Reflection. Genesis, Marriage and Family

The Bible has accumulated mystique as the sacred book of two world religions, so some find it sacriligious to subject it to the same critical scrutiny as any other historical source. As to the approach I take above, at a recent conference on the Bible and history, few if any of the 200 delegates would demur from the approach. When I edited Creating the Old Testament, 15 scholars joined me in scrutinizing evidence for the whole of the Old Testament, Christian, Jewish and humanists. We need to approach such important historical texts with the highest rigour and rationalism.

Genesis is essentially a fictitious genealogy, filled out with stories for public propaganda. The aim was a serious one - to blend the rough group of people who returned from Babylonian exile as a single people with common purpose, with a law code to create social order and religious piety. These people worshiped Yahweh, a traditional deity from pastoral or nomadic tribes in the Palestine and Syrian hill country. Some other divine names were used to explain this deity; others such as Baal were rejected as too close to the settled peoples whom they called Canaanites.

The returned exiles made a strong point against the practice of intermarriage, even requiring some people to divorce spouses who had not come from the in group (see Ezra and Nehemiah). Further info to come on intermarriage. This is the great organising message behind Genesis - a pure race, who marries in, not out. An unsullied blood line where girls marry the lads of their father's brother's family. This reflects the propaganda of the post-exilic period but has little to say about marriage in an earlier period. It has fed extraordinary loyalties and prejudices over history. Its sacredness, or perniciousness, is in the eye of the beholder.
Kinship:
We have explored in this chapter how national kinship is fictive - an artificial construction for political purposes. Kinship itself is more messy and has been a key topic within social anthropology throughout the 20th century. A key issue is to decide who is in our 'in' group and who is in the 'out' group. In some societies, anyone in the 'out' group is an enemy and can be killed, so this is a crucial concern throughout human evolution. Blood ties, (consanguinity) can be augmented by marriage ties (affinity) so kinship systems use intermarriage (exogamy, marriage out) as a means of widening kinship relations. Political marriages are examples of the same idea.
Next I will explore the law code that developed in the same period, the book of Deuteronomy, and especially what it says about marriage, the family, and kinship.