Music Right, um the Genesis 2 passage-I asked at the panel the other day when this text is preached at weddings you know, 'the two shall become one flesh'. What is the usual exposition on it? And, Mark, you said.
. . .
so I think that when this is used in weddings and and I'd be interested to know your experience but my experience has been that there are usually two ideas that are expressed. One idea is uh it's an expression of the sexual union between the two becoming one flesh. The other idea is that it is a knitting of the hearts together.
So that um as Bob Dylan said, you are the other half of what I am' you're the missing piece you you know. Together we make one; uh type expression um. Setting aside whether or not Bob Dylan made sense uh which was an appropriate question you asked.
The uh uh the import of this verse is actually found within the context if we look a little bit deeper so take us through it. Right I'm not totally setting aside those interpretations. We hear them all the time at Indian weddings.
And the Bible is is layered enough to accommodate that because you know the earlier part of the story is of God looking at this first male human and saying it is not good that he should be alone so these senses do come in that's all right. But what might be the primary sense of this text? And for any text you first look at the context, the literary context.
What's before it, what's after it to make sense of it. You follow the thought of the narrator, the author. You look at what goes before it and after it.
I mean that's what you do in a newspaper or in any communication. You will read just a line and say oh well this one means -if you are wanting to know what it means you read the paragraph before and the paragraph after. So we must do that with the Biblical text as well.
So now flesh. The word flesh occurs in the verse just previous and that's a little poem that the man puts out when he sees the woman. The man said in verse 23, 'this now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh and she shall be called woman for she was taken out of man'.
And that is why-and now the narrator steps back from the narrative. He almost freezes the narrative and steps out. We call it breaking frame.
So he steps out and then makes a prescription to his readers. This is why he says a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife and they become one flesh. Why?
Because of the poem that precedes it. Because of what the man said. He said this now is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.
Now this is uh clearly idiomatic language. There is a certain literalness to it of course because uh the construction of the woman was through the taking of rib. All of that.
But it is a Hebrew idiom that occurs in other texts as well and so we track the idiom first across the Old Testament and we find it's quite frequent. For example it's going to come in another story in Genesis. This is where Jacob is fleeing from his twin brother Esau and lands up back in Mesopotamia at the doors of his mother's brother.
His uncle Laban and when Laban opens the doors and meets his nephew who he hasn't seen him ever. He says to Jacob well you're welcome to come stay with me. You are, and the same idiom comes up, the idiom is bone and flesh.
You are my bone and flesh. In in English, in the NIV for example, you will have it rendered into the English idiom which is flesh and blood. It's the same thing, flesh and blood.
Bone and flesh in the Hebrew. You are my bone and flesh. Says to his nephew Jacob.
And then in the Book of Judges there is someone we might not be too familiar with-Gideon's son a certain Abimelech, who is trying to gather votes and make himself King somewhere. So he goes off to his maternal town of Shechem, And he says to the people of Shekem, make me King over you. Am I not your bone and flesh, he says.
Another place could be when David is already crowned King over Judah. seven years have lapsed. Now the northern tribes come to him and say come we are working also because you are our bone and flesh.
So now think about the parties in all these examples I gave you the two parties are male yeah? And it's quite different from well um this particular context in which is a marriage context a man and his wife. Those are male parties.
What we're talking about when we talk about bone and flesh or flesh and blood is kinship relationships and kinship obligations. This is big! This has a very high value in collectivist societies.
Societies which place a high value on community and is the opposite of individualistic. So as I explained that is why-it's because of kinship obligations that you have so many Indians in America. Because uh uh the man who first comes here is now obliged to his kin to bring them all over to this land of uh milk and honey.
Yeah? So so he's obliged to any brothers or sisters he might have. He's obliged to the children of his brothers and sisters and their second cousins and their pet dogs you know.
It just goes on like that. So kinship obligations are really high. That's why when um a woman is married she comes into this household of her husband as an outsider.
An Indian mother um is very likely to say to her newly married son and you're listening to what this wife tells you? And how long have you known her? Three months?
Me, have I not born you in my belly for nine months and then clothed you and fed you for 27 years you see. So that's that's the competition. The the incoming woman is always the outsider.
She is from another family. She is not blood. She is not kin and so that is where this takes- it is now so counter-cultural-it's uh-it's a it's a shock even.
It's saying once you're married-it's addressing the man because we're talking about patriarchal systems here uh- it's saying to the man reorganize your kinship obligations. Who's sitting at the top of that pyramid of obligations? It's usually the patriarch of the family, the father or maybe an older brother.
So that's not who your primary obligation should now be directed at. Revise that hierarchy. Who sits at the top of that pyramid now?
Not even the father and the mother. It's the wife. That, that ,that's, that's something the Indian mind, you know uh uh really struggles to wrap its uh head around.
So, uh that's how counter cultural this text is. It's talking about kinship obligations and it's asking that the man reorganizes priorities totally so as to make his wife, who is usually culturally the outsider-the other, to make her his primary kin.
