Tag Info

The Hebrew words in question are עזר כנגדו (ezer kenegdo). The Hebrew root עזר means “help” and the word kenegdo comes from the root word נגד (neged). Neged in the OT always means "opposite" or "across from" and negdo means across from him. In Exodus 19:2, Israel encamp neged hahar, opposite to Mount Sinai. The form kenegedo doesn't appear anywhere else ...

Occam's answer: The toleration of polygamy in the OT is not to say that it was an ideal, and we see that the laws dealing with it are mostly proscriptive. The ideal is more likely represented by the monogamous story of Adam and Eve. But for various reasons, the position of women in the ancient world was such that polygamy was an unavoidable fact of life ...

Foundational considerations in approaching this passage: The theology of marriage that is derived from this passage must jive with the theology of marriage in the rest of Scripture. We have from other places, including Paul's own writing, a beautiful view of marriage as a prelapsarian blessing which is meant to reflect Christ and the church. Thus it would ...

There does not seem to be any way to narrow the gap. This might be intentional, the intent being to establish a generally negative moral value to kings gathering harems, but allowing for the necessity of politically expedient marriages with foreign royal families. The term "many wives" is as specific as the OT gets. Kings 11:4 is clearly an indictment of ...

Paul seems to be very careful at the beginning of I Corinthians 7 in his statements, hedging them so that they are not taken as absolutes, e.g. vv. 1-2 and 8-9 with "it is good [...] but", and v.6 with "by way of concession, not of command", and in the middle of the chapter when he's talking about divorce he does clearly separate his "I say, not the Lord" ...

As for why the KJV used the term "meet", the Old English adjective form means "proper", "suitable" or "precisely adapted to". See the definitions on Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster.com and TheFreeDictionary.com. I think that in some cases people have reacted to this rather strongly (and unnecessarily) because of the passing resemblance to "meat" - See, God ...

I think this is a clear Matthean addition: And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”—Mark 10:11-12 (ESV) “Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries a woman divorced ...

We often think that the punishment for adultery in the Bible was stoning but according to the Mishnah (Sanh. xi. 1) it was strangulation. John Owen says, strangulation was used for: adulterers, strikers of parents, man-stealers, old men exemplarily rebellious against the law, false prophets, and those who predicted the future under the names of idols (John ...

To add to Ami's answer... Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. No other creature was created in God's image - in the context of the creation account here in Genesis 1, we can infer the nature of mankind is more like God than any other created thing. It follows that, ...

If we read the New Testament in its historical context, we must cannot underestimate the importance of the destruction of Judaism in AD70. The imminent warnings of the apostles (as Covenant prophets) to the first Christians all relate to that event. Peter Leithart writes: Given the high view of marriage and sexuality in Scripture, Paul’s instructions ...

If you believe that the text is divine, then this isn't a question about the text. It's a question about why G!d chooses this asymmetrical policy. And, as such, that question belongs, I believe, on a doctrinal site. If you look at the text as a text, then you are looking at the social and cultural context of the time in which it was written. In that society ...

Polygyny was acceptable because women were considered to be possessions. That is why Sarah called Avraham adon (Gen. 18:13 cp. 1 Pet. 3:6), or "sir"/ "lord"/ "master." The husband is essentially considered to be his wife's "master," and she, his servant. This is why women did not have the right to divorce their husband. The only way they could re-marry was ...