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Biblical Marriage Is Not Biblical
Why Biblical Marriage Is One of the Biggest LIES the Church Tells
Marriage as we know it in the modern world is actually a fairly recent invention. While it may come as a surprise to many of us, marriage is not what has always defined a “family”. In fact, on the timeline of Human existence, marriage as we know it did not even exist until the invention of—the Church.
A Brief History of Marriage
On the timeline of Human existence, homo sapiens have existed as families of hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years. Families consisted of loosely organized groups of as many as 30 people or more, often with several male leaders, and multiple women shared by them, along with their children.
About 12,000 years ago, various cradles of civilization began to emerge as the earliest forms of agriculture and farming were forming all over the world. As the culture of tribalism became less and less efficient for the managing of farms and settlements that grew larger and larger, as Human knowledge and civilization increased, the concept of marriage would slowly develop within the evolving local culture.
Marriage, to use the term very loosely, grew into a way to manage one’s family, and by that I mean one’s property. And when I say “one’s” what I really mean to say is a man’s. The primary purpose of marriage was to bind women to men. Through marriage, a woman became a man’s property.
Marriage would evolve to create a social mechanism that helped to guarantee that a man’s children were his biological heirs. Having your father’s name became very important for social identity.
The ancient world was most decidedly a man’s world; with rare exception, it was highly patriarchal.
The earliest known recorded evidence of what we can call something close to modern “marriage” of one man to one woman dates from about 2350 B.C., in Mesopotamia. But while this is evidence of what we might call monogamy, it was not, to say the least, the norm.
Over the next several hundred years, marriage would evolve into a widespread institution, one that was embraced by the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans.
