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What constitutes the marriage bed?

Memphis Dwight

Memphis Dwight

Member
The ushering in of the New Testament was a change from the old religious system to the one
we are currently under. That which pertained to religious activity (animal sacrifices, etc) changed. But marriage did not.

The marriage bed came before the law of Moses and the marriage bed is here long after it.

First let us see what the writer of Hebrews says of the marriage bed:

Marriage [is] honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge. Heb 13:4

Alright so we see a line being drawn. On one side is the marriage bed and on the other is whoremongering (fornication) & adultery.

Concubinage: Which side of the line is it on? Is it on the side of the line which is said to be honorable? Or the other side, which is not? A couple of connected passages should clear this up.

Gen 35:22
And it came to pass, when Israel dwelt in that land, that Reuben went and lay with Bilhah his father's concubine: and Israel heard [it]. Now the sons of Jacob were twelve:

Reuben went in to his father's concubine. Was the concubine something that amounted to fornication or adultery? Or was it the marriage bed that is honorable in all?

One more verse ought to clear that up. 1 Chronicles 5:1

Now the sons of Reuben the firstborn of Israel, (for he [was] thefirstborn; but, forasmuch as he defiled his father's bed, hisbirthright was given unto the sons of Joseph the son of Israel: and thegenealogy is not to be reckoned after the birthright.


The NIV reads like this:

The sons of Reuben the firstborn of Israel (he was the firstborn, but when he defiled his father's marriage bed,his rights as firstborn were given to the sons of Joseph son of Israel;so he could not be listed in the genealogical record in accordance withhis birthright


So if I go about teaching that having a concubine is fornication, not only am I lying, I am, in effect, a forbidder of marriage. And that makes me a teacher of the doctrine of devils. 1 Tim 4:1-3

Hope you enjoy,
Dwight
 
I can't say that I'd agree with all the comments you made in the first part of your post, so I'll just leave that alone. But on the subject of what a conubine was, I think you are right.

I know there are all kinds of thoughts and commentary on this. But from Rabbinic & historic literature all I can gather is that a concubine was just a wife that doesn’t have a ketubah. She could be a slave or a freewoman, didn’t matter. She wasn’t second class or anything like that; that I’m aware of. In modern terms it’s kind of, sort of, like not getting a marriage license, in addition she would also not get an agreed upon inheritance. That is my understanding of the Hebrew mind on this matter. And that is the only way I can see it from scripture.

So I think your statement is correct:

So if I go about teaching that having a concubine is fornication, not only am I lying, I am, in effect, a forbidder of marriage. And that makes me a teacher of the doctrine of devils. 1 Tim 4:1-3
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But I think a lot of people will get a little bent out of shape over the term. Probably because their understanding of the term concubine is that of the Greco-Roman mind, which was basically a temporary or forced slave like relationship and generally immoral.

I made a post once titled Terminology and the Legal System which touched on this as well, but that didn’t seem well received; that's alright with me. I guess I think we as modern Americans have our own definitions and even if those definitions line up with an English dictionary we should keep in mind that those definitions don’t always line up with the Bible’s definitions or the way God’s people looked at things historically.

As far as what actually constitutes as a marriage. As far as I can tell, in most cases parental permission usually from the woman's father, agreement between the man and the woman followed by consummation.

I hope that's helpful to you. :)
 
Offhand (and it would involve a lot of discussion about a lot of verses), marriage was a contract between parties with the power to make that contract. In the case of those who had never married, that would be parents. Gifts were exchanged (Bride price and Dowry) to seal the bargain, and those two were married. Widowed and divorced women were said to have the power to make contracts. Men already married once seemed to have that capability as well.

If you did NOT come to the "Marriage Bed" with such a contract in place, you were a concubine. A wife of slavery, conquest or lower estate. It would seem that with the daughter seduced where a father refused her in marriage to her seducer, the compensation of the "dowry for the price of virgins" was paid. All of this suggests mechanisms that have fallen into disuse to such a degree that we have a hard time understanding them.

The problem comes in verses like Exodus 21:10, with words like עוֹנָה (`ownah), which occurs 1 time in 1 verse in the Hebrew concordance of the old Testament, and is translated as "duty of marriage." We have a very underdeveloped concept of what marriage is, and we've neglected it for the better part of the last 2000 years.

I'd love to have a Hebrew langauge version of Hebrews, to know what words were selected for "marriage bed," but it would seem that "Duty of Marriage" and "Marriage Bed" were not concepts that needed marriage to exist.
 
So basically we have this picture being given in Hebrews 13:4
rszlineq.jpg


With the scriptures I've supplied, it is clear that concubinage is in the marriage category and
those forbidding it are teaching a doctrine of devils.
 
I would say intercourse outside the "husband-wife" relationship is immoral. I wouldn't say that all husbands are in a marriage relationship with their wives. This can rather easily be proven with Keturah and varying descriptions of her in Genesis. The short form is that Keturah and Hagar are given the description of wife, AND concubine.

Thus you are not always "married" to your wife.
 
Hugh McBryde said:
Thus you are not always "married" to your wife.
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You guys leave me so confused. Is I married or ain't I? her dad gave her away and the preacher man said we wuz. We been livin' like we wuz, so I sure hopes we is. Now if'n I get me a second wife, an' her daddy's dead & gone, An' o' course it'll be a little hard to find a preacher man hereabouts to say the words an' all - will we be married once we agrees to it and consumates it?

dave
 
Biblical marriages, where they are described in detail, are always described as a sort of contract or covenant between the parties empowered to make such a contract/covenant. For an unmarried virgin daughter, only her Father, or nearest male relative (Mordecai) can contract for that marriage. Scripture does say that widows and divorced women can contract for themselves (Abigail).

From a Biblical standpoint, you indeed may not be married. We connect Husband to Wife to Marriage as if it is an all or nothing deal. Scripture doesn't.
 
Hugh,
regarding the things you speak of, what passages are these mentioned in?

Sometimes, even we who have come to the truth on polygyny need to reexamine our thoughts on the entire realm of sexual ethics.

For example, what about the case of Onan? He was instructed by his father to go in unto his brother's widow and knock her up. He went in unto her but then engaged in birth control. Didn't God take his life for spilling his seed on the ground? Why was God not upset that he had gone in to a woman that he was not married to? I dunno. Maybe we have these ideas about sex and they may not always be grounded in scripture.

And what about the man that gets a wife while in the position of being a slave? If he gets freed, he has the choice to leave. But he doesn't get to keep his wife. She stays with the master. If this isn't a form of "temporary marriage", then I don't know what is.

Today, we would say that anything outside the realm of traditional marriage is fornication. But I'm not so sure about that. Maybe there was fornication in the NT that Paul was condemning that was actually temple prostitution involving all forms of disgusting practices and not simple premarital sex.
Sure, there is the case of the corinthian man with his step mom, but that goes against the Levitical prohibitions.
Just thinking out loud here...
 
I'm going to say Onan was instructed to be a husband, in marriage, to Tamar. I base this on the fact that later, there is Levirate law, which makes clear that the wife of the dead brother becomes the wife of her new consort:
If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger: her husband's brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband's brother unto her."
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This brother became the husband of the "kinsman/redeemer" and all subsequent offspring was his, because only the first born inherited for the dead brother:
And it shall be, that the firstborn which she beareth shall succeed in the name of his brother which is dead, that his name be not put out of Israel."
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As to the man who took a wife as a slave, she was a wife of slavery, and belongs to her master, who is not her husband. This is about the only way I can make it work in my mind. She is a concubine, a possession of her master forever, though she is not a wife of one of his family. Her and her offspring stay in the possession of her master, and her husband only stays with her if he stays as a slave himself. Remember, Hebrew Female slaves, were slaves forever, not to be sold, unless redeemed:
If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her."
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I agree though that this does set up two possibilities, that a man who was husband to her and freed could arrange to have her redeemed out of slavery by her own family, and "re-acquire" her, and it also sets up the temporary wife scenario, but not the wife of marriage.

This is why I have arrived at a tentative conclusion that marriages in this country are really concubinage. They have all the trappings. The state is our master, and can reassign wives to other husbands, and the children stay with the slave wife, as opposed to the father. In a marriage, if the wife was cast out through divorce, she would not go out with her children, as Hagar did and as our "ex wives" often do.

I too am "thinking out loud" though I have given this much thought before. I think in terms of behavior, most of our wives are essentially concubines, not wives of marriage. If they were wives of marriage, they would not seek to divorce us, as they really cannot, in God's eyes. If they leave and take the children, by definition, are they not slaves of the state, and thus concubine wives given to us by our "master?" This is partly a rhetorical offering, I'm wondering about this myself.
 
Doggonit - you guys are going to make me get serious here. I've got absolutely no Biblical basis for this other than it is the tone of the whole Bible, and especially the New Testament.

Pure and simple, there are 3 components that make a marriage Holy in God's eyes:
1. Commitment to love one another until death do us part.
2. Love your wife as Christ loved the Church
3. Enter into the marriage with prayer and thanksgiving to the One who brought you together.

Remember that this is just my belief. I could give a whoop about what the state says. I will not be a slave to it, nor will I encourage such for my wife or children.

When I was young and dumber than now, I committed to my first wife, who was a believer in her own eyes only. She hated going to church because she got reminded that the Bible never claimed the sexes were equal. She later divorced me rather than get help for a persistent mental illness. My second wife and I are both believers - there will never be a divorce. Although we've had some tough times, prayer and thanksgiving have gotten us through every minefield so far. I have faith that it will continue to do so. The toughest thing to remember in any rough time is, in His time not ours.

I also have faith that should God see fit to bring another wife into our family at this stage of the game, she will be a wife, not a concubine. From what I've read of Jewish history prior to Christ, although it was rare, and somewhat scandalous, there were time when a woman left the home of her father and lived on her own working at some craft. These women were allowed to marry the man of their choice without permission. whether there was any official position on this in the somewhat complicated Rabbinical Laws, I'm not sure. In many cases I see it as something forced upon the society by the lack of marriageable men. With a birth ratio of about 60/40 more women than men combined by the high loss of life in combat, the real ratio was probably closer to 70/30. There are often holes in the Bible where I believe God intends for us to apply the basic principles. For instance, in the case where the virgin lies with a man:
Deu 22:28 If a man finds a virgin girl, not being betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they be found;
Deu 22:29 then the man lying with her shall give to the girl's father fifty pieces of silver, and she shall be his wife, because he has humbled her. He may not put her away all his days. LITV

What if she's not a virgin? what if they aren't caught?

How would the girl feel being forced to wed a rapist?

There are a lot of questions the Bible doesn't answer where we are left to decide what is best given our understanding of the WORD.

Of course, knowing what we do now about sexual predators, she'd probably be single again shortly. He'd try it with a betrothed woman and get stoned to death.

Dave
 
Shimon said:
Doggonit - you guys are going to make me get serious here. I've got absolutely no Biblical basis for this other than it is the tone of the whole Bible, and especially the New Testament.

Pure and simple, there are 3 components that make a marriage Holy in God's eyes:
1. Commitment to love one another until death do us part."
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You lost me at "commitment to love, till death do us part." That's not a scripturally sourced condition of marriage. Men are to love their wives, women are to obey their husbands.
 
Hmmmm, this is very interesting and informative. Good question raised by Memphis, excellent response by McBryde. Shimon is asking questions that I've been wondering about myself for sometime now, questions like how would a woman feel to have to marry her rapist.

Lionking.
 
I think you have to keep in mind that the father could refuse his daughter to the "seducer" or in some cases, the "rapist." Second, the rapist I think was an infrequent event in Israel, among neighbors. Remember, you're always living next to your "kinfolk." It's the inheritance pattern.

Next, the rapist risked death. If the maiden was betrothed, he was a dead man. The "Stranger/Rapist" was probably an infrequent event. I know of none recorded in scripture apart from the Levite's concubine, and that louse of a husband turned her over to strangers. They were deserving of death and got it. The Levite wasn't much of a prize. The rapist of Absalom's sister Tamar (Amnon) was avenged by death. The rapist of Dinah (Shechem), dead, with all his relatives.

Every rapist of scripture ends up dead, in some cases many men ended up dead with him. It seems to me this "marry your rapist" event is never recorded as having happened. I'm pretty sure that past a certain age, there weren't too many maidens in Israel, that were not betrothed to someone. That made them automatic death penalty targets.

A good father probably had his daughter betrothed at an early age.
 
You lost me at "commitment to love, till death do us part." That's not a scripturally sourced condition of marriage. Men are to love their wives, women are to obey their husbands.
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You lost me Hugh. In what way is that not-scriptural, other than it's not a direct quote. It is clearly the intent that a marriage is to last for life. The only exception being adultery, Matt. 19:8-9. But in Mark 10:5-12, when addressing the same subject, He does not make that exception, saying that Moses (not God) allowed divorce because of man's hardheartedness. I believe that He would want us to forgive even an adulterous wife and stay married till death. After all, at that point the marriage ends because, "in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but they are as the angels of God in Heaven." Mat 22:30

Dave
 
Shimon, that is part of a "marriage vow" concocted for civil or church wedding. I agree that marriage is to be for life, but the business that marriage is an agreement to love, like it or not, isn't Biblical. The Biblical commitment of a man in marriage is to love, the Biblical commitment asked of a woman in marriage is to obey.

That doesn't mean that women CAN'T or DON'T or SHOULDN'T love their husbands, but it's not what is asked of them, Biblically. Older women in the New Testament, are asked to TEACH the younger women to love their husbands, that's the closest thing I can find to a mandate of love in marriage, for women, with regard to their husbands.

The very first thing we learn about marriage, is not that it is born of love, but that it is arranged, and the woman is to be a man's helper and to keep him from being alone, because it is not good that he be alone.
 
Hugh said a mouthful here:
This is why I have arrived at a tentative conclusion that marriages in this country are really concubinage. They have all the trappings. The state is our master, and can reassign wives to other husbands, and the children stay with the slave wife, as opposed to the father. In a marriage, if the wife was cast out through divorce, she would not go out with her children, as Hagar did and as our "ex wives" often do.
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Hugh is absolutely right here.

Lets be clear: In the USA, we don't have real, biblical marriages.

In a real biblical marriage where the man and the wife are free, the wife becomes part of the man in a corporate body. If she should be divorced from him, it is like the cutting off of a limb. The children are not to be amputated as well. Only the wife is sent out of the man's house, not the wife and the kids. See Deut 24:1.
 
That doesn't mean that women CAN'T or DON'T or SHOULDN'T love their husbands,
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Conceded Hugh, sort of. As far as women having to love their husbands. In my commitment standard, I worded myself poorly as what I was intending to say was that there must be a commitment that the marriage will last as long as we live. However, the wife must still love the husband - it's just not a marriage requirement. Did Christ not command us to love one another?
Joh 13:34 A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.
Joh 13:35 By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.

Dave
 
Lets be clear: In the USA, we don't have real, biblical marriages.
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I still disagree with the inclusiveness of this statement. We may not have to have a biblical marriage. That doesn't mean we can't though. We chose to honor God, not Caesar.

BTW Hugh, thanks for keeping me straight. I did let 'conventional' language get into my thoughts back there. Got to watch that.

Dave
 
Shimon,

That part in the marriage & divorce passages about the hardness of hearts. The hardness is being caused by the rebellious wife and that is just another way of saying she finds no favour in his eyes due to the uncleanness in her behaviour. Deut 24:1.

Christ was not condemning the men for "hardness of hearts." That expression was used to illuminate what was the purpose of the law of divorcement.

The expression, from the beginning it was not so, points to the fact that it was never the intention of God that the wife be acting against her husband in the work of being fruitful, multiplying and having dominion over the other creatures.

It was not in the original plan for the wife to go against her husband thereby causing hardness of heart, from the beginning it was not so.
 
In what way is that not-scriptural, other than it's not a direct quote.
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Hugh is correct, Dave. A large part of the reason that there is such turmoil associated with the concept of "marriage" in the world today is because man is not content to obey YHVH. See both Deuteronomy 4:2 and 12:32. We are not to "add to" His Word at all - even if it seems like a great idea, is associated with wonderful "traditions" of men , or makes us feel better. (The alleged "monogamy ideal" seems to fit several of those categories!)

The Pharisees did exactly that, and indeed made careers out of the practice. "Binding burdens" in the form of "additional" requirements for Sabbath-keeping is a great example, and serves to illustrate why the Savior rightly called them "hypocrites".

I will submit as well that in every single case, we will find that Psalm 19 has it right. The "instruction of YHVH is perfect, converting the soul...making wise the simple."


PS> Wow; active board this AM. Normally there's a warning about additional posts being added while we are typing. ;) But they're good ones...
 
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