Genesis has much more to say about sex and marriage than the creation of woman out of man and the scene at Sodom. Sex and marriage is a theme that can be found throughout the book and the righteous make a lot of mistakes.

The book teaches that sex and marriage are to be enjoyed between one husband and one wife. This may come as a surprise to those who have not studied Genesis carefully because everyone remembers that the patriarchs had multiple wives. Abram not only married Sarai but Sarai gave her servant Hagar to Abram as a wife. Jacob married Leah and Rachel and each of them gave their servant to Jacob as a wife. Thus Jacob had four wives. But this was not God's original design and we can see why when we see the issues of jealousy between wives, competition for children between them, and so forth.

God's original design was for marriage between one man and one woman. And he blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over..." (Gen 1:28). The married couple was blessed to have children and be fruitful and was put in the Garden of Eden (meaning fertility). The first poem in the structure of Book One says, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man" (Gen 2:23). And the next verse after this says, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh" (Gen 2:24). So the original design was that of marriage between one man and one woman. This picture of exclusivity pointed to the relationship the husband and wife as one were to have with our jealous God.

The Book of Genesis on its own terms is very clear about the design of marriage and sex. The third poem in the structure of Book One is a song of revenge by the evil murderer Lamech proclaimed to his two wives. The third part of Book One means to demonstrate the escalation of sin among the seed of the serpent moving from the murderer Cain to the murderer Lamech. It is intentional that Lamech is the first one in Genesis said to have more than one wife. But this is only the beginning. In Book Two the demon possessed kings, the so-called "sons of God," take harems and breed champion giants. They have many more than two wives. It is instructive that the two situations calling for God's judgment in Genesis both have a sexual dimension: harems (answered by the flood) and homosexual rape (answered by the sulfur and fire coming down on Sodom & Gomorrah). This is not to say that there are not other issues involved. But the climax of sin includes harems or homosexual rape.

We saw that the first half of Book Six and all of Book Eight are chiasms. In Book Six there are parallel episodes of Abram/Abraham and his sister/wife Sarai/Sarah (Gen 12:10-20 and Gen 20). In the first story Pharaoh took Sarai as his wife, not knowing that she was Abram's wife. This brought down great plagues on the house of Pharaoh. In the second story Abimelech took Sarah as his wife, not knowing that she was Abraham's wife. God came to him in a dream and said, "Behold, you are a dead man because of the woman whom you have taken, for she is a man's wife" (Gen 20:3). God explains to Abimelech that he kept him from "sinning against me" (Gen 20:6) by having sexual relations with her because Abimelech was unaware she was married. That the Gentile Abimelech knew before this that it was wrong to take another man's wife as his own wife is clear because he tells Abraham, "You have done to me things that ought not to be done" (Gen 20:9).

In the similar story in Book Eight (Gen 26), Isaac told the men of Abimelech's city that his wife Rebekah was his sister. And Abimelech saw them laughing together and realized, 'like father, like son' and he rebuked Isaac saying, "What is this you have done to us? One of the people might have lain with your wife, and you would have brought guilt upon us" (Gen 26:10) and then told the men of the city that the death penalty would be the sentence for anyone who touches Isaac or Rebekah. The end of this section tells us that Esau took two Canaanite wives who "made life bitter for Isaac and Rebekah" (Gen 26:35). The parallel story in the structure of Book Eight is the rape of Jacob's daughter Dinah (Gen 34). After raping her like a prostitute, Shechem the Canaanite wanted to marry her. As the sons of Jacob said, "He had done an outrageous thing in Israel by lying with Jacob's daughter, for such a thing must not be done" (Gen 34:7). Interesting that such a similar phrase appears in Book Six and Eight.

The climax of Book Six (Gen 15:1-16:16 and 17:1-18:15) is complicated by the fact that Abram/Abraham took Hagar the Egyptian as a wife and she gave birth to Ishmael. Later in the book, righteous Lot's fall becomes complete when his two daughters got pregnant by him. They gave birth to Moab (father of the Moabites) and Ben-ammi (father of the Ammonites). He never should have gone into seclusion so that each could not marry a husband (Gen 19:30ff).

In Book Eight, when Jacob had gone to find a wife among his kinsmen, Esau took one of the daughters of Ishmael as a third wife. The text tells us, "When Esau saw that the Canaanite women did not please Isaac his father, Esau went to Ishmael and took as his wife, besides the wives he had, Mahalath the daughter of Ishmael, Abraham's son, the sister of Nebaioth" (Gen 28:8-9). The solution was not to add another wife: Esau should have never married two wives to begin with and most certainly not two Canaanites under the curse. The comment "besides the wives he had" accents this.

Also in Book Eight, Jacob married Leah and Rachel (Gen 29:1-30) and this caused all kinds of jealousy issues even to the extent that they each gave their servant to Jacob as additional wives. It is instructive that Isaac had sent Jacob to find in Laban's house "a wife from there" not wives (Gen 28:6). Of course, the stress is on the instruction not to take a wife from among the Canaanite women. In any case, the author of Genesis wants the reader to compare Abraham's servant who went to find Isaac a wife and Jacob when he went to find a wife. Jacob wanted Rachel because of her looks instead of praying to God for direction on whom to take as a wife. And as a result of this mess, Jacob ended up with two wives and then four.

The sex and marriage then continues in the epilogue of Book Eight. There we see Rachel die during childbirth and Reuben, Jacob's firstborn and the son of Leah, "went and lay with Bilhah his father's concubine" (Gen 35:22). Bilhah was Rachel's servant and this will keep Bilhah from replacing Rachel in the affection of Jacob. Reuben did this for his mother Leah (I am not implying that she knew anything about it ahead of time, nor am I implying that this excuses his sexual sin, I am simply explaining the situation).

Book Ten resumes this theme as Judah sleeps with his daughter-in-law thinking that she is a prostitute (Gen 38), Potiphar's wife tries to seduce Joseph (Gen 39:7) and even includes the theme in the concluding poem as Jacob cursed Reuben in the blessing, "unstable as water, you shall not have preeminence, because you went up to your father's bed; then you defiled it - he went up to my couch" (Gen 49:4). They have knowledge of sexual ethics (language of defiled). Also Joseph's response to Potiphar's wife shows this: "How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?" (39:9). But even though they know right and wrong the explicit episode with Judah shows they did not always do the right. In this story, Judah took a Canaanite wife and had three sons. Judah took Tamar as the wife of his first son. But his son was so wicked that God struck him down. So Tamar became the wife of Judah's second son who wasted his semen on the ground because he knew that if he had a child it would not be considered his own. And God struck him down. Judah, afraid the same would happen to the youngest son, sent Tamar away pretending to need to wait for him to grow up. Eventually Judah himself slept with her, not knowing it was her, and she gave birth to twins. She was accused of adultery until it was discovered that the father was Judah himself. The story has a number of similarities with the daughters of Lot narrative.

So the Book of Genesis teaches (through precept and example) that God intends for sex and marriage to be between one husband and one wife for all of humanity and that His people should only marry those not under the curse of Canaan. The consequences of the patriarch's failure to keep this design would last for the rest of the history of Israel. And a sign of sin reaching its height is harems or homosexual rape. Of course, people will try to excuse behavior that does not fit God's intention of sex and marriage between one husband and wife by arguing that the episode at Sodom does not have to do with homosexual behavior but homosexual rape. But such an argument has missed the overall message of Genesis on this theme that marriage should be between one man and one woman.

It is worth noting that marriage is a gift of God's common grace to all of humanity. God defines marriage for all peoples (not just His people) as between one man and one woman. Israel and the nations broke the covenant of creation whenever they allowed variations from this pattern. While this common grace institution was something Canaanites could enjoy, the people of God were prohibited from marrying Canaanites under the curse. Later laws in Scripture would build on this principle by prohibiting believers from marrying any unbeliever. For example, in the New Testament (though the regulation was much older) believers are told to marry in the Lord (1 Cor 7:39, i.e., only marry other believers). There are other laws that would be spelled out in the Torah including regulations about marrying close relatives (including prohibiting marriages between some relationships that are not blood relationships). In the New Testament, for example, Paul rebukes the fornication among the Corinthians not even found among the Gentiles - a son marrying his step-mother (1 Cor 5). The most serious violations of this creation ordinance, short of harems and homosexual rape, are things even the Gentiles know are wrong, and are called things which quite simply ought not to be done (cf. Gen 20:9, 34:7 and Rom 1:28) or things that are contrary to nature, which we have called the covenant of creation (cf. Rom 1:26). Such things include marrying your step-mother, all homosexual behavior, marrying another man's wife, and heterosexual rape. This is why it is so surprising that Christians are debating homosexual marriage, something that even the Gentiles should know is wrong.

Labels: Abimelech, creation ordinance, flood, Genesis, giants, gomorrah, harems, homosexual behavior, lamech's curse, marriage, polygamy, prostitution, rape, sex, sodom

The key to seeing what is most important to the author is noticing the compositional strategy of the book. Most of the books in Genesis follow the following pattern: heading ("these are the generations of..."), narrative, poetry, epilogue. Actually Sailhamer, as mentioned in my earlier post, "The Way of Wisdom: The Canon and Cessation," notes that narrative, poetry, epilogue is the compositional strategy of the whole of Genesis and the whole of the Torah. In this strategy the key is the poetry. The difference between this book and most of those in Genesis is that the pattern of narrative, poetry, epilogue takes place thrice.

Genesis 2:4 is the heading for the second book: "These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that YHWH God made the earth and the heavens." It is worth noting, since this is a common structure in Genesis, that the mention of heavens, earth, earth, heavens is a chiastic pattern. Also the heading is artificially contrived to maintain continuity with the rest of the ten headings in the whole of Genesis. (Ten being a consistently significant number for fullness.) The title does not tell us who the book is about, instead the book is about this person's descendants. Thus, the first book is about the "descendants" of the heavens and the earth.

Within the narratival sections there is a general pattern. Each one begins with the problem, the response to the problem, and interaction between the person(s) involved and God. In the first panel (Gen 2:5-22) the main problem is that the earth has not yet brought forth vegetation (Gen 1:12) because it had not rained. It is also noted that there was no man, thus no irrigation. God solves these problems one at a time. First with rain, as translated by Lee Irons and Meredith Kline in "The Framework View" in The G3n3s1s Debate, "So a rain-cloud began to arise from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground." The word translated "rain-cloud" is only found in Scripture in Job and is found in another ANE language. In Job and the other language it means, "rain-cloud." (Not to mention that this translation makes sense as the solution to the problem introduced.) The other part is then solved by making man and designating him as the priest who guards or keeps the garden (Gen 2:15). God tells the man not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (a probationary test) and after making the land animals and birds then makes woman. The act of naming the animals shows Adam's servant-king power over the creation.

In the second panel (Gen 3:1-13) the problem is the serpent. Adam is the one to blame in the text because he had been given the role of the priest ("guard" the garden). Adam's response to the problem, however, was not to stand up to the serpent but to buy into his lies. In this panel the interaction between God and man is one of judgment. The picture is that of Judgment Day, or as it is often referred to in Scripture "the day" -- thus "And they heard the sound of YHWH God walking in the garden in the Spirit of The Day" (Gen 3:8). Adam and Eve hid because they knew it was The Day "for in The Day that you eat of it you shall surely die" (Gen 2:17). The judgment day motif is complete with the sound of YHWH, which elsewhere in Scripture is described as incredibly loud and similar to that of a huge army. And the Spirit of God, usually translated with the silly "cool" idea of wind, should be identified with the Spirit of God from Gen 1:2 that hovered like a bird over the face of the waters. The response of Adam and Eve to the questioning in the court of judgment was to pass the blame. Adam blamed God and the woman. Eve blamed the serpent. It is not much of a step to Cain's "Am I my brother's keeper?" (Gen 4:9).

In the third panel (Gen 4:1-22) the problem is that "Cain brought to YHWH an offering of the fruit of the ground." Abel's offering was accepted because it was the firstborn of his flock, but Cain's offering was not the firstfruits of the ground. And Cain's sin mastered him as he killed Abel in premeditated murder in the field. Unlike in later Scripture where the death penalty is prescribed for murderers, God spares Cain and protects him. The genealogy offered in this chapter includes several interesting things worth noting. As we have been stressing structure, you should number the genealogy with Lamech as number seven. Cain is number 2, Enoch is number 3, Irad is number 4, etc. Number seven will without a doubt be significant. And Lamech is significant because he shows that sin has escalated out of control to a climax ready for God's judgment since he has two wives in contrast with the teaching of the first panel of marriage between one man and one woman and is a murderer (this we discover in the poetry). The genealogy is also structurally interesting because Lamech has three sons Jabal, Jubal, and Tubal-cain. Adam also had three sons, Cain, Abel and Seth, and Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth.

Most important in this book's structure is the poetry. In panel one the poetry is Gen 2:23: "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." In panel two the poetry is Gen 3:14-19. The most quoted portion of this poem is the protoevangelium: "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel" (Gen 3:15). The poetry in the third panel is Lamech's curse where he boasts of murdering a young man for striking him and calls for revenge seventy-sevenfold. Unlike Cain, Lamech does not want his family to wait for God's vengeance but to take unbridled revenge into their own hands if anyone touches him. This is the perfect example of disproprotionate response -- Lamech kills a man for hitting him and if anyone kills him in reply he calls for seventy-sevenfold retaliation. Lamech's words are the anti-gospel. All of this poetry points to Jesus Christ. Jesus is the new Adam and his church is the Woman, bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh. Jesus is the seed ("offspring") of the woman who bruises the head of the serpent. And Jesus is the one who goes through the curse of death on the cross for our sins and leads us to forgive seventy-sevenfold as he forgives his murderers.

The rest of the text in each panel (the remainer of each chapter) are the epilogues. The first epilogue shows a happy relationship between man and wife without shame. Shame would require clothing in the second panel (first they clothe themselves, but in the epilogue God sacrifices an animal to give them garments of skin). The epilogue also explains the continuing application of the poetry to the life of God's people ("a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh" Gen 2:24). In the second panel, the continuing consequence is being driven from the mountain-garden of fruitfulness (Eden) so that man would not eat of the tree of life and seal himself to continue forever in his fallen estate. The way to the tree of life is through the sword of the circumcision of Christ on the cross. And in the third panel we see the birth of Seth. Seth's son Enosh would be the heir of Abel as this is the first example of a common practice in Israel (for example Boaz does this in the book of Ruth for Elimelech and his son Mahlon). This is why Enosh is mentioned here: Abel has his heir and the book can conclude on a note of hope with calling upon the name of YHWH.

We could examine these three chapters and note a great many more details. My reflections here owe much to my professors at Westminster Theological Seminary, the works of Meredith Kline, and the commentary of Bruce Waltke. As always I have added my own observations and analysis and any mistakes are my own.

Labels: abel, cain, Genesis, Genesis 1, kline, lamech's curse, protoevangelium, sailhamer, serpent