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| I searched google for "levirate marriage" and this is the diagram I got. It's a family tree, with circles (women) and triangles (men), and one triangle is crossed out and an arrow is drawn from the wife to the brother. Image source. |
A while ago I saw this blog series "When Marriage is Unjust" by Herb Montgomery- here's part 1, part 2, and part 3. It's about Luke 20:27-38, where the Sadducees come and ask Jesus this weird hypothetical question about a woman who married 7 brothers in sequence because they keep dying on her- whose wife will she be at the resurrection (ie, in heaven)? Jesus tells them that at the resurrection, there will be no marriage.
Montgomery's take on this passage is:
Jesus explains that in the age to come, an age of justice, there will be no marriage. How unjustly must the institution of marriage have been that Jesus couldn’t imagine it in the coming age of justice? Jesus states that all who are children of the resurrection will be “like the angels.” We can debate whatever that means, but the implication of the phrase is that marriage will be no more because all injustice will be no more.
Marriage in the time of Jesus was so unjust and oppressive to women, that Jesus says it cannot possibly exist at the resurrection, when there is perfect justice.
(Montgomery's blog posts also raise some good points about the practice of levirate marriage- which is what the Sadducees are describing, a widow has to marry her dead husband's brother- and how it was so centered on men. Like the dead man's "need" to have an heir is more important than his widow's right to make her own choices about things like marriage. I've heard the argument that this practice was intended to help the woman, because if she was single and didn't have a son, she basically had no way to provide for herself- even so, the problems are all caused by patriarchy.)
I find this fascinating because it's so different from what I was taught "the bible says" about marriage, growing up in evangelicalism and purity culture. Purity culture teaches that "God has a plan for your life" about what person you will marry. That God picked 1 specific opposite-gender person for you, and that's "God's plan" (and you have to pray really hard and be really stressed about trying to figure out who it is, or else you're ruining God's plan). And that when you follow all of God's rules, don't have sex before marriage, and marry the one magical person that God picked, the result will be so perfect and magical and amazing. You'll have such a loving, intimate, romantic connection. You'll have the best sex ever. You'll fit right into your gender role, and it will feel so natural and fulfilling.
That was how I viewed marriage. You find someone you can truly trust, that you can love with everything you have, and you build a life together, as equal partners. I thought that's what marriage *is*. (And yes, lucky for me, that *is* what my marriage is about.)
Turns out that's a pretty modern idea- having a marriage based on romantic love. And historically, the way it often worked was, women have a bunch of less-than-ideal options, and one of those options is to get married- so that's why they get married.
It really amazes me how obvious it is that there are no women in the bible who followed the "purity rules" and then had a perfect marriage, and I totally never noticed this, until I had already started to question purity ideology. I'm a bible nerd, I knew all the stories, I knew all the messed-up ways that men of the bible treated their wives, and yet somehow I still bought this idea that "God has picked 1 guy who is perfect for you, and if you follow these biblical rules, it guarantees a perfect marriage." HOW??? (I ended up writing about this here: "God has one perfect guy for you!" Yeah, that's not biblical.)
As I was thinking about the idea of "unjust marriage" and getting married because it's the least-bad option, I thought about this article I had read, from Sixth Tone: A Vietnamese Bride’s Chinese Dream. It's about a Vietnamese woman who didn't have many options for getting a well-paying job in Vietnam, and then she heard about a cousin who had married a Chinese man and moved to China. She decided to look into this option for herself too, which meant taking a very shady bus ride hundreds of miles into China, with some other Vietnamese women. They came to some small village in China and met the available men. She says this about the man whom she decided to marry:
The next family offered 100,000 yuan and had a two-story brick house. The suitor was in good physical shape, had a junior high school diploma, was five years older than me, and looked to be freshly shaven.
The first time I saw him, I felt nothing; my only concern was the bride price. After weighing it up, I decided to marry him.
It really surprised me, the way marriage is talked about in this article. It's not about "you know this person and you love this person and you want to spend your life with them." Instead, it's talked about like... do you think you could tolerate this person? If you had to live with him and have his children, could you accept that? Is it a better situation overall than the life you have in Vietnam?
The article also talks about the difficulties that this woman has because she entered China illegally. Not having id, worrying about being deported, not even having the right documents to be able to go back to Vietnam- and also, she couldn't speak Chinese at all when she first arrived. Immigrant women in this kind of situation are extremely vulnerable. What if her husband turns out to be abusive? She can't easily leave him because then she may get deported.
This is the reality of what marriage is, for a lot of people in the world today. It's a way to get out of a bad situation, into a different-and-hopefully-less-bad situation. And I think reading about women's experiences today, choosing marriage for these reasons, can help us when we read what the bible says about marriage.
We read words like "marriage" or "divorce" in the bible, and we think of those terms in the way we see them defined in our culture today- which is very much because of the work of feminist activists, pushing for changes in society so that women would have better options. And as a result of that feminist work, it feels normal to us to marry someone because you want to be with them, rather than because it's the least-bad option available to you. And also, the work of LGBT activists- because the concept of same-sex marriage is very much dependent on the idea of marrying someone because you want to be with them, not because of societal expectations, or economic reasons, or being expected to have children. (But also there are legal things like health insurance, hospital visitation, etc, which are very important reasons same-sex couples need to have the right to marry.) So this is how we see marriage, and then we read the bible and we assume that's what the bible means when it uses the word "marriage", but wow it is NOT.
So, in summary: In purity culture, I was taught that God has a plan for all of us to have a wonderful marriage with an opposite-sex partner, whom we work together with so incredibly well, and that we love and trust fully. And yes, I'm married now, and I'm glad my relationship with my husband is like that- we work together well, it's romantic, we love each other, etc. (But I don't believe in the gender-roles stuff, and also it's important to me that I chose to marry him, instead of just coasting along on "God's plan.") But, this view of marriage is a very modern thing- and actually, there are many cultures in the world today where that's not what marriage is at all. Instead, marriage is about financial needs, or immigration opportunities, or fitting a role that your family wants you to fit... And the concept of marriage that we see in the bible is much closer to that than to romantic ideals about "we want to spend our lives together."
When we read what the bible says about marriage, we should remember that's the kind of marriage it's talking about. And we should be grateful that because of feminist and LGBT activists, marriage in our culture has become something so much better than what it was in biblical times.
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And 1 more thing I want to say: We can help by donating to charities that help women around the world have better economic opportunities, and charities that help immigrants. For example, there's Women For Women International, which focuses on women who are survivors of war.
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Related:
"God has one perfect guy for you!" Yeah, that's not biblical.
This "Do Not Intermarry With Them" Stuff Hits Different Now
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