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1: When does marriage begin? - Sex
- Thread starter FollowingHim
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If you keep clicking on that word for further explanation in the link @rockfox posted, you get to a detailed definition of the word here. Summary: It means "man", but here is translated "husband" due to the context. In the KJV it is translated "husband" 69 times but translated "man" over a thousand times (see here).
It's not that there are multiple words for "husband". Rather, there is NO word for "husband" or "wife". Throughout scripture, in both Hebrew and Greek, the words used mean "man" and "woman". In contexts where it would be clearer to an English reader to use the word "husband" or "wife", translators use these English words. But they basically don't exist in Hebrew or Greek (that's a really brief summary).
Interestingly, even in English, the word "wife" used to just mean "woman" also. This meaning is retained in the word "midwife" and the phrase "old wive's tales", where it just means "woman" in both cases. In old English, if you referred to "a man's wife" you meant "a man's woman", just as in Hebrew or Greek. The fact that "wife" has now come to only mean a married woman is a recent language development. We shouldn't expect to find an equivalent word in ancient Hebrew or Greek.
But you're right about concubines nevertheless. They're completely legitimate. We're agreeing with you in principle while just clarifying the terminology slightly! This is just detail. I too have used the "husband" terminology to justify concubines as legitimate in the past, I now know more about the meanings of the words and know this isn't technically the best way to understand the scripture, but the conclusion is still the same.
It's not that there are multiple words for "husband". Rather, there is NO word for "husband" or "wife". Throughout scripture, in both Hebrew and Greek, the words used mean "man" and "woman". In contexts where it would be clearer to an English reader to use the word "husband" or "wife", translators use these English words. But they basically don't exist in Hebrew or Greek (that's a really brief summary).
Interestingly, even in English, the word "wife" used to just mean "woman" also. This meaning is retained in the word "midwife" and the phrase "old wive's tales", where it just means "woman" in both cases. In old English, if you referred to "a man's wife" you meant "a man's woman", just as in Hebrew or Greek. The fact that "wife" has now come to only mean a married woman is a recent language development. We shouldn't expect to find an equivalent word in ancient Hebrew or Greek.
But you're right about concubines nevertheless. They're completely legitimate. We're agreeing with you in principle while just clarifying the terminology slightly! This is just detail. I too have used the "husband" terminology to justify concubines as legitimate in the past, I now know more about the meanings of the words and know this isn't technically the best way to understand the scripture, but the conclusion is still the same.
That makes a lot of sense then. I am happy to learn something from someone. I just wanted to know the entire scoop on this. I am still curious here. FollowingHim, if there was no word for husband or wife is it only the context that informs the reader? Was it just in scripture there was no word for either or in society as well.Was it just essentially people would say this is his woman or Thats her man?
I would have to dig through the archives to find the thread, and we all know I'm not going to and it would be pointless too because it was the MOST EPIX BF thread of all time it would take hours to dig through, but Paul makes it pretty clear that sex with a harlot does form a "one flesh" relationship and he uses the exact same phrase that Jesus uses when he addresses marriage and quotes the Old Testament. So yes, the harlot's houses were literally filled with their neighbors wives.
I don't speak Hebrew or Greek either, so I'm just going by concordances. @IshChayil and @frederick could elaborate on the precise meanings of different words and correct me if I have anything wrong. But going through a concordance, the following words are translated husband and wife in the KJV (other translations are similar). Strongs numbers in brackets to help you look up the definitions for more detail:
Husband:
Old Testament / Tanakh
Almost always: 'iysh (H376) - This means "man".
Most other cases: ba'al (H1167), meaning "master"
Twice: chathan (H2860), which means a relative through marriage - daughter's husband, bridegroom, spouse.
New Testament
Always: aner (G435), meaning "man", equivalent to 'iysh.
Except once where hupandros (G5220), meaning a woman under a husband (ie a wife) is translated as "woman which hath an husband".
Wife:
Old Testament / Tanakh
Almost always: ishshah (H802), meaning "woman".
1-3 times: ba'al (H1166) meaning "master", in the sense of a woman under a master; duwr (H1753), meaning "dwell"; yebemeth (H2994), meaning sister-in-law (translated as "brother's wife").
New Testament
Almost always: gyne (G1135), meaning "woman" (being the root word of the English "gynaecology").
1-3 times: dektos (G1184), meaning something like "approved"; penthera (G3994), "mother-in-law" (translated as "wife's mother").
So basically, almost universally the word is simply "man" or "woman". And yes, people would just say this is his woman / her man.
The main exception to this is the word "ba'al", meaning "master", which is frequently applied to a husband as being a woman's master - so it's really just a different way of saying "her man".
Other than that, we've only got a handful of verses with different words that are only translated this way once, or don't actually mean "husband" or "wife" but used that word as part of the translation. These few exceptions are rare enough to prove the rule rather than contradict it.
If you want to understand this more, I would strongly encourage you to learn to use an online concordance & lexicon. I tend to use www.blueletterbible.com to drill into the words behind scripture, if doing it online. However I much prefer to use a hard-copy concordance, they're difficult to find but if you hunt through second-hand bookshops you might be surprised what you find.
Thank you. Its amazing to see how such small changes and variations in language can distort what we read today. Most of us spent our childhoods in churches taught to never question the doctrine of the church. Many take what is written at face value never questioning if what they are reading is what was really meant.
At the age of 15, I witnessed the pastor of my small church ask a polygamist man and his wives and children not to come back to the church. They had came by to attend a service in hopes of finding a place them and their children could attend. I Began to research if the man and his family were indeed living in sin as the pastor preached from the pulpit. To my surprise they were not, when I scoured through scripture after scripture. I realized the pastor like society had abandoned Gods law.
Last night me and a woman I had been dating broke up because of the fact I believe that marriage starts from sex. I never married her. That argument led to me and her going separate ways. I wanted to court her in all honesty but she wanted to date. God showed me several lessons from this woman. She insisted she only wanted a man who went to church. So I went with her, Only for her to stop going and me to go the last two Sundays alone. After I would spend fri sundown to sat sundown resting to keep the sabbath. She would not. She said she was christian, but the way she showed no forgiveness, no sympathy or pity for my personal flaws only a drive to make more money and attempt to control every aspect of my life led me to join the site. I am glad G0d used her to lead me back to what I have felt called to. Biblical Marriage.
Thanks FollowingHim. I have read your posts for years and your a very smart man and have made great contributions to the effort along with many others here at the site.
At the age of 15, I witnessed the pastor of my small church ask a polygamist man and his wives and children not to come back to the church. They had came by to attend a service in hopes of finding a place them and their children could attend. I Began to research if the man and his family were indeed living in sin as the pastor preached from the pulpit. To my surprise they were not, when I scoured through scripture after scripture. I realized the pastor like society had abandoned Gods law.
Last night me and a woman I had been dating broke up because of the fact I believe that marriage starts from sex. I never married her. That argument led to me and her going separate ways. I wanted to court her in all honesty but she wanted to date. God showed me several lessons from this woman. She insisted she only wanted a man who went to church. So I went with her, Only for her to stop going and me to go the last two Sundays alone. After I would spend fri sundown to sat sundown resting to keep the sabbath. She would not. She said she was christian, but the way she showed no forgiveness, no sympathy or pity for my personal flaws only a drive to make more money and attempt to control every aspect of my life led me to join the site. I am glad G0d used her to lead me back to what I have felt called to. Biblical Marriage.
Thanks FollowingHim. I have read your posts for years and your a very smart man and have made great contributions to the effort along with many others here at the site.
My son uses an online bible and concordance a lot, and it is quick and has other advantages. I still prefer the paper concordance and am glad we have it. There are other advantages that it has over digital....like the visual impact of seeing the quantity of words....or the list from the same word.
Good list. You left one out for Husband:
adon (H113), meaning lord, master
It is notable for being the word Sarah used in reference to Abraham in Gen 18, the passage called out in 1 Peter 3 and also in referring to the same man in Judges 19 who was also called husband according to the translation of H376 which prompted this discussion. Additionally for the Greek list, Peter in quoting that uses G2962 (lord, master, sir). That connection back to the Judges 19 made me look up Judges 19:1 "he took for himself a concubine". 'Took' here means just that in the Hebrew, but is translated marry at other times.
I'm in agreement on your take about man and woman being the words used and also the English history and have said as much before. However I'd like to hear confirmation about H802 from someone better versed in Hebrew. Can anyone tell me if the modifications to that root in BDB definition #2 are related to its usage (i.e. the for in 'for wife') or was there a Hebrew word specifically meaning wife with H802 as its root?
Gynecology. There, I fixed it for you. You're welcome
American snob!
Good catch. My wife and I love to reference that verse (Genesis 18 )for other, non-submitting, modern, Christian wives. It always gets a serious stare from them.
Serious is putting it mildly. If looks could kill. It's a good rubber hits the road verse; really cuts through all the noise on the submission issue.
OK, I've been sitting on the sidelines thinking I was supposed to keep my mouth shut, but it has just dawned on me that we're back on track with the discussion about whether or not sex indicates the beginning of a marriage in the eyes of God.
@rockfox, I don't know if my computer has been hijacked by Google or Facebook and is thus purposefully altering reality to encourage me to take on a propagandized viewpoint, but I just clicked on your 'translated' link and was taken to a translation of the Hebrew in Judges 19:3, and it says, well, husband. I then clicked on the Hebrew word translated as 'husband', and it took me to a page on Bible Hub devoted to the variations on how the word '’î·šāh' is translated into English, and as far as the eye can see all it is translated into is 'husband'. I'm not disputing that there might be translations that don't use husband, but the CVOT (Concordant Version of the Old Testament, my go-to translation, because I don't know any other that makes a greater effort to translate literally from as original of manuscripts as possible, weighting the Septuagint above all others) says, "Then her husband got up and went after her, to speak onto her heart and bring her back."
In that regard, even in the case of a concubine the man was considered her husband, which seems to rather clearly bolster the case that marriage begins with sex. Also, while you are technically correct about there being no Hebrew word for marry, I think you and @FollowingHim are focusing down too hard on individual words. In order to glean truth from Scripture, we always have to take context into account, most especially the context of related words in a sentence that naturally modify each other. The CVOT consistently translates not only Hebrew words but also more than one idiomatic phrase as 'marry', partially based on the then-current understanding of those phrases. We must be careful not to use 2018 Hebrew for our understanding of what was meant in B.C. Palestine, etc. Furthermore, we have the Septuagint Greek to refer to, and the immediate context of '’î·šāh' in Judges 19:3 is that it is written in the genitive mood, which would clearly indicate that the man had an of-the-woman relationship to the man, that, by the way, would have been understood by anyone in that period of time as meaning that they were permanently bonded to each other, something that wouldn't have been the case if they'd just been playing checkers together.
More comments to follow in relation to other posts . . .
@Herbie, I see you are 31 and happy to be alive, and I just want to say that I'm not only happy you're alive but very happy that you're here communicating with us. I applaud you for being so thirsty for knowledge and willing to be humble about seeking it. I also applaud you for standing your ground for your intentions about what kind of marriage you're creating. Many of us older and wiser individuals can now recognize that we would have saved a lot of time, energy and heartache if we hadn't begun marriages without ensuring that compromise wasn't afoot.
I think, also, that one of the things you're learning is another lesson many if not most of us have learned along this journey: that the mainstream corporate church is not only not the answer to the problem, it IS the problem. Too often, people will insist their future mates attend church with them while also insisting that they not look too carefully into what's said in their Bibles.
Right, meaning usually means what it means.
Great questions, @Verifyveritas76. The answers, though, can be better gleaned through a combination of how these terms were already established prior to Jeremiah and supplemental non-Scriptural historical texts, both of which beg some clarification related to the then-current understanding of the term we shorthand as 'adultery' and the issue of prostitution.
Temporarily setting aside @ZecAustin's much-appreciated hilarity about how, yes, the harlot houses were filled with the neighbors' wives . . .
1. The modern-day limited understanding of the meaning of adultery does not reflect the concept as held by the B.C. Israelites and other bordering cultures. The phrases we translate as 'adultery' were much more comprehensive than our restricted definition of having sex with someone you're not married to (which, to them, would have been considered a complex impossibility). Adultery was a broader construction, and, if anything, back then, could be simplified to the phrase, "sexual interaction that abuses, offends or humiliates." I know this will set off a firestorm among those who adhere to their supposed God-given mandate of the rule of thumb, but again, back then, a man raping his own wife could be considered adultery, because, if discovered, it would humiliate her. Having sex with a woman and then refusing to marry her was considered humiliating and abusive -- and thus one who did that was accused of adultery. Having sex with a married woman humiliated the married woman's husband and created confusion about who she was now married to -- as well as confusion about the paternity of future children, which was sex-related humiliation for a whole clan. Making fun in public of how one's wife performed intimately was also included as an adultery offense. And this is the context in which the stone tablets came down.
2. I also think it's important to keep in mind two things about prostitution and whores and harlots as they're mentioned in Scripture:
a. Within the polygamous culture of the Israelites, prostitution was almost unknown, because why would a man need to go pay some woman for some nooky if he could maintain his status as upstanding member of the tribe by taking on another wife?; and
b. For the most part, prostitution was practiced by competing cultures, and the most likely place to find prostitutes, even up through the time of Paul, was in establishments whose purpose wasn't just to get cash in exchange for sexual gratification but, more importantly, to actually convert Israelites, Jews, and then Christians, into abandoning their monotheistic beliefs or allowing those beliefs to be piggybacked by worship idols or Greek gods or some other form of pantheistic paganism. Prostitution was predominantly associated with Cult Prostitution, and the prostitutes were considered to be doing their divine duty to entice men to abandon reliance on The One True God. The cults of prostitution that preyed on weak men did so by capitalizing on awareness that those men considered themselves to be married to the women with whom they shared genital intimacy; there was no question but that the prostitutes were performing the role of marrying those men to paganism.
[I'm still, by the way, only partway through my inspired-by-you re-reading of Pagan Christianity, so I'm almost hoping that, as I go forward, I'll discover some delicious insight on the part of Viola associating the modern-day corporate church's allegiance to paganism with the practice of cult prostitution. Was that perhaps why the hymn solo was invented -- as a sort of cathedral-friendly soft-core porn?]b. For the most part, prostitution was practiced by competing cultures, and the most likely place to find prostitutes, even up through the time of Paul, was in establishments whose purpose wasn't just to get cash in exchange for sexual gratification but, more importantly, to actually convert Israelites, Jews, and then Christians, into abandoning their monotheistic beliefs or allowing those beliefs to be piggybacked by worship idols or Greek gods or some other form of pantheistic paganism. Prostitution was predominantly associated with Cult Prostitution, and the prostitutes were considered to be doing their divine duty to entice men to abandon reliance on The One True God. The cults of prostitution that preyed on weak men did so by capitalizing on awareness that those men considered themselves to be married to the women with whom they shared genital intimacy; there was no question but that the prostitutes were performing the role of marrying those men to paganism.
And now I can't stop laughing, because as soon as I re-read this in someone else's reply, I started thinking about the excellent construction of your sentence and began saying to myself, "How funny: neigh-bor, naaaayyy-bor," and now I can't get out of my head hearing Mr. Ed bleating, "Willl-burrrr, have you been paying any clandestine visits to your neigh-eigh-eigh-bor's wife lately?"
Re: Jeremiah 5:7:
The CVOT reads, "Wherein can I pardon you for this? Your sons, they have forsaken Me, And they swear by non-elohim; Though I am ~surfeiting~ them, Yet they still commit adultery, And in a house of prostitutes they slash themselves."
That's pretty clear. They are indeed two separate assertions. They adultered, on the one hand, and they were also slashing (damaging) themselves and their bond to the Lord in a "house of prostitutes."
There were no allowances for such 'houses' within the guidelines of the Law.
The CVOT reads, "Wherein can I pardon you for this? Your sons, they have forsaken Me, And they swear by non-elohim; Though I am ~surfeiting~ them, Yet they still commit adultery, And in a house of prostitutes they slash themselves."
That's pretty clear. They are indeed two separate assertions. They adultered, on the one hand, and they were also slashing (damaging) themselves and their bond to the Lord in a "house of prostitutes."
There were no allowances for such 'houses' within the guidelines of the Law.
Could you please explain your understanding of how I Cor. 6 asserts that sex doesn't establish a marriage?