The term "One Flesh" is used frequently in scripture, and is usually interpreted spiritually. It is used as a synonym for "marriage", and seen as some sort of spiritual state that God causes two people to be in when they are married.
I have come to realise that this is the exact opposite of what the text actually says.
Let's examine the text for a minute:
English: One Flesh
Hebrew: echad basar (H259, H1320). Literally "one (united)" "meat".
Greek: heis sarx (G1520, G4561). Literally "one" "meat".
The words "basar" and "sarx" both very explicitly refer to soft bodily tissues - in other words, meat ("flesh"), including the muscle and internal organs. They are both translated "flesh" because it is precisely accurate.
In both Hebrew and Greek, this phrase explicitly states that the soft bodily tissues of the two people become united as one. It is a very physical statement. To spiritualise this, and take it as talking about some spiritual concept instead of a physical one, is to completely throw out the actual text, and substitute it with something entirely different.
In my opinion, the reason we spiritualise this is solely because it is blindingly obvious to us that when two people have sex, they are not instantly physically fused together. They still look like two separate individuals. It therefore makes no logical sense to us that they would now be physically one - our senses tell us that they are still physically two.
So, lacking the faith to believe the plain words of God, and instead believing our own physical senses to be more accurate than God, we throw away the plain meaning of what He said and substitute our own human logic, making up new meanings that seem more plausible to us. We ultimately claim that the two have become "spiritually one" in some way. We keep using the words "one flesh" to describe this but we assign an entirely different meaning to those words.
Here is a radical proposal: What if God was actually speaking the truth accurately, and we simply lacked the scientific knowledge to understand it?
In the last couple of decades, biology has revealed many things about what happens when a man and woman "cleave together" sexually. To recognise the significance of these discoveries you must keep in mind the fact that the human body contains as many cells of microorganisms (such as bacteria and fungi) as it does human cells. And these microorganisms are essential for our bodies. They are a part of our bodies, and our bodies would not function without them (digestion for instance is virtually entirely done by microbes). They are collectively called the "microbiome"
As sex and kissing change your microbiome, and the microbiome affects everything, even how you think, it is possible that sex and kissing could change almost anything about you! We just haven't discovered the details yet.
In other words, sex causes the soft tissues of a man and woman to become more and more similar over time. Or, you could say, they literally become "one flesh".
I have come to realise that this is the exact opposite of what the text actually says.
Let's examine the text for a minute:
English: One Flesh
Hebrew: echad basar (H259, H1320). Literally "one (united)" "meat".
Greek: heis sarx (G1520, G4561). Literally "one" "meat".
The words "basar" and "sarx" both very explicitly refer to soft bodily tissues - in other words, meat ("flesh"), including the muscle and internal organs. They are both translated "flesh" because it is precisely accurate.
In both Hebrew and Greek, this phrase explicitly states that the soft bodily tissues of the two people become united as one. It is a very physical statement. To spiritualise this, and take it as talking about some spiritual concept instead of a physical one, is to completely throw out the actual text, and substitute it with something entirely different.
In my opinion, the reason we spiritualise this is solely because it is blindingly obvious to us that when two people have sex, they are not instantly physically fused together. They still look like two separate individuals. It therefore makes no logical sense to us that they would now be physically one - our senses tell us that they are still physically two.
So, lacking the faith to believe the plain words of God, and instead believing our own physical senses to be more accurate than God, we throw away the plain meaning of what He said and substitute our own human logic, making up new meanings that seem more plausible to us. We ultimately claim that the two have become "spiritually one" in some way. We keep using the words "one flesh" to describe this but we assign an entirely different meaning to those words.
Here is a radical proposal: What if God was actually speaking the truth accurately, and we simply lacked the scientific knowledge to understand it?
In the last couple of decades, biology has revealed many things about what happens when a man and woman "cleave together" sexually. To recognise the significance of these discoveries you must keep in mind the fact that the human body contains as many cells of microorganisms (such as bacteria and fungi) as it does human cells. And these microorganisms are essential for our bodies. They are a part of our bodies, and our bodies would not function without them (digestion for instance is virtually entirely done by microbes). They are collectively called the "microbiome"
- When a couple have sex, microorganisms are exchanged between the penis and the vagina, so the microbes living on the genitals of a couple become strongly related to each other since they are exchanged so frequently. They are related so closely that some scientific papers refer to them collectively as "the seminovaginal microbiome".
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0923250815000613 - We also have many microorganisms living in our mouths, both beneficial and harmful. Intimate kissing obviously means that saliva moves from one persons mouth to the other. Couples have more similar bacteria in their mouths to each other than to other people, and the more frequently a couple kisses the more similar their oral microbiome.
https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2049-2618-2-41
The oral microbiome is swallowed into the gut and may affect the gut microbiome. - People who have anal sex (mainly homosexual men) also exchange microbes between their penis and their partners gut. Some recent research suggests that this changes the microbiome of the gut, and could make homosexual men more susceptible to disease.
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1007611 - The microbiome in your gut can even affect how you think. This is called the brain-gut-microbiome axis, and is a topic of active research. As one paper states: "Although research has demonstrated that the gut microbiota can impact upon cognition and a variety of stress-related behaviours, including those relevant to anxiety and depression, we still do not know how this occurs."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28804508/
As sex and kissing change your microbiome, and the microbiome affects everything, even how you think, it is possible that sex and kissing could change almost anything about you! We just haven't discovered the details yet.
In other words, sex causes the soft tissues of a man and woman to become more and more similar over time. Or, you could say, they literally become "one flesh".
