Introduction

Recently, a friend of mine who is a retired Methodist pastor asked me to teach his Sunday-school class for a few sessions. I was, of course, flattered and immediately said yes. I haven’t had a chance to do much teaching about Christianity in the “real” world lately and–as I imagine you might suspect–teaching about my faith is one of my favorite things to do.

Then my friend told me that the subject would be “marriage.” K and I will have been married twelve years in June, and we’ve been together seventeen, but all of the members of this particular Sunday-school class have been married far longer, and some have been married longer than I’ve been alive. It felt like a trap, though I’m sure it was not meant as such.

Despite the danger, I wanted to teach too much to back out. Besides, it’s often a good idea to get outside of your comfort zone a little–the best learning is done there. Nevertheless, I needed to sidestep the pitfall of trying to give marriage advice to people who know far better than I.

So, I decided that, while I’d sure teach about Christian ideas of marriage, I’d do so from a theological perspective rather than a practical one. More in my area of knowledge, and safer. This led me to the topic we’ll discuss today: one of Jesus’s hard sayings in Matthew 22:30 (also Mark 12:25 and Luke 20:34-35, so it’s pretty clear that the authors of the Gospels thought that this saying was important).

N.B.: Because this has turned out to be a relatively long post, I’ve tried to insert section headings for ease of navigation and so that you, dear reader, can read or skip as much as you want. Trust me, I won’t be offended: I’ll never know what you picked to do. Unless you tell me, in which case I’ll do my best not to be offended.

Matthew 22:23-30

In Matthew 22:23-30, the Sadducees have come to Jesus to test him, and they present him with a hypothetical problem to solve (flashbacks of law school immediately followed). Specifically, they tell him of a woman who was married and widowed without a child, so her husband’s brother married her, but then he died, so the next brother in line married her, but then he died, and so on and so forth until the woman had been married to seven brothers before she died herself. The problem the Sadducees pose, then, is who will she be married to in the afterlife?

Jesus says, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead–have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.” Matthew 22-29-32.

Whoa! I enjoy being married. I love my wife. When we got married, we intentionally left out the “’til death do us part” language of our vows–we didn’t think that just this life would be enough for us. I want to be connected to her eternally. So what do I do with what Jesus says here?

Research. That’s what I do. And think. Because something’s going on here, and I’m quite sure that Jesus is not telling us that we will not be with those we love in the Kingdom of Heaven. This lead me to identify a problem, a relatively obvious one when you think about it. Our modern Western idea of marriage is not like the idea of Jewish marriage in the first century C.E. To impose our idea of marriage on this statement is to immediately miss the point.

Instead, I came to understand that Jesus is making a point about social justice. Let’s walk through it together:

Context

First, let’s but things in context–geographically, historically and literarily. As you might have seen in my posts about my profound learning experience with Dr. John A. “Jack” Beck, it has been ingrained on my mind now that, when I look at the Scriptures I ask: “Where are we when this takes place?”

Geography

In this instance, that question proved immediately helpful. In Matthew 21:23, we are told that “Jesus entered the temple courts.” So that means that Jesus is on the Temple Mount when speaking with the Sadducees. I soon learned that even that was not enough specificity for this passage of the Gospel. Matthew doesn’t tell us more about where Jesus is on the Temple Mount than that he’s there somewhere, so I needed to do some research to see if I could find some information to make a better supposition about where specifically Jesus might have been.

First, let’s talk about the geography of the Temple Mount itself. I recommend Googling to find a picture because one will be helpful, but I’ll try to do a good job describing with words.

Imagine a rectangle (Josephus described the mount as a square a furlong on a side, but I don’t think that’s quite right–it’s possible though that I am mistaken. For sake of argument, bear with me.) with the longer sides oriented roughly north-south. That’s the Temple Mount. The place now known as the Western Wall or the “Wailing” Wall is a part of the north west segment of the entire western wall.  The entrance to the top of the Temple Mount was made via ramps up from doorways in the southern wall–these doorways are now sealed up, but you can see parts of them. There was also a bridge entryway on the southern part of the western wall, connected to Herod’s Stoa on the south end of the Temple Mount. The impressive archway of the bridge and stairs of this entrance have since been destroyed, but you can find both pictures showing where the supports of the arch can been seen in the wall even today and diagrams showing what it would have looked like in the past.

Let’s return to Herod’s Stoa. While his lineage is a little complex, Herod was considered to be a Gentile. Therefore, he could not travel farther than the Court of the Gentiles in on the Temple Mount. The Court of the Gentiles is essentially the area of the Temple Mount outside of the walled-in Temple complex proper. Herod built the Stoa as an elaborate three-aisled arched and columned basilica where he could stay in luxury while looking out at the Temple–and reminding Israel who was in charge.

On the (outside of) the eastern wall of the Temple Mount with another set of gates was a colonnade or cloistered area known as Solomon’s Porch, so named because it was believed that that part of the Temple area had been built in Solomon’s time (I have not done any research to determine the likelihood that that belief was true).

Near the middle of the Temple Mount itself is the Temple complex, facing (very) roughly east-west. Think of the Temple complex as two compartments, with the entrance into the first compartment from the eastern outer wall of the complex and entrance into the second (western) compartment–where the Temple itself was–only through the first compartment. The first compartment is known as the Court of the Women (because it was the closest to the Temple women could get). The second compartment, the courtyard around the Temple proper, was known as the Court of Israel.

You’ll notice that I’ve bolded four places around the Temple Mount–the Courts of the Gentiles, Women and Israel and Solomon’s Porch. The scholarship I reviewed indicated that these four locations were the places where Jesus taught when he taught at the Temple. That’s a pretty easy statement to make since, combined, that covers pretty much everywhere but inside the Temple.

With this in mind, let’s look at some textual evidence. As I mentioned above, Matthew tells us that Jesus “entered the temple courts.” That rules out Solomon’s Porch, I think, as the location for this saying. But we can go farther than that.

The day before this confrontation with the Saduccees, Jesus had overturned the tables of the moneychangers at the Temple. All the texts I looked at stated that the moneychangers would have been located in the Court of the Gentiles. I see no reason to argue with that. When Matthew relates Jesus this previous event, he tells us again (before, really) that Jesus “entered the temple courts.” I think the connection there makes it quite likely that Matthew 22:23-32 also takes place in the Court of the Gentiles.

There’s a logic to this as well. Given that Jesus has come for Jews and Gentiles (although that’s only made explicit later), he would have wanted to teach in as public a place as possible most of the time (though how many Gentiles actually came to the Court of the Gentiles is hard to say). More important, I think, is that the Pharisees and Saducees would have wanted to challenge Jesus in as public a forum as possible–again making the Court of the Gentiles the likeliest place for this scene.

If I had to bet, I’d say Jesus was in the Court of the Gentiles, but there’s no proving that. On other grounds, I think it’s very likely that Jesus was not in the Court of Israel. Why? Because I think it was important to him (as I’ll argue below) that women be present to hear the words he speaks in this passage.

That’s the geography. Now, let’s talk about the historical context of Jewish marriage in which Jesus’s statement is made.

An Etymological Aside

One of the most surprising things I discovered in my research is a relatively minor etymological note, but one that immediately impressed me. The word baal (sometimes written and pronounced “ba’al“) is sometimes used for the word “husband.” The word itself is most often translated as “lord” or “master” and, when discussed in the OT, usually refers to pagan gods, who are called baals just as we would name our God by saying “the Lord.” There were many baals (though they’re often only referred to as baal): Baal Hadad of Tyre, Baal Hamon, and as a title for the Canaanite god El, just to name a few. Indeed, the probable etymology of the word is from the Mesopotamian god Belu and there’s no question that, whenever used by the Old Testament authors, the connotation of paganism was attached, intentionally or not.

Baal is translated as “husband” in Genesis 20:3; Exodus 21:3 and 22 Deuteronomy 22:22 and 24:4; 2 Samuel 11:36; Joel 1:8; Proverbs 12:4 and 31:11, 23 and 28 and Esther 1:17 and 20. It is by far not the most common word used for husband in OT Hebrew (that is “‘iysh” or, properly, אִישׁ, Strong’s H376). There’s not enough here to make a true argument that the use of the word means anything more than when we refer to a mortal “lord” as opposed to “the Lord” in English, but it is interesting to me.

Historical Context of Marriage

Etymological notes aside, let’s talk about the social culture of marriage. Jewish marriages were (and sometimes still are, though much less often, I think) arranged by the parents and particularly the father. Most of the usages in the Old Testament of the word “marriage” are in the context of a woman being “given” or “taken” in marriage. It’s easier, in fact, to refer to the times when the Hebrew equivalents of the English word are not used in that context–1 Kings 11:2 (“enter into marriage”) and Dan 2:43 (“they will mix with one another in marriage”).

As with many–perhaps most–premodern societies,  marriages were not arranged for love but for the maintenance or creation of economic, political or social ties between families. For farming families, marriage helped consolidate interests between families for farming larger areas cooperatively, a palpable benefit for surviving in hard times. For the elite, as we’re perhaps more familiar in the Western medieval context, marriages were about determination of succession, alliances and control of territory.

As evidence of this, the Old Testament has some relatively complex rules on where and how land can and cannot pass as a result of marriage and children–land cannot be transferred by marriage between the twelve tribes, for instance.

The marriage itself was not just an agreement between spouses, as we tend to think in the modern world–it was a contract between families with much more at stake than how the couple got along.

To marry a woman, a man would give her father a mohar (typically defined as a “bride-price” or “dowry”). We see this in Genesis 34:12, Exodus 22:17, 1 Samuel 18:25 and it is the basis of Jacob’s work contract for the hands of Rachel and Leah. Socially, though, this was not considered the “sale” of a woman but was meant to compensate the bride’s family for the loss of a productive member (through marriage). There was some expectation that a father would set aside some or most of the mohar for his daughter’s future, but there was no strict rule requiring this and a second gift was made by the groom to the bride.

Let’s talk specifically about Levirate marriage, since that’s the situation that the Sadducees are refering to in questioning Jesus.

Levirate marriage (which is described in Deuteronomy 25:5-10) was the practice where, if a man was married but died leaving a widow and no children, the deceased man’s brother was expected to marry the widow. The first child between the two would be deemed to be the child of the dead man, ostensibly assuring the descent of the man’s name and property. Despite the focus on “protecting the dead man’s name,” the practice was likely meant to be a social protection for women–now outside of their father’s house and without a husband or male children, the widow might be left without social protection or anyone to provide for her. Being a childless widow could be a precarious social position indeed.

If the stories of Ruth and of Onan and Tamar are to be taken as exemplars, it seems that it was more common for women to pursue the idea of Levirate marriage–and for men to sometimes resist it.

Under Mosaic law, women were expected to be absolutely subordinate to men. A man could divorce his wife, but not the other way around. A man could have multiple wives, but a woman could have only one husband (both Josephus and Justin Martyr–who wrote well after Jesus–described the existence of the practice contemporary to their writings). Under Levitical law, a husband had the power of life and death over a woman who committed adultery (as we see Jesus confront even in his time).

There is evidence that women purchased or sold land or otherwise participated in commercial enterprise, so (as always) we need to understand that there was some nuance and complexity to the social status of women but, for the most part, women were subjected to the will and whim of men and were used in marriage as a tool for the management of property and other “masculine” concerns. Women simply did not have the rights or freedoms that, in modern culture, we believe that they are entitled to (and Jesus, as I’m going to argue, would agree).

Literary Context

In the passage before the Saduccees test Jesus on the subject of marriage in the great hereafter, the Pharisees have tested him on whether taxes should be paid to Caesar. He tells them to “…give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” Matthew 22:22. In other words, he turns the Pharisee’s question back upon itself by telling them, “you’re asking questions about money and power, but those are not the concerns of God. We’re talking about something much more important.” His Kingdom is not in contention with the petty kingdoms of man.

After the confrontation we’re discussing, Jesus gives the Great Commandments: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind….Love your neighbor as yourself.” Matthew 22:37-39.

It is significant that the exhange with the Sadducees occurs bookended by these two statements.

Interpretation

One of the commentaries I looked at mentioned (and astutely, I think) that, for the Sadducees at least, this confrontation really isn’t about marriage. The Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife (or angels for that matter), so what they’re doing is asking a question that they believe is logically unanswerable so that they can say, “Aha! Can’t figure that one out, can you? See, there is no afterlife, because it wouldn’t make sense!”

This is almost certainly the Sadducees’ goal, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the only thing that Jesus is talking about. If it were, he would only have needed to (after noting that they misunderstand the Scriptures) make the statement that God is the God of the living and not the dead–that assertion alone is enough to confound the Sadducees’ purpose.

Yes, the statement about marriage at the resurrection reinforces Jesus’s retort above, but it also does more.

Coming on the heels of the Pharisees’ question about money and taxes, Jesus is telling the Sadducees the same thing he told the Pharisees. Given the social background of Jewish marriage, what the Sadducees are asking, in a sense, is “who will own this woman in the afterlife?” or, to put it in a slightly more sympathetic light, “who will have rights over this woman in the afterlife.”

Jesus’s response says, “Asking that question shows your complete lack of understanding–you’re concerned about power and status in the world and thereby missing all of the important things with which God and the Scriptures are concerned.”

Jesus’s life itself is grand statement that the things that we humans chase so lustily after–fame, wealth and power–are not the more important things of God–relationship, love, creation, meaning. It stands to reason that his responses to doubters carry the same truth underneath them.

And with the Great Commandment(s) following after this passage, we certainly cannot read Jesus’s statement that people do not marry in the afterlife to mean the same thing as “people do not love” in the afterlife. The argument could be made (drawing twistedly on C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves, I think) that the kind of love in the Great Commandment does not include eros/romantic love but only agape/unselfish love, but the use of marriage as a metaphor for the relationship between the believer and God (or the Church and Jesus) so profoundly throughout the Bible (this is the topic of the next part in this series) seems to indicate otherwise.

Conclusion

What we’re left, then, is a promise of a more socially just existence in the resurrection–the artificial human socioeconomic and political construct of marriage will be replaced by natural and divine relationship that is about those involved and not about power and wealth and land in the world. I can’t help but imagine that there were women in the crowd who heard Jesus make the statement and thought “Thank God!” not because they did not want to love and be loved but because they wanted to be equal–something the old system of Jewish marriage did not allow them.

P.S. – I do not mean any of the above analysis to be a disparagement against modern Jewish marriage practice. Until only recently in our history, Christian marriages were also arranged primarily for economic and political purposes. Even more important, it is my understanding that ideas about Jewish marriage have evolved through the ages so that modern Jewish marriages are every bit as concerned with love, respect and equality within a marriage as Christian ones are (ignoring entirely those fundamental and “evangelical” Christian sects that still maintain that a woman should be subservient in all things.

Topics Coming Up:

The next topic I’ll discuss in this series will be about marriage as metaphor for relationships with God–we’ll start with Scriptures and move into theology and metaphysics.

At some point in this series I’ll return to the two creation stories of Adam and Eve in Genesis and what they might mean for God’s original intent for the values that a marriage ought to uphold.

While my stance that homosexuality is not a sin and that the love between people of the same sex (or gender identity for that matter) should be viewed (from a theological perspective) no differently from that of a heterosexual couple has been discussed on the blog previously and should be relatively well-known by my readers by known, this series is probably a good place to include some comments on that front as well, so look for that in the near future.

For the next post in this series, click here.