Genesis and Family Values

The phrase "family values" currently reverberates in political, religious, and even academic circles. The conversations are complicated and the tone is often heated. Various organizations spend vast sums of money to promulgate their views on issues such as pro-natalism and gay marriage. People argue vigorously about the very nature of the family. Those debates involve important and foundational questions: What is a family? Is there a normative family structure? What does marriage mean? One might think that these questions belong primarily to the purview of sociologists, anthropologists, and ethicists, among others. However, as many of us know, the aforementioned conversations regularly involve appeals to biblical literature. When examining the issue of the Bible and family values, Jay Newman recently wrote, "In modern Western democracies, the religious texts that have had by far the greatest cultural impact have been Biblical texts, so it is not surprising that in recent debates in the West about religion and the family, religious cultural critics and reformers have concentrated much of their attention on the values ostensibly imparted by Biblical texts. Questions thus arise concerning, for example, what family values the Bible actually imparts. . . ."1 If Newman s assessments are accurate, we biblical scholars have a role to play in the current debates, since who better than one of us is in a position to talk about family values as they are depicted either in the Hebrew Bible or in the New Testament. Within the context of this discourse about family values, one prominent organization, Focus on the Family, has identified five principles or "pillars" that undergird its work of "helping to preserve traditional values and the institution of the family." In introducing those pillars, Focus on the Family offers the following statement regarding their source: "These pillars are drawn from the Bible and the Judeo-Christian ethic, rather than from the humanistic notions of today's theorists."2 Despite this claim, explicit reference to biblical material is not prominent in their formulations.3 When one continues to read through the foundational documents of both Focus on the Family and comparable organizations, such as the Family Research Council, it seems clear that certain issues, for example, abortion and the male headship in the family, are of primary importance. In a recent essay devoted to religion and the family, Bryan Turner has concluded that a number of organizations, including the New Christian Right, "have in various ways rejected liberal America in favor of the regulation of pornography, anti-abortion legislation, the criminalization of homosexuality, and the virtues of faithfulness and loyalty in sexual partnerships."4 Appeal to family values seems to have become a code phrase to address these and other issues, many of which involve human sexuality and familial life.5 Oddly, some pressing contemporary issues involving the family, such as child or spouse abuse, are not included in these conversations. As one who is interested in the intersection of Hebrew Bible texts and contemporary life, I began to ask myself: What traditional values are attested in the Hebrew Bible, and what is the institution of the family that we see there? In short, what family values pervade the Hebrew Bible? When reflecting about these questions, I thought about some of the fami lies attested in biblical literature. Surely the marriages of religiously prominent individuals in the Hebrew Bible would constitute formative moments in the socalled Judeo-Christian ethic, to which Focus on the Family had appealed. I thought about Abraham, who was married to one woman, Sarah, and given sexual access to another, Hagar. I thought about Jacob, who was married to two sisters, Leah and Rachel. I thought about King David, who was married to Michal (Saul's daughter), Abigail (widow of Nabal), Bathsheba (widow of Uriah), and Haggith (mother of Adonijah). …