Finding Community in a New Social Unit, with John Walton: Genesis 2:24

All right, Genesis 224, that's where we are.

It's a famous passage.

John, set it up for us.

Sure.

NIV translates it, that is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.

There's problems in almost every phrase there.

What social scenario is reflected with a man leaving his parents instead of a woman joining the husband's clan? What's implied by the verb davach, to cling or cleave to? And what does becoming one flesh mean? So every clause in the verse has problems associated with it.

And there's a lot of theological interpretation that goes into that, right? Absolutely.

And part of that is that these languages or ideas of marriage and family and such, those are very culturally connected.

Yes, they are culturally connected, yet lots of Christians reading the Bible tend to go to this passage and say, this is what institutes God's view of marriage.

That's a pretty high statement, and we want to make sure that we're reading the text well before we come to that kind of conclusion.

So what does it mean for you to say that a man leaves a father and mother?

Again, that doesn't work in the society as we know it in the ancient world.

And so we have to ask, what is it talking about? And one of the ways that we can understand that is that it's not so much the idea that either the man fulfills the marriage by going to his in-law's house or that he joins their clan.

But rather it's the idea that a man leaves his established community.

that is, the one he's in with his parents, and establishes a new community with his wife.

So in that sense, it's more community-focused instead of marriage practices.

Yeah.

Well, we look at that today and we would say, well, okay, so you need to move out of your parents' house and need to have an apartment.

I mean, we sort of look at it in a different way.

Our marriage customs are different, and yet – Aren't we doing the same thing? Aren't we establishing a new community? So that does

carry across.

We're establishing a new community.

Again, in the ancient world, they had insular housing.

So you just added a new wing to the clan household and moved in.