent on the status of Jacob's daughter. It is a historical account of things that happened and in no way a statement of God's standards. No one in this story acted with righteousness and the folly that was wrought in Israel was most likely the intermarrying with a foreign people, which we know from Abraham's extreme efforts to get a bride for Isaac was something that was frowned upon. This one isn't quite as bizarre as the Laban reference but it offers us no insight into when a marriage is formed. It doesn't indicate that a marriage was formed by the sex but it doesn't indicate it wasn't either.

I was going to refute the rest of this post point by point but there are no points. Once again you are taking unrelated verses and trying to extrapolate out to your desired conclusions. Most of them take no stance on marriage at all other than to list as the context for the sin in question. A list of verses prohibiting whoredom is interesting and maybe tangentially related but they are about a different topic, whoring. We all know that whoring is a thing. We're talking about the opposite of whoring, Godly marriage. Yes they both involve sex but at two extremes of the spectrum and if you think about it the very idea that rampant sexual profligacy is so bad that it's prohibited speaks strongly to how significant sex is. It's interesting that on one hand you say sex is no big deal and then on the other hand we have it being a major sin. It seems like a not insignificant disconnect.

I of course reject completely your claim of having identified new categories of sin, with whoredom, adultery and fornication assigned to different statuses of woman. I'm not going to invest the time in to looking but I bet those words are often interchanged in the original languages.

We're really spinning our tires here. We've been over all of the directly related verses and a lot of the indirectly related verses. Now we've moved on to what happens after a marriage is ended but that isn't getting us any closer to how it was formed.

I see that you have more posts and that @andrew has chimed in but I haven't read those yet so I am still willing to see some evidence but so far nothing you've brought up seems relevant.
 
I didn't want to dilute the impact of this statement by including it in that insanely long post above, but I wanted to extrapolate from this into some verses in the New Testament that I have always been a little bit unclear on. My study this morning has definitely cleared that up for me.

Hebrews 13:4 Marriage is honorable in all and undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.

A married woman that has sex outside of her marriage is an adulteress, her actions are considered adultery and the male side of the equation is considered an adulterer.
An unmarried woman that has sex is divided into two categories based upon payment.
  • Payment + sex - intent to marry = whoredom.
  • Sex alone - payment - intent to marry = fornication or profaning her fathers house/folly
A man who has sex for money with no intention of marriage is a whoremonger.
A man who commits villany /folly (Jer 29:23) or fornication with an unmarried woman is still culpable but this sin can be wiped away when and only when he satisfies conditions making her his wife.

Practical application re: polygyny IMO

Sir: if in the course of your search for another wife you engage in sex outside of covenant for any reason and fail for any reason to convert that into a marriage/covenant you are guilty of villany/folly or fornication.

Ma'am: if in the course of your search for a husband and family you engage in sex outside of covenant for any reason and fail for any reason to convert that into a marriage/covenant, you are guilty of villany/folly or fornication.

Can you have sex with intent to marry and it be ok? Absolutely! My advice for the protection of both parties is to make it evident ASAP that that was your intent. Draft a ketubah, ensure that there are witnesses to this fact even if it is after the fact. If possible, pay a bride price of some sort even if it is to her. A ring, even if you choose not to wear it on her "marriage finger". Do something! This is a practical way to strengthen the foundation of your house beyond "he said", "she said".

The best way to avoid all this? Covenant! Covenant! Covenant! Then sex. Lots and lots of sex!
After the scripture reference you made the rest of this up from whole cloth. Some of it may be good practical advice but that's it. Some of it is just wrong, the definition of whoremonger I believe is much bigger than this.

But you continue to want to connect fornication to sex with an unmarried woman. You REALLY need to back this definition up in Scripture. God's Laws are always clear and if this is indeed a sin then He will have enumerated it for us. And this is the real danger of what you're teaching here VV76, you could be actively leading people into adultery, telling them that their sexual liaisons are essentially meaningless picadilloes that have no real impact on their marriageability. I would want a lot more creditable sources than Lathan and Shechem before I told someone they were free to flirt with adultery.
 
This passage is entirely silent on the status of Jacob's daughter. It is a historical account of things that happened and in no way a statement of God's standards. No one in this story acted with righteousness and the folly that was wrought in Israel was most likely the intermarrying with a foreign people,

Can you prove that she was married? I think not. Especially scripturally. Based on that and the fact that she’s still a part of her fathers household I think it’s safe to say that she’s a maiden. (This is further backed up by multiple extra Biblical sources as well, one of which places her age at 12).

As to being an example of Gods standards, all of her brothers had been raised with some understanding of God’s standards and they all agree that it was folly and shouldn’t have been done in Israel.
Several of these same brothers end up married to women that fall into this category of foreign people so that (along with the fact that this isn’t mentioned) is not a plausible answer to folly, especially when the Hebrew word that’s used here is used everywhere else in scripture for an unbetrothed maiden that’s slept with.
 
Lol, this is great. I'm not sure what extra-biblical source you found this in but it's good to know I can have sex with harlots as long as I don't marry them. I don't know why I'm fighting you so much on this. It really sounds like a good deal. I used to love having sex with harlots.
Obviously you missed the part of the passage that says sex with a harlot is fornication
 
But you continue to want to connect fornication to sex with an unmarried woman. You REALLY need to back this definition up in Scripture. God's Laws are always clear and if this is indeed a sin then He will have enumerated it for us.
Deut. 22:21 . . . if the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel, . . . they shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her fathers house

BTW. This is the same Hebrew and English word for folly used to describe Dinah’s case

Hosea 4:14 I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredom, nor your spouses when they commit adultery,

You mentioned earlier that the New Testament word porneia/fornication doesnt include sex with an unmarried woman. Unfortunately for that premise, the New Testament often quotes the Old Testament such as 1 Corinthians 10:8. Neither let us commit fornication, as some of them committed and fell in one day three and twenty thousand. This is crossreferenced to Numbers 25:1,9 And Israel abode in Shittim, and the people began to commit whoredom with the daughters (bath) of Moab. 9. And those that died in the plague were twenty and four thousand.
This also ties in with the doctrine of Baalam in Rev. 2:14 where he references that it included things offered to idols and fornication. Baalam was the one who advised Moab to offer their daughters to Israel thus causing them to commit porniea/fornication /whoredom/zanah which is the same word used by Dinahs brothers when they said, “Should he deal with our sister as with a “zanah” Gen. 34:31

In case you missed that, porneia includes sex with unmarried women. Sex with an unmarried woman is fornication.
 
Obviously you missed the part of the passage that says sex with a harlot is fornication

This is why I'm disengaging Joe, you're not serious. Of course sex with a harlot is a forbidden sexual act, that's why it was called fornication. You see how circular this has become? You have to start with a definition of fornication. Whatever your starting point is dictates your ending point. We're on two entirely different starting points.
And that's it, I'm done. Anyone who is serious about figuring out the truth of this can surely do so by now. I look forward to future discussions but I will not be weighing in on this one anymore.
 
Position 1: Sex forms a marriage.

If a man and woman have sex, by default they are married. However:
  • If they were ineligible to marry (e.g. if the woman was already married, so the sex was adultery), they are not married.
  • If the woman was a virgin, her father has the right to annul the marriage.
The term "One flesh" is synonymous with marriage. When they become "one flesh", through sexual intercourse (physical act + potential formation of offspring / family), they are married.
Adam and Eve were put together by God, but were only married once they became "one flesh" through sexual intercourse.

Please post further refinements or explanations of this perspective, with scriptural backing, below.

So . . . . In an attempt to try to bring this back around to something resembling edification and growing in knowledge. . . . . I’ll try to recap where I am as succinctly as possible

Sex can form a marriage, if the intent and consent of both parties intend for that to be what the sex consummated
However, I don’t believe that Sex automatically forms that union (as in Sex alone) for the following examples

Leviticus 19:29, indicates that a father can receive payment (indicating consent to sex) and prostitute his daughter resulting in her being a whore, not a wife. He’s only consenting to rent his daughters assets out not to sell them outright as in a bride price. In Deuteronomy 23:18 apparently this same man or any one is forbidden from bringing those receipts to the Temple because it is generated from prostitution not betrothal/ bride price. If sex automatically = marriage, there would be no way to prostitute his daughter.

Leviticus 21:7&9 indicates that an unmarried daughter that has sex while in her fathers house commits folly and profaned her fathers house. In Ezekiel 23:8 a virgin is lain with an it results in her being a whore, not a wife. In Deuteronomy 22:21 a young woman is married and found to not be a virgin. She’s not considered to be someone else’s wife and no search for her non existent husband is performed, and her new man is not charged with adultery.


While I believe its true that a marriage can be formed without money, ketubah or the fathers blessing, there has to be something that differentiates this act that forms marriage with the other act that does not form marriage but fornication.
 
This is why I'm disengaging Joe, you're not serious.

I’d say that the minutes I’ve spent examining your (3) proof texts, and the hours I’ve spent examining the rest of Scripture disproves this and shows which one is serious.

The 1 Cor 6:13-18 passage is not just about fornication with a harlot, and its not just about marrying a harlot, It’s about both. Don’t fornicate with a harlot, and don’t be joined to a harlot. These are not one and the same thing as both the New and Old Testament have examples of fornicating without being bound or joined. If you think they are perhaps you should provide something beyond opinion to show how there’s no connection between fornication and sex with a woman not your wife.
 
Given that this discussion seems to have been put to bed by its founder, I will begin a related discussion in a new thread . . . "CONTEXTile Mill-ing Around"

I'm not stopping the discussion. Just keeping reality in mind.

Oh, I was just referring to the part of the discussion that was veering away from your original intention.
 
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