Genesis and Early Man, Part VII: Light From Other Forms of Cultural Behavior on Some Incidents in Scripture
AT LEAST ONE book and quite a few papers have been written exploring the light which the customs of other cultures throw upon many passages of Scripture, especially in the Old Testament. But almost all of these have, concerned themselves primarily with peoples from the Middle East area, both ancient and modern.
For example, H. B. Tristram in 1894 published a volume entitled, Eastern Customs in Bible Lands. (1) It can still be obtained in secondhand bookstores and is a thoroughly worthwhile book to read, shedding a great deal of light on both the Old and New Testaments, and on the beliefs of the Jewish people particularly in the time of our Lord. In 1896, a very well-known Oriental scholar of that day, Hormuzd Rassam, presented a paper before the Victoria Institute in London. (2) This, too, is full of interesting observations. Much more recently, Ernest Gordon in 1945 contributed an article in The Sunday School Times entitled, (3) "Light on the Old Testament from Primitive Society."
All of these have this in common, that they deal with people who in one way or another have shared in the historical stream of events which form the immediate background of the biblical record. To my knowledge there has been no serious attempt to show how primitive and advanced cultures which have not shared this common background have nevertheless developed patterns of cultural behavior which shed unexpected light on many parts of Scripture. Now and then one will run across casual comments in a work such as Livingstone's Travels in Africa, (4) or Lubbock's Origin of Civilization, (5) but nobody has thought to pull together this kind of incidental commentary on the Scriptures into a single essay.
The only exception to this is a volume such as Barton's Archaeology and the Bible, (6) which gives numerous references to cultural parallelisms in the Middle Eastern literary texts such as legal codes, collections of stories, poems, and prayers, and religious documents of various kinds, both in Cuneiform and hieroglyphics. For this reason we have not included any illustrations from such contiguous sources. The material of this Doorway Paper has been derived almost entirely from records of cultural behavior which owe little or nothing directly to Middle East tradition.
This is not a paper which one would ordinarily read straight through as a continuing text, but rather a source of reference. A few of the comments do not deal strictly with cultural parallels but were felt to be intriguing enough to justify their inclusion--and it is not too likely that the average reader would discover them otherwise.
This collection of comments has simply grown by accretion from a fairly wide range of studies which have taken me into the highways and byways of biblically and non-biblically oriented literature over the past 35 years or so. Hence the reader should understand that this material did not result, strictly speaking, from a study of Scripture itself, though by investigating some particular passage listed in the Index, he will often find a great deal of information on Scripture. This kind of material was rather extracted from studies of primitive people made in depth by anthropologists who lived with them for a time. In many instances the writer was not aware of the fact that he was shedding interesting light on Scripture. In a few cases the parallelisms are not precise but reflect the underlying philosophy of the biblical pattern and to this extent help one to understand better. Some things that people did in the Old Testament seem, if not unforgivable, at least somewhat cruel, and yet when the underlying philosophy is illuminated by reference to some other culture, the situation often appears in a much less unfavorable light.
IN GENESIS 2:24 it is written, "Wherefore a man shall forsake his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife." It is amazing how many repercussions in the cultural behavior of people can hinge upon some apparently inconsequential fragment of the total behavior pattern. That a man should leave his home and take up residence with his wife's people rather than that a woman should leave hers and take up residence with his people seems on the face of it of not very profound consequence. And yet there stems from this single procedure a whole chain of consequences which can be traced in virtually every kind of culture in the world, both high and low, and which sheds a wonderful light on a surprising number of events in Scripture.
That it should be the first distinct reference to cultural behavior in Scripture suggests that the writer recognized its prime importance. And, incidentally, it raises the interesting question as to how the passage got in at this place in Genesis, since it is reasonably certain that Adam himself did not insert it--unless under divine inspiration he was instructed to set down as a guide to marital conduct in the future something about which he could not possibly have had personal experience at the time.
For many years biblical scholars have held that the book of Genesis was originally composed of 11 brief histories which had accumulated from Adam to Moses and which Moses took and combined into a single narrative. This view holds that the first narrative was written by God Himself and terminated with the words (in Gen. 2:4), "This is the history (generations) of the heavens and the earth, etc." That God should write such a record is by no means impossible. He wrote the Ten Commandments on tablets for Moses; and He wrote on the wall of Belshazzar's palace. This first record was presumably put into Adam's keeping who subsequently added an historical record of his own, a record which terminates with the words, "This is the book of the history (generations) of Adam..." (Gen. 5:1). There are 11 of these in all, and when Moses put together the book of Genesis they formed the basis of his account. To these he added a few explanatory "editorial" notes, which, for example, recorded the identity of places which had since changed in name. To this History he then added the other four books, so that with complete justice the whole Pentateuch is credited to Moses, but with the significant restraint that no quotation in the New Testament from Genesis itself is ever actually attributed to Moses. It is therefore possible, but by no means certain, that Genesis 2:24 was added by the hand of Moses by divine instruction.
Why should the man leave his home rather than the woman leave hers? Primitive societies are primitive chiefly in the sense that their dominion over their physical environment rests on a slender margin. The term "primitive" has nothing to do with intelligence or wisdom in dealing with social problems. There are many anthropologists and sociologists who have expressed the belief that the most primitive people are often the most socially sophisticated. They do not always reason out why they have adopted some customs which contribute to the general well-being of their society, but perhaps they learned more quickly by trial and error than we tend to do. In the present context they saw very clearly that when the wife's mother receives into her household the new husband, she has gained a son. By contrast if the wife moves into the husband's home, his mother has "lost" her son. Since from time immemorial the feelings of the matriarch have carried more emotional weight in the home than that of the male, who is very likely to spend far less time at home in any case, it is a sound principle for the well-being of the community to take steps to lessen as far as possible the emotional conflicts which are almost certain to arise when a woman with rights enters the household of another woman with rights. The introduction of the man into the wife's household rather than the reverse is a custom that is very widespread. It is worth noting certain things which follow from it as a principle.
Were each man to bring his wife into his own family circle, several brothers or a number of males within a village might well end up bringing together a number of women who were virtually strangers to one another and belonged to different tribes with somewhat different patterns of culture, who would then be called upon to live together in harmony when their husbands might, for one reason or another, be all absent from the village for long periods of time. In most societies of the world until very recent times, the males were likely to be away at war, hunting, or engaged in some form of work away from home. The woman is inevitably in such cases left to care for the children, the hearth, and the animals and the garden. When the husband has settled in his wife's home, it comes about that the women in the community who must live together and work together rather closely will by this very arrangement already belong to the same basic family, sharing the same cultural idiosyncrasies of the tribe.
The consequences of this practice of residence had other interesting repercussions with respect to the children. Since the children grew up in their mother's home territory, they naturally learned to behave as members of the mother's tribe, and they were in fact accredited to her tribe and her family and not to his. As a consequence, when the husband happened to have inherited "property," and by property is meant rights, titles, movable wealth, and so forth, he might be reluctant to see it pass out of his hands into the hands of his wife's tribe. Now he could get around this difficulty, if he so desired, by adopting an orphan, or a slave, or a youth captured in war, as his own son, and then passing over to him, rather than to any of his own children, all his wealth. As we shall see, adoption of those who were not sons into full sonship occurs in Scripture. Indeed, when the husband is away for extended periods of time either trading, fighting, or hunting, there is always some question of whether all the children born to his wife are really his children. As a result, there has been a very widespread practice of having the father officially "adopt" his own children. And until this adoption has been publicly declared in some simple ceremonial way, even his own legitimate children cannot claim him as their father.
In our culture, we are very much concerned with physical paternity, that is, with the man's role in conception. In many other cultures physical paternity is either not even recognized as a fact or is considered of little consequence. In almost all societies other than our own, children are so welcomed that the question of who is the legitimate father is very secondary. Indeed, an unwed mother who has a child, particularly a man-child, is likely to be sought eagerly in marriage because she has demonstrated that she is capable of bearing children. The Chukchee even had a particularly happy name for such an unwed woman: they called her a "fawn mother."
A further point of logical consequence is that since the woman has not left her home, her brothers are present always while her children are growing up and they, so long as they remain bachelors, are likely to take a larger part in the education of these children than the father himself does. As a consequence, the children grow up with a rather special attachment to "uncles" as a class. Every daughter in a household looks forward to receiving a bride price from her intended husband, and in the natural order of things it has worked out generally that one particular brother becomes especially attached to one particular sister and that sister will probably turn over to him much of the bride price which she receives, so that he in turn will be in a position to find a wife for himself. This special brother-sister relationship persists throughout life, and since his sister will in all probability be married before he can be, she is apt to have children before he does, and as a result, he will take particular interest in her children as opposed to the children of other sisters in his family. He will be the one who will discipline or reward them. His sister's husband will not be allowed to punish his own children, and indeed he will generally be very happy not to be required to do so. This uncle relationship is reflected interestingly in the Old Testament in certain important ways.
Another consequence of the matrilocal principle is that in many cultures which are polygynous--that is, in which the man may have a number of wives--his second wife, and indeed as far as possible all his wives, will be sisters. The reasons for polygyny will be considered briefly below, but the point I am trying to make here is that if a man married two women who were not sisters and if he was by custom to live with his wife's parents, then he would logically have to live in two places at once. The fact is that many societies expect the man who has married one daughter to take in succession each of the other daughters, so that in the end the whole family stays together. The first wife will have the priority due to her, which is nothing less than the priority she had in her own family as the eldest daughter in any case. To marry one of the younger daughters first would, in the eyes of such a culture, give rise to an impossible situation in which a daughter who had been junior in the family would "lord it over" her seniors. The reader may see the relevance of this to one well-known biblical event. But as we shall show, every one of the points which we have considered thus far sheds light on events in Scripture-- and this not only in the Old Testament but also in the New.
Because in a polygynous society a man's wives are likely to be close relatives, the children as a whole will be apt to call any adult female "mother." Indeed, since the father is common to them all, they not unnaturally look upon every female as a potential mother, and this is reinforced by the fact that in many such societies any one of the women will without hesitation suckle any hungry child. As a result, children will reserve the use of a given name only for their true mother in order to identify her. The child will, therefore, call every woman "mother" except the individual who happens to be his or her mother, and this individual will be addressed by her first name. By the same token, the women will refer to the child by the true mother's name as a means of particular identification. It would not serve the purpose to identify the child by its father. Thus while Indo-Europeans habitually attach the determinative -son (i.e., John, Johnson, etc.), other societies in which physical paternity was not so critical used such a form as Mary, Maryson, etc.
But this is only one of many names which a child is likely to receive, names which identify the tribe, and which even summarize the individual's personal history.
We cannot leave this subject without touching upon one particular concept of marriage which I believe must virtually be absent in every culture except that of so-called Western Man. This is the concept of romantic love as the basis for engagement. People in primitive cultures as well as high non-Western cultures do not marry for love except on rare occasions, and do not marry to legitimize sex. For the most part marriage serves two purposes which are clearly recognized: the first is that, by it, the individual achieves adult status, and the second is that the children may be legitimized. And by "legitimized" is meant here that the children will have a recognized relationship to everyone else in the community. They belong in an orderly way.
It should be emphasized that genuine love often develops between man and wife even when it has had little or no part in the original marriage. When I said that romantic love is not the basis of engagement, I meant only that it is not as a rule the reason for becoming married in the first place. But there are many accounts in the anthropological literature of strong attachment between two married people which has developed as the result of living together. It has been said that any two people of the opposite sex who are thrown together closely for a sufficient length of time and whose background makes them congenial to one another will have a tendency to become increasingly attached in the course of time. There is still much to be said for the once common practice, even in European society, of arranging marriages on the basis of overall appropriateness rather than prerequisite affection. Unfortunately, all too frequently, romantic love is based upon too shallow a foundation to survive the stresses and strains of individual growth of the two parties.
In many cultures, it is very firmly believed that in procreation the man provides the spirit of the child whereas the woman provides only the body. Since such societies are less materialistic than we are, it is honestly believed that at the time of birth the man makes a greater sacrifice than the woman does and is in greater danger. One interesting consequence of this concept of the relative roles played by the man and the woman in procreation is that the marriage of brothers and sisters is very often considered incestuous, and therefore abhorrent, only when the two children are the offspring of the same mother. Having the same mother, they are believed to have the same kind of body--which forms a dangerous union. On the other hand, having the same father is not nearly as serious. Two children of one father, then, whom we would therefore consider as brother and sister may marry legitimately, provided that they are the children of two different wives. A very interesting story in the Old Testament involving two of David's children might have ended differently if the young man had realized the implication of his exact relationship to the girl he violated.
As we have already noted, earlier cultures tried to make provision for the achievement of familial harmony by insisting upon the union in marriage of people who were related in a special way. They wished to see joined together people who were closely enough related by blood that the involvement of the equally closely related relatives would stabilize the marriage as far as possible with the least emotional disturbance for all concerned, especially when the husband was likely to be absent from home a large part of the time. But they also wished to avoid bringing into the world defective children, an eventuality which people had very early observed was more frequent if the blood relationships were too close. Since each brother in the family tended to be paired off in a special relationship with a particular sister, his sister's children became of special concern to him. When these children grew up, it was often taken for granted that the ideal marriage partner for them would be one of his own children. Thus a man's son would ideally marry his mother's brother's daughter, i.e., a cross cousin. This can be set forth diagrammatically as follows:
However, among Semitic people another kind of cousin relationship seems to have been preferred. In this case the ideal marriage partner was not the mother's brother's daughter but the father's - brother's daughter, a relationship known as parallel cousin marriage. This is set forth diagrammatically as follows:
Frequently, tied in with this parallel-cousin relationship, was a further principle which is as follows. If my brother marries a woman and dies at a time when his wife may still bear children, then I will assume the position of husband towards his wife. When this happens, his children would then become my children. However, since I am not related by blood to his wife, her children would not be considered related bodily to my children because they have received their bodies primarily from their mother. It thus comes about that although her children have now become my children and are thus counted as brothers and sisters to my children, since I am the appointed father of them all, yet it is perfectly legitimate in societies so structured in this way for such children to be joined in marriage. Indeed, a son may marry a "sister" so that his spouse is both wife and sister, a circumstance which illuminates one particularly well-known story in the Old Testament. He truthfully marries his sister; and yet because she is the daughter of his father (by a process of "adoption") she is not the daughter of his own mother. It is this last fact which earlier cultures saw as being crucial. It depends entirely on the concept that incest is dangerous because of the close relationship of two bodies derived from the same mother, and not the close relationship of two spirits derived from a common father. This is why a man may not marry his own mother or his own sister by his mother.
It is abhorrent to us that a man should have several wives at once, and yet for thousands of years polygyny has been practiced very widely. One reason for this is that there was a tendency for the succession of wives to be sufficiently closely related that they were already well conditioned to living together. The notion of romantic love introduced a most disruptive of all forces in human relationships, namely, jealousy. And there is no jealousy as divisive as that which stems from wounded love. The jealousy which stems from wounded pride is bad enough, but there are often ways in which it can be compensated for on a social plane. The simple fact is that the practice of a number of women sharing a single husband does not automatically lead to family chaos. The rights of each wife and her children have almost always been protected by custom. And, curiously enough, it is not infrequently the women themselves who insist upon other women being added to the "community." This is partly a question of social prestige, for as each wife is added all the previous wives move up in rank by one order. Moreover, a man who can support successfully a number of wives is generally considered to be a superior individual to the man who has only one or two wives. In addition to this is the plain fact that, in many such societies the women far outnumber the men. Not only do they tend to mature sooner and live longer, but the very occupation of men keeps the male population down. The hazards of war, hunting, traveling in general, cause a steady attrition of the male population. In some societies this is so serious in fact that the balance is preserved by destroying a large number of female infants at birth. Only in Western culture are people comparatively indifferent to the plight of the widow. In non-Western cultures a widow would not be left to grow old by herself, she would be married to a man able to provide her with the associations of "family." This factor also contributes to polygyny. In short, polygyny, unlike the harem, is a social arrangement not really prompted by sex at all.
There is a further extension of the connected lines of thought regarding marriage which is logical enough, granted the other premises. Since the element of romantic love does not usually enter into the contract of marriage, the marriage bond is in no way weakened seriously in the eyes of the community merely because the husband and wife are constantly at loggerheads. But there is one element in the union which is quite critical, namely, that the wife must bear children. In the event that she proves barren, the man may take one of several alternative courses of action. He may divorce his wife and reclaim in full the bride price, since the "contract" has been broken. As a second alternative, he may demand from the bride's family the next oldest sister, not as a substitute for his first wife but as an addition to his household to bear his children. It is just such a possibility as this that in many societies leads to the feeling that the bride's sisters are potential wives of the oldest sister's husband. And this probably led in some cases to the potentiality becoming a reality, with the end result that the man by custom married all the sisters whether his first wife was barren or not. There is a third alternative, and this is that the wife who finds herself unable to bear children has the privilege of providing her husband with another woman to raise children for him, the children as they are born being laid at once upon her knees so that they accept her as true mother from the very first. The important point here is that the husband himself is not allowed, in this arrangement, to choose the second wife. And it must be supposed that the first wife will take care to ensure that the second wife will be one who will not forseeably compete with her own privileges as the first wife. The husband has no choice in this matter, it is entirely for the wife to decide and it is she who "gives" the substitute to her husband and not the husband who makes the choice himself.
The opposite of barrenness which is considered a breach of contract is the birth of more than one child at a time, which is frequently felt to be undesirable. The birth of twins has been interpreted in a number of ways by primitive people, some believing it is a good omen and others not a good omen. It is considered a good omen by those who desire only to have a large number of children in their household and who are not unduly superstitious, although in some circumstances even those who love children find it necessary to destroy one of them by exposure since the mother cannot support both because of the harshness of their environment. Those cultures in which the forces of evil are more manifest, and some societies like the Dobuans which are absolutely impregnated with black magic, the birth of twins is looked upon with distaste, suspicion, fear, or horror. Those who look upon the event with distaste are people who usually believe that it is most improper for a human being to parallel the behavior of animals by bearing more than one child at a time. It is an animal, not a human, practice and is felt to be degrading. Those who look upon the event with suspicion believe that it is evidence of infidelity on the part of the woman. In order to bear two children at once she must have "known" two men, one of whom would, of course, not be her husband. In this case action is likely to be taken by the mother in order to avoid suspicion, and one of the two children may either be destroyed by "exposure" or farmed out to some other family. Those cultures which look upon the phenomenon with fear believe that no good can possibly come of such an event if the sex of the two children is different, since it implies in their mind that a brother and sister have been far too closely associated together in the womb. It is a kind of prenatal incest, which is taboo. Finally, and in the context of this paper perhaps more significantly, those who view the event with horror do so because they believe that one of the two children is born of an evil spirit. They therefore destroy both children, being unable to tell which child is the evil one. It is possible that this particular belief arose in the course of time as a consequence of certain events in the early history of mankind which, as we shall see, may also be implied in certain passages of Scripture.
Although the father is not believed to be important in the physical birth of the child, he is believed to be nearly, if not wholly, responsible for the child's spiritual soul. As a consequence physical malformation is blamed on the mother as a rule. On the other hand, where it happens that the child grows up to look like the father, it is either totally improper to draw attention to it or it is attributed to the fact that the father has played so much with him and been familiar with the child as he grew
So close is this "spiritual bond" that when a child turns out to be notably good, it is credited entirely to the father, and when the child turns out to be particularly bad, it is blamed upon the father. This is not unreasonable, and it is reflected in interesting ways.
One final aspect of family life relates to the fact that in simpler societies, or in the higher cultures which have a very stable diet, all the members who "belong" have a tendency to develop the same characteristic body odor. A foreigner has a body odor which is different and for that reason apt to be unpleasant. Food has a tremendous effect in this respect when it is not varied from meal to meal and when washing of the body is not an important part of daily life. One of the first things that a man will do when he returns after a period of absence is to bury his nose in the necks of his children in order to delight in the familiar odor which is apt to be most readily detected here where the clothes are vented. Our noses are challenged with so many conflicting odors that we become comparatively indifferent. In biblical times it was not so.
In our culture a man's will is not usually read until after his death, though he may reveal some of its content to those concerned while he is still alive. To many cultures this would appear to be a strange procedure, for it makes it impossible sometimes for those who are to benefit to make any long-range plans. And with us it is a rare thing for a benefactor to pass on his wealth to any of his children while he is yet alive, thereby anticipating the terms of his will. This again seems foolish to many peoples because the aged are robbed of the pleasure of seeing their wealth do some good and indeed of benefiting reciprocally themselves.
Other cultures have often tended to adopt the principle of allowing children upon demand to be given their inheritance. Since the assumption is generally made in such societies that only sons will share the inherited wealth, if it happens there is only one other son, that other son automatically becomes possessor of all that his father has, a circumstance which is vividly reflected in a well-known New Testament parable.
We shall now consider these matters in somewhat greater detail, using illustrations drawn from cultures in many different parts of the world.
1. Primitive Sociology
As an illustration of the sociological sophistication of a primitive people we may quote the conclusions of Claude Levi-Strauss writing in one of the UNESCO publications: (7)
In all matters touching on the organization of the family and the achievement of harmonious relations between the family groups and the social group, the Australian aborigines, though backward in the economic sphere, are so far ahead of the rest of mankind that, to understand the careful and deliberate system of rules they have elaborated, we have to use all the refinements of modern mathematics. It was they in fact who discovered that the ties of marriage represent the very warp and woof of society, while other social institutions are simply embroideries on the background...
The Australians, with an admirable grasp of the facts, have converted this machinery into terms of theory, and listed the main methods by which it may be produced, with the advantages and drawbacks attaching to each. They have gone further than empirical observations to discover the mathematical laws governing the systems, so that it is no exaggeration to say that they are not merely the founders of general sociology as a whole, but are the real innovators of measurement in the social sciences.
2. Groom to Leave Home
Among the Iroquois there existed eight separate tribes, and no member of any one tribe could marry within his or her own tribe. The husband joined the tribe of his wife and the children were all named after her, not after him. As a result all the women of any one tribe remained together and all the children were relatives in a special way, and would receive an inheritance in the same tribal territory. By this means, by requiring that the husband be from another tribe but take up residence with his wife and not the reverse, tribal territories and wealth were preserved intact but the tribal stock itself was constantly regenerated by the introduction of new genes. (8)
It will be remembered that Laban insisted that Jacob ought to remain with him in his territory after marrying his two daughters.
Since there is apt to be a closer emotional attachment between a mother and her son, it naturally leads to more acute jealousy if the son brings a woman into the mother's house. Hence patrilocal marriage, i.e., marriage in which the woman forsakes her own home and goes to live with her husband's household, is more rare, particularly where romance enters marriage--which it does in a few cases, though this, too, is rare. As an illustration, we may note that the Reddi, a tribe living in India in the Bison Hills, according to Haimendorf, have adopted the practice of requiring the bride to live in the bridegroom's house until they can set up house for themselves. Haimendorf comments, (9) "there is usually pretty hard feeling between the mother-in-law and the bride."
It is not always true that the man leaves his father and mother while the woman stays at home, for very often both leave home and set up house together. The principle is rather that if the couple due to circumstances (lack of house or money) have to live with one of the parents, it is usually with the wife's family, and where it is not, there are apt to be emotional conflicts. In a few cases the husband goes to live with the wife's family only until she has borne her first child, after which he takes her away and they set up house independently. According to Driberg, (10) the Lango (Africa) do not require the man to provide a house for his wife until a child is actually born. This is to validate "the contract" which requires that the woman shall give children to her husband. A few cultures, the Hopi of Arizona, (11) for example, turn the tables on the husband somewhat by requiring him to stay with the wife's family until he has proved himself a good provider by fulfilling certain household tasks to their satisfaction, so fulfilling his part of the contract. All of which reflects the wisdom of obeying the injunction of Genesis 2:24 where independent residence for the newly married couple is not immediately possible.
3. Adoption
The principle of adoption is very widely illustrated throughout the world. For example, Sir John Lubbock said: (12)
The mere tie of blood relationship was of no account among the Romans. The most general expression and comprehensive term indicating relationship in Roman Law was cognatio (meaning, "I recognize"), that is to say, the tie between persons who are united by the same blood or those reputed by law as such. But cognition alone, whether it proceeds from legal marriage or by any other union, does not place the individual within the family nor does it give any right of family. Even at the present day, in some parts of Africa, a man's property goes not to his children as such but to his slaves.
In speaking of kinship, Robert Lowie had this to say: (13)
In pre-Christian German law, a newborn child did not automatically enter the family of its unquestioned begetter, the latter was obliged formally to recognize the child as his, if such were his wish and was also at liberty to disown it.
By African custom a man who could not possibly be the true father of a child is rated as its parent provided he fulfills certain legal conditions of fatherhood. In Jewish custom these conditions involved naming the child officially and teaching him a trade.
With us the question of physical paternity is decisive if it can be demonstrated according to law, but in a society where the husband may be away from home for great long periods of time as Roman soldiers often were, it was not easy for him to generate his own offspring and yet children were greatly desired. Since marriage was not based on any concept of romantic love (except upon occasion) the returning husband was quite happy to find that his family had increased provided that his wife was the mother. He would therefore by a very simple gesture adopt them and they became his sons in the eyes of the law.
Among the Eskimo adoption, even if he is not a true son, may entitle a man to be heir to all the family possessions if he happens to be older than the other sons. (14) In Central Africa the practice of adopting children is very prevalent indeed, especially among the Feletabs and, though they have sons and daughters of their own, the adopted child generally becomes the favorite and heir to the whole property. (15) Perhaps our own adopted children might be encouraged if they knew some of these things.
In Africa among the Banyoro it is customary for a male child of five or six years, to be adopted by someone traced in the male line as a relative. (16) The adopted child's true family in the meantime adopts another child from another family which bears an inverse relationship to themselves. Thus the families are not really blood units at all, but there are many bonds of association that tend toward cohesion.
The Lango, another African tribe, treat their captives very handsomely. (17) They are adopted into the village as equals and welcomed as additional hands. The men adopt younger girls who are captured as their own daughters, the older ones being immediately married into the village. In Arabia the Muti Ali capture slaves and promptly adopt them into their own household with all the rights of the children of the house. (18) Some slaves have climbed up to the position of chieftain. In the Northwest, although the Iroquois were almost continually at war from around 1650-1785, they actually had a larger population when they finished than when they started, due entirely to their practice of adopting the majority of their prisoners into the tribe. It is generally held that by about 1700 they had more foreigners in their tribes than actual natives. Even aged people were adopted if some particular family was lacking a grandparent, for example, in order to make the household complete again. Robert Briffault pointed out that among primitive people mother love is not based so much on the fact of actual birth but on a deliberate process of adoption. (19) As he put it, "It is the adoption of the offspring, and not the relationship, intellectually viewed, which constitutes maternity."
4. Physical Paternity
It is not surprising, perhaps, that in days gone by, or in cultures where a knowledge of what takes place at conception was very hazy, people should naturally attribute the development of a child's body to the mother but be somewhat less certain about the part played by the father. In some societies it was questioned whether the father had any physical part to play at all. For example, the Trobrianders held that supernatural beings conceived the child, though only after the passage had been opened for them by the male. (20) The Australian aborigines held that the male sperm merely feeds the supernaturally conceived embryo in its initial stages. (21) If it is pointed out to either of these people that the child sometimes bears a remarkable physical likeness to the father, they account for it by pointing out that the father fondles and plays with his children so much that it affects their appearance. The Australian aborigines believe that the supernatural being is a kind of spiritual animal of some particular recognized species. If the animal happens, in a particular tribe to be a kangaroo for example, then the spirit of the child is kangaroo, though the body of course is human. The child grows up to believe he is kin to the kangaroo family and he may not eat kangaroo meat except on one very solemn occasion which is a kind of annual memorial communion service.
Among the Ainu of Northern Japan, (22) it is believed that both the spirit and the intellect of the child are derived from the father and not from the mother; consequently, as in many other tribes, the father feels he is losing spiritual strength of a very vital kind when the child is born. The woman is merely losing part of her body which is much less demanding. So he is the one who endures the suffering of childbirth and gets all the sympathy from his neighbors who look after his pigs and cultivate his yam patch while he enjoys complete rest. When the child is born, the wife is expected to return to work at once and generally does so without any ill effects.
And this brings up another important point. It is only because of our materialistic view of life that such a "spiritual" view of things seems unrealistic--indeed, absurd. The father who by an act of will adopts an unrelated individual as his own son looks upon such an individual as genuinely related in a way that his own children are not. Thus it comes about that in a polygynous society children of different mothers are not looked upon as brothers and sisters in our sense of the terms, even if they share the same father. A man who has two wives, one of whom bears a daughter and the other a son, would not deny the right of those two children to marry since in his view they are in reality unrelated in any physical sense. Granted his premise, that he is not physically their father in the sense that the mother is physically the mother, his conclusion is reasonable enough. The principle sheds an interesting light on one of the tragic stories of the Old Testament.
Reverting once more to the Trobrianders, (23) and they are merely one of many peoples who might be used as an example, it may be noted that since the legitimate father is not considered as related in the way that the mother is, he is to some extent treated as a stranger, yet not entirely a stranger but rather a "special friend." Resemblances are never denied but they are never made the basis for speculation as to the possible role of the father in procreation.
It is difficult to see how the fact of physical paternity would not force itself upon their thinking, these people being intelligent as they actually are. But the facts of life are such that if a man has constant intercourse with his wife the period of gestation might never come to be recognized, especially where children are born to a wife acceptable to the husband even when he has been away for more than nine months at a time. Moreover, ignorance on this whole matter is surprisingly widespread even in our own society. Recently a case was reported in a New York hospital where a woman had eleven children before she and her husband discovered "where they came from," as she put it. (24)
Herskovits underscores the happy relations which almost always are apparent between the father and the children of his wife. Speaking of the Trobrianders, he said: (25)
He fulfills the role within the family of nurse and playmate. The relations between him and his children are described as wholly delightful. He fondles them, amuses them, spoils them, but never corrects them and never punishes them.
5. Mother's Brother
No matter how idyllic the total environment of a culture may be, children still have to be taught. And teaching, if it is to be effective, must involve sanctions of some kind. Since the father has such a delightful relationship with his children, it seems clear that the necessary discipline as a child grows up must be applied by someone else. All corrections and punishments are administered by the mother's brother, the uncle on the mother's side. This principle is also very widely observed in cultures all over the world, even--though somewhat vaguely--in our own. With us, as boys, uncles were invariably looked upon as sources of tips and surprise gifts in a way that the father was not. In English society many parents send their children to private school, partly because of their reluctance to risk the loss of warm associations by having to take disciplinary action. It is easier to have a governess discipline the children when they are very young and the school authorities as they grow up.
Speaking once again of the Trobianders, Malinowski (26) says that a child soon comes to look upon his mother's brother, one particular brother actually, as a very special person whom he calls his kada. This individual lives probably in the same locality, but he may live at some distance in another village. It makes no difference. Malinowski says, "The child (also) learns that the place where his kada resides is also his, the child's own village; that there, he has property and his other rights of citizenship; and that there his future career awaits him." The reason why the maternal uncle is so important will become apparent in the next section.
G. Brother-Sister And Bride Price
In the previous section we qualified the word "uncle" as being a maternal uncle; that is, a mother's brother rather than a father's brother. But we also qualified the statement by saying that it is one particular brother who acts in this special relationship.
In almost all societies in which the groom must acquire the guardianship, or proprietary right to the "service" of his wife, a special relationship arises between one brother in the family and the sister who is nearest to him in age and is given public recognition as a result of the fact that the brother, in order to get married must himself be able to raise the bride price required by custom in order to obtain his wife. The man who seeks this particular sister's hand in marriage will bring to her a comparable "bride price" which will make it possible for him in turn to achieve his status as a married man. He thus has a special interest in this particular sister and in the kind of husband she gets, and in the course of time this concern and interest is extended to her children. And thus it comes about not only that he becomes their disciplinarian, but he also looks upon his own children after he is married as the most suitable marriage partners for them. So has arisen a practice which is very widespread indeed, namely, the marriage of a man to his mother's brother's daughter or of a woman to her father's sister's son.
It has always appeared superficially to the European that the concept of "bride price," or as it is referred to widely in Africa, the lobolo, reduces the wife to a purchased article, a kind of chattel. Generally speaking, this interpretation is quite erroneous. With a certain amount of social logic, the father of a girl who is to be married will point out to the inquiring White Man that he has kept the girl and brought her up and in return has received her service in terms of household duties performed. When she is taken away from the house, her husband will benefit by her past training, whereas the father will be sacrificing a pair of useful hands. Why, then, should he not be "compensated"? The Chukchee argue that the daughter who has served her father, when she is married, will end up by serving her father-in-law and that therefore the father-in-law should be required to contribute towards the bride price which will go to the girl's father. (27) But this is only one part of the logic.
There is another side to the coin. Unlike our way of arranging these things, other cultures have usually made it a costly business to get married, but comparatively easy to obtain a divorce. We adopt precisely the opposite policy, by making it easier to get married than to get a driver's license, and a very expensive process to obtain a divorce. We invite two young people to join themselves together with the greatest of ease into a union which is supposedly for life, which, if it does not turn out, we leave them to struggle through years of psychological torture either because they have inadequate resources to obtain the necessary release without an extended process of further anguish, or, which is perhaps even worse, because their moral standards are too high to allow them to take the simplest course for the obtaining of a decree of divorce on the grounds of adultery. In short, one can walk in without the slightest hesitation, but one can only get out through an experience which leaves scars for life.
In other cultures than our own, the situation is such that it often takes almost every near relative to help a man to accumulate the necessary lobolo before he can obtain a wife. It is not a question of making a snap decision and going through a five minute ceremony. Everyone in the neighborhood has some stake in the undertaking. If a man finds he has made a mistake and that his marriage cannot continue, he cannot lightly consider divorcing his wife since he must marry again to maintain his adult status and this would involve going around to all his former sponsors and asking them once again to invest a considerable amount of wealth in a second try. Needless to say, the certainty that he is going to have to make a second round of entreaty is a quite adequate deterrent against casually deciding to get married in the first place, or casually deciding to terminate a marriage that has once been contracted. So, in point of fact, such societies tend to hold that a man is only going to seek divorce if the situation is so bad that the consequences of having to raise a second bride price are to be preferred. It does make a certain amount of sense.
Among the T'honga, (28) a people living on the border between Natal and Portuguese East Africa, the collection of the bride price begins several years before the ceremony. Much haranguing and argument accompanies the discussions as to the proper amount between the in-laws. The man may only be a lad when the process begins, when he obtains a promise from his father of three cows, from his father's brother of two cows and two goats. He may go to his father's brother's son and get the promise of another six cows and an additional seven sheep from his father's brother's son's son. In the meantime, he has to accept gracefully long speeches of instruction, of advice and precaution from the subscribing parties. Everyone seeks to ensure that the lad will not come back to them again; the longer the period of preparation, the greater the opportunity each side has to expound the virtues of their respective offspring. If the wife proves a bad one, he may divorce her and demand a refund. She, then, has to go around and collect back from everyone who shared in her bride price the goods which had been passed on to them--no mean process of recovery. It must, indeed, be a very stabilizing factor.
If the woman proves barren, the husband may ask for the return of the bride price. If there is little chance of success in this, he may decide to ask his wife instead to provide him with another wife as a kind of compensation. In most cases, probably in nearly all, the wife will have her next oldest sister join the household as a second wife.
The bride price is also to some extent an indication and a recognition of the value which the groom and his family attach to the girl and her family. Among the Anglo-Saxons the supposed "sale" of a daughter by the parents or guardian to the husband was not the sale of a woman as a chattel but the transfer of the "right of protectorship" over the woman. (29) Whatever may be said about our interpretation of this exchange of wealth, Diamond notes that where contact with the White Man has led to the abandonment of this practice, (30) marriage has proved to be much less secure and more easily broken up.
Where a man, for one reason or another, cannot call upon an extended family to help him "raise the necessary funds," he may work for his bride by accepting temporary enslavement. This happens where the suitor is far away from home or is without resources. It may happen in a nomadic society where a woman is necessary to a man's survival and if the man happens to lose his wife while away from home. Bogoras mentions this of the Chukchee. (31) And it happened to Jacob. According to P. Dobell, the custom is prevalent among the Karaikees (northeastern Asiatics). (32) If a young man should fall in love with a girl and he is not rich enough to obtain her by any other means, he enslaves himself to her father as a servant for three, four, five, or ten years, according to agreement, before he is permitted to marry her. When the term agreed upon expires, he is allowed to marry her and live with the father-in-law as if he were his own son. The same custom prevails among the Kamtchadales where the suitor of a particular maiden asks her parents permission to serve them for a time with a view to obtaining her as a wife.
7. Marrying Sisters
The practice of validating a marriage contract only after children have been born with the proviso that if the woman proves barren, the man must be fully compensated by the girl's family very naturally led to the principle that he might claim as a second wife one of her sisters to bear him children. According to Schapera, (33) at the present time the Tswana in South Africa require the family of a barren bride to substitute or provide in addition the next older sister. There was always the possibility, of course, and it must have happened upon occasion that even the second sister failed to provide him with a child. It was very seldom that the man himself was suspected of being to blame, though in one or two societies this possibility was recognized. On the whole, it was customary to allow for this contingency and to "hold" the other sisters for the husband of the eldest one. Even if children were born to the first wife, it was often felt quite proper for all the other sisters to join his household, since in the event of her death prematurely he could still claim one of the sisters. According to Briffault, (34) in some Indian tribes a widower could demand as a "replacement" wife her next oldest sister even if she was already married to someone else! According to the same authority, in the Central Celebes Islands, a man cannot marry a younger sister unless he has first married the elder. In the Philippines, generally, a man usually took as wives all the sisters of the family. In the Marshall Islands when a man marries a woman, he is automatically regarded as married to all her sisters. In fact, if the husband does not find it convenient to take charge of all the sisters, there is no alternative for the latter than to contract casual alliances, they become in fact what we would call prostitutes. In the Marquesas a man had marital rights over all his wife's sisters, whether these subsequently married other men or not. The substitution of a sister for a wife who has died prematurely is extremely widespread, being found among the Tartars, the Kalmuks, and many other Siberian peoples. Among the Wabemba of the Congo, if a man's wife dies and all her sisters are married, the husband of one of them must allow his wife to cohabit on specified occasions with the widower. If the sister happens to be an infant she is nevertheless handed over to the widower but a slave girl is sent with her to act as a substitute until she comes of age. Among the Kaikari of Central India, a man may marry his deceased wife's younger sister but may not marry her older sister. The principle, far from being distasteful, is therefore found all over the world.
That the sisters should be betrothed in the right order according to age is also a principle universally accepted as far as I know. The Hindus always avoid giving a younger daughter in marriage before an older one. (35) The Kurnia of Gippsland in Australia insist that a man's first wife must always be older than his second wife, hence where sisters follow in marriage they do not allow the taking of a younger sister first. (36)
8. Naming After the Mother
In cultures other than our own, names are apt to have somewhat wider significance. There are at least three different kinds of names. First, there is the name which is inherited in the sense that it identifies the lineage of the child in terms of blood relationships. It has chiefly social significance and because the identity of the father is not always as clear as the identity of the mother, this kind of name reflects the mother's rather than the father's line. The second kind of name is psychological, one might say personal. This kind of name is usually given by the family, who after consultation decide that they wish some ancestor to return to be with them in the household, taking up residence in the child so named. The third kind of name has more a magical connotation. Anyone who can "get hold of it" has, by doing so, a powerful insight into the character of the person to whom it is given. It gives one power over an individual to know what this name is, and consequently it is kept very secret. The Indians of North America were either allotted this name privately by an individual specially appointed as "Keeper of Names," or they went out and sought it in a kind of private religious ordeal which might involve some self-mutilation and entering into an ecstatic trance. It was only shared thereafter with certain very personal friends. According to McIlwraith, (37) the Bella Coola added names to individuals occasioned by some personal experience, so that men or women might often have ten or even twenty names. And knowing these was like knowing their personal history. In England two or three generations ago, one did not address an individual by his given name until he had established a certain intimacy--except where class distinction so set a gulf between two individuals that they either would not or could not take advantage of it. Looking back on my own public school days, I'm quite sure that I never learned the given name of any one of the many boys with whom I lived and played and studied for eight years or so. It was not considered proper to address a fellow by his Christian name.
The giving of a name may also signify an invitation to the spirit of one departed to return, via the present bearer, to the family circle. If the child becomes seriously ill, it is customary to change the child's name, as is done by the Chukchee for example. Curiously enough, very sick children, mentally ill, may upon recovery--even in our own society--decide to adopt a new name as though they had become a different person.
In all primitive societies and in some higher ones, the name is identified with the character of the holder, whether animal or human. A logical extension of this identification is that to reveal a person's name is to reveal his character, a procedure which must be avoided at all costs if one is a friend or a relative, because it allows others to make use of this information. Murdock says that the Ainu wife never mentions her husband's name, for to do so would rob him of part of himself. (38) Very often the soul has no existence in the individual until he has received his name, and among American Indian tribes a certain woman would be appointed as "Keeper of Names," to whom application had to be made before a child could receive full person hood. (39) However, once the name was given and the soul was lodged, the name could be safely forgotten. It was like a key to open the way to personality, which once used could be thrown away. But without a name, nothing had any real existence. Thus the great Sumerian Creation Epic speaks of past eternity as a time when "Heaven was not named, Below to the earth no name was given." (40)
In some cases although the person's name is known to everyone, he is not directly addressed by it but is spoken to as the son of whatever his mother's name was. If a wife and a husband have names like Dorothy and John, for example, the husband will be addressed as Dorothy's husband and the wife as John's wife, so that neither is actually addressed by name (41)
Ernst Cassirer says much about the significance of naming things in a child's growing ability to come to terms with the world. (42) Once he has hold of the name, he has hold of the object itself. This "learning of names" process is far more than merely increasing one's vocabulary. It is more than the mastery of labels, it is mastery of the things labeled. To know a person's name is to "know" the person for what he is. This is not so true in our philosophy, but it is almost universally so in other cultures.
9. Romantic Love
It is difficult for us to realize that our accumulated social wisdom does not mark the high point in history but may reflect rather a retrograde view. We find it almost impossible to see how a society could operate without "discovering" the excitement of falling in love. Nevertheless, many societies know nothing of this particular form of cultural behavior. It is certainly not, apparently, one of the so-called "universals." Some societies recognize it as a possibility and reject it outright as being stupid. Twenty-five years ago, and perhaps even today, in China, a man who falls in love is considered insane. (43) And I learned recently that even today American films with a romantic theme are tremendously popular with Mongolian audiences because they treat them as comedies. The Samoans laugh incredulously at tales involving jealousy due to love. (44) According to Haimendorf, (45) among the Reddi of the Bison Hills the individuals concerned in a proposed marriage not only have no choice in the matter, the selection being entirely a parental affair, but the couple are virtually not even interested. One might suppose that such an indifferent union between the newlyweds might seem likely to poison their feelings toward their children and thus make them feel unwanted. Contrary to psychological doctrine, this does not appear to be the case at all. The children in such cultures appear to live remarkably happy lives. Frank Speck, (46) speaking of the Naskapi Indians in Canada says that although marriage is based entirely on convenience, "the children are quiet and well behaved, and are well loved. There is no corporal punishment but a spirit of real comradeship." This is a constant refrain in the literature of anthropology which deals with patterns of culture. It suggests that some of our conclusions that the waywardness of children is due to lack of discipline or the absence of love between the parents may require some revision. Certainly photographs of Naskapi children reflect their sunny dispositions. A notable exception is found among a people whom we have referred to more than once previously, the Trobrianders. Malinowski, who made these people his special interest, says that permanent attachments between boys and girls spring out of passion, genuine affection, and intellectual companionship. As soon as this occurs, the girl is "seen" with the boy during the day and is then considered married. In a sense we reverse this process.
10. Incest
It may truthfully be said that there is an almost universal "horror" of incest, that is to say, the marriage of a brother and sister who are children of the same mother, or of a mother and son. These two are singled out in particular by virtually all societies. But, there are many cultures which do not consider the marriage of a man to his daughter as incest since it is not felt that the daughter received her body from him. Similarly, it is not felt to be incest when a brother and sister who are children of one father but not of one mother, are married--for the same reason. One only has to remember that it is believed that the mother supplies the body and it is the uniting of two bodies from the same source which is viewed with such distaste.
For reasons which geneticists feel they can explain satisfactorily, the marriage of all very close relatives is apt to have undesirable results; and records show that in highly inbred isolated societies, even in Scotland for example, the incidence of deaf-mutism and other congenital deformations is considerably higher than normal. It is quite likely that primitive people who are very keen observers took note of this fact.
It will be perhaps of more interest to refer very briefly to the fact that in many primitive or older high cultures, whenever a brother-sister marriage which was by definition incestuous could be "got away with" without ill effect on the offspring, the family was generally considered to be superior stock just on this account...as indeed they may very well have been. Such families gained this advantage over others, namely, that all wealth, privileges, rights, and titles remained undivided within the family. The two circumstances combined, the reputation for being superior stock and the accumulation of wealth, afforded the family aristocratic rank. The Inca chiefs married their sisters, and the Ptolemies of Egypt married their sisters. (47) It will be remembered that Cleopatra was the seventh generation of brother-sister marriages, and there was certainly nothing inferior about her, though her younger brother appears to have been less notable, indeed perhaps even slightly imbecile. It may be that the superior stock was already beginning to lose its genetic excellence.
11. Cross Cousins and Parallel Cousins
It should be underscored that while the concept of a cross cousin as the "ideal" marriage partner is exceedingly common all over the world, it is not the only acceptable cousin marriage relationship. By contrast with the cross cousin relationship, there is what is known as a parallel-cousin, by which is meant the mother's sister's daughter or the father's brother's daughter as opposed to the mother's brother's daughter or the father's sister's daughter. To marry one's mother's sister's daughter would be to all intents and purposes by definition incest in some cultures. In fact, it is incest but one generation removed since the couple are then children of two sisters who in turn derived their bodies from the same mother. This incest principle is not, however, applied to the marriage of a father's brother's daughter. It applies only to bodily or blood relationships, not to such spiritual relationships as are felt to exist in fatherhood. Female incestual relationships of this kind have never been favored in any society. What is found among the Hebrew and the Muti-Ali (an Arab people), and not altogether unexpectedly, is the marriage of parallel cousins who are the children of brothers, since this is not considered to involve incest by their definition. (48) In short, I, as a son, would marry my father's brother's daughter. This is much more allowable because our two bodies will almost certainly be derived from two different mothers.
C. S. Coon (49) notes that as the Israelites became more settled and well-to-do after the conquest of Canaan, they tended to favor a cross-cousin relationship, whereas previously they had favored the parallel-cousin relationship adopted chiefly by the Arabs. Among the representative people who marry cross-cousins are the Reddi of the Bison Hills in India, the Hopi of Southwestern United States, the Nunivak Eskimo, the Chukchee of Siberia.
12. Levirate Marriage
The principle that marriage is a contract which is broken if the wife dies while the man might still hope for children, in which case the dead wife's sister substitutes for her, is in some societies paralleled by a reverse agreement. In other words, if it is the husband who dies at a time when the wife is still young enough to have children, then it is her turn to be compensated, and this compensation is not guaranteed by her being given her dead husband's brother as a "private" husband, but she is allowed to claim her dead husband's brother as a father not only to the children she already has but as a "substitute" husband to provide her with more children. By this means she can raise a family without her children being illegitimate. This practice, which is not only found in the Bible but found among primitive people occasionally (the Nunivak Eskimo, for instance), is an example of the somewhat rare acknowledgment in other cultures of the equality of the wife with the husband in terms of the marriage contract. Although it is a mistake to suppose that the term bride price signifies that the wife was little more than a chattel, a purchased possession as it were, for quite other reasons women have tended to be treated as such by their husbands in many cultures. The Levirate, wherever it is found, is a recognition of the right of the woman to enjoy the raising of a family for her own protection and provision, just as the provision of a substitute sister recognized the right of the man to raise a family of his own. It provides for the birth of legitimate children to a partner of a contract whose rights are not otherwise protected.
There is a phenomenon which is very widespread in primitive societies and which is referred to as a "joking relationship." This permits a relationship of excessive familiarity between a man and a woman under certain conditions. The man may raise her dress, exposing her in public; and she may retaliate in kind. This is a rather surprising circumstance. Among the Crow Indians it prevails between man and his sister-in-law, (50) i.e., between a man and his brother's wife. Among the Nahma Hottentots, the relationship exists between cross cousins. (51) To my knowledge wherever a joking relationship is recognized in a society, it exists always between two people who may become man and wife. In the case of the cross cousins, it exists primarily between cross cousins who are most likely to end up as man and wife. Not all cross cousins will do so, of course. In the case of the man and his brother's wife, the same potential exists; namely, in the event of the brother's death. It is a kind of privileged relationship of familiarity, which may perhaps be not altogether unlike the familiarity which used to exist in England between a boy and a girl in their childhood, who in the normal course of events might be expected to marry when they grew up.
The privilege of "exposure" by uncovering nakedness was strictly limited to those who might be expected to marry, hence it was a severely punishable offense where such an expectation could never be realized.
13. Polygyny
I suppose that polygyny is most commonly associated in the mind of the White Man with Africa, and perhaps it is here that the phenomenon is most frequently observed. As a matter of fact, when large parts of Africa were under British Colonial administration, every administrator when he visited a village would immediately look for the central house or hut which had the largest number of huts adjoined to it. For this was a sure sign of a man with many wives, who could be pretty safely judged to be, as a consequence, an able administrator like himself. It takes a good man, as one of my professors used to say, to run a women's college successfully!
I am not suggesting that such a custom is desirable once a society has reached the point that its male members are likely to live out their lives to a reasonable age, and once a society has found ways and means of caring for its older women folk. But in the absence of these two requisites, I do not think that polygyny in itself need involve all the evils which we tend to associate with it. This is particularly so when two other factors are borne in mind: first, that the womenfolk are likely to be of the same family or quite closely related; and secondly, that the emotional tensions which are involved in a marriage that is predicated primarily on romantic love are absent, the marriage being essentially a contract agreeable to all parties.
14. Barrenness
With respect to barrenness, enough has already been said to indicate that since marriage is not for the gratification of sex, but is rather a contract wherein the man undertakes to care for the woman and the woman undertakes to provide the man with children to continue his line and his name, it follows that virtually without exception a childless wife is considered a contract breaker with respect to her husband, a disturber of normal behavior with respect to her society, and a source of great potential embarrassment to her family. The last stems from the fact that having broken her contract, the husband can claim back her bride price, a circumstance which can be disastrous to a family since the gifts may already have been widely distributed--even slaughtered and eaten in fact. And in terms of the social organization of the community, the groom's gifts to the bride's parents may already have been used by her special brother for the "procurement," of his wife. In short, reverberations are likely to occur throughout the whole community. It is therefore no wonder that the grief of a barren wife is a recurrent theme all over the world, and not least in the Old Testament.
To my knowledge only one society other than our own has ever thought to acknowledge the fact that the husband himself and not the wife might be to blame. Unfortunately, it would be difficult to prove except by some form of adulterous action in which the man demonstrates his virility with some other woman than his wife.
15. Birth Of Twins
On the whole, pastoral people, who have many flocks of sheep, can employ their children usefully at an earlier age than those societies which are either hunters or farmers. Hunters clearly would be handicapped by very small children (while engaged in hunting), and farmers who must do hard physical work cannot employ very young children either. But those who herd animals can and do use children at a very young age indeed. Such societies tend to welcome children born under any circumstance whatever.
On the other hand, people whose environment is harsh, such as the Eskimo for example, (52) do not have the means of accommodating too many entirely dependent children at any one time, nor do they have foods, apart from the mother's milk, which are suitable for exceedingly small infants. An Eskimo mother will nurse her child anywhere from four to six years. She cannot nurse two children and infanticide is therefore practiced (or used to be practiced) not only when twins were born but if children appeared in too short an interval. It is important to realize that the Eskimo, like the Chukchee and many other primitive people, do not believe that the infant has a soul until it has received a name. To them a nameless baby is almost, though not quite, a thing. The mother may show no grief when she puts the unnamed baby out in the snow to die. Mother love is not found in all societies.
Almost universally twins have been considered an ill omen in many societies. Sometimes it is explained by a native spokesman that only animals have multiple births and that it is not proper for a human beings to behave like animals. (53) The attitude of other native people is based on a much more profound distrust, namely, that one at least of the children is the offspring of an evil spirit. (54) Since such a child should be destroyed immediately, the problem is to know which one to destroy. And since this cannot be known with certainty, either both babies are killed at once, or the whole family may be ejected from the village. The Peruvians in some cases agreed that it was a bad omen, (55) in others they rejoiced in it as evidence of exceptional fertility.
Livingstone notes that among South African tribes one of the twins is killed. (56) Among the Arunta of Australia, (57) twins are usually killed immediately as being "unnatural," but there is no ill treatment of the mother. The Arunta chiefs apparently do not know how the custom arose. In Melanesia where brother-sister relationships are so strongly avoided, if a girl and boy are born together, one will be put to death immediately in order to avoid having to raise them in proximity. (58)
16. Honoring Parents
The principle of crediting to the father the goodness of his son or blaming him for his wickedness is found very widely in non-Western cultures. It is a principle of great importance where it is observed, and the Westerner does well to heed it when in their company. Peacekeeping forces in the Middle East have on more than one occasion run into unexpected problems by personally rewarding some young Arab who performed them a kindness. This was taken as an insult to the father who believed that he should have received the reward directly, and it was distasteful to the village because it undermined their system of cultural values by improperly paying attention to one of the younger members of the society. The result has been to alienate the whole village by an act which was supposed to do precisely the opposite. If the father had been rewarded instead, as would have been proper, everyone would have been happy: the father because he would have been richer, the son because he would have maintained a reputation as dutiful, and the village as a whole because the outsider's behavior would have been a tacit recognition of the reasonableness of their culture pattern which they themselves took for granted.
The Japanese, at least the older generation, even today take this principle very seriously. Not very long ago a young man who brought disgrace upon his family by some dishonorable act would be quite likely to commit suicide in order to redeem his father's honor. Some primitive cultures, such as the Samoans, punish a whole family--father, mother, brothers and sisters--if any one member of the family does some particularly disgraceful thing. (59) The individual has never assumed the kind of personal importance in any other culture that we allow to the individual in ours.
17. Body Odor
Almost all societies except our own have a tendency to adopt a comparatively simple and comparatively stable diet. Some live on maize (American Indians), some live on rice (Chinese), some live on potatoes (Aymara of Peru), others live on the meat of a single species (reindeer: Chukchee), and so forth, and in most cases very little change or embellishment of the diet is either desired or possible. The consequence of this food stabilization is that a characteristic body odor is developed in association with each particular diet. This body odor becomes pleasant by familiarity and is preferred or considered "natural" by all those who happen to share it. All foreigners or strangers who do not share it, or who may happen to have no detectable body odor at all, are considered distasteful in this respect. (60)
One of the first things which the Eskimo hunter does when he returns to his native village is to bury his face in the neck opening of his children's clothing in order to breathe deeply the familiar body odor of home. It is just possible that the European habit of touching cheeks as a form of greeting is not a form of the kiss of welcome but a less demonstrative remnant of the habit of "falling upon the neck."
18. Division of Inheritance
The culture of Western man has attached great importance to the accumulation of wealth by "usury," the gathering of interest with time without any further expenditure of energy by the possessor. The longer this kind of wealth is kept in the position where it can accumulate interest, the more valuable it becomes when it is finally transferred to a new owner. Since a father not unnaturally desired that his children shall have the maximum benefit of his wealth and at the same time he is likely to be convinced that he is the best judge of how to invest it, he is apt to retain control of it as long as he possibly can. With this kind of system, an inheritance normally is only passed on to the children when the benefactor can have no further interest in it.
Throughout most of the world's history, the possibility of accumulating interest in this way has been somewhat limited. Where wealth was property, rights, or in the form of otherwise unexchangeable things, the present owner often had no particular reason for maintaining sole ownership until he died. As a consequence, those who were to inherit his wealth often had the right to claim their inheritance at any time.
In his Ancient Law, (61) Maine pointed out that in his time among the Hindus the instant a son is born, he acquires a vested right in his father's property which could not be sold without recognition of his joint ownership. When he attained full age he could, if he so desired, compel a partition of the estate, even against the consent of the parent. And if the parent acquiesced, one son could always demand a partition even when the other sons were not in favor of it. Maine pointed out that German tribes in ancient law allowed the same proceeding. If it happened that there were only two sons and the first had demanded and taken his inheritance already, all that the father possessed automatically belonged to the other son. Nor was it necessary that the first son to demand his inheritance need be the eldest.
ALL THAT WE have presented so far is in one way or another related to family life, and was sparked by a consideration of Genesis 2:24, which lays down the general principle that if a man and his wife when they are first married do not have the means to establish a home of their own, the man should go to live with his wife's family rather than the wife leaving home to live with his family. As a matter of convenience, we broke up our consideration of the rather wide ramifications of this injunction into sections. But, after due consideration, it did not seem the most suitable arrangement to explore the Bible itself under these particular headings in the same order, so we decided instead to follow on from Genesis 2:24 through the Old Testament, pointing out, where appropriate, how the story as it unfolds reflects many of these patterns of cultural behavior. In doing so, it will be seen that these other cultures do indeed shed light upon many events in Scripture which to our western view seem otherwise improper, or at least somewhat irrational.
GENESIS 2:24: Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and cleave unto his wife.
Since this passage was largely responsible for initiating the thread of the argument in the first part of this paper, we merely refer the reader to Part I and Part II without further comment here.
GENESIS 4:1-2: and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord. And she again bare his brother Abel.
The Hebrew original is rather exceptional. Two boys are born who are
generally assumed to have been twins, but the original text suggests rather
that Abel was the true child resulting from Adam "knowing" Eve--as
the text puts it--but that Cain was satanically originated 
and unnaturally given prior birth. Even in the natural order
of things sons have been born some hours apart who are nevertheless not
twins in the true sense. (62)
In Genesis 3:15 the promise is given to Eve that one who should be her seed would finally undo the works of Satan. In the circumstances, it was very natural for Eve to suppose that this Promised Seed would appear at once; and there is some evidence that she supposed this to have happened when her first child was born. This event is recorded in Genesis 4:1 and 2, and the Hebrew of the original is in some respects a little odd. Our text reads: "And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord. And she again bare his brother Abel." In the original, Eve's statement "I have gotten a man from the Lord," may be translated in several different ways. She may have said, "I have gotten a man with the Lord," i.e., with the help of the Lord perhaps. But she may also have said, "I have gotten a man, even the Lord." In any case, the word "Lord" is "Jehovah" in the Hebrew, a circumstance to which we shall return in a moment. The phrase "And she again bare his brother Abel" is also a little strange. It could possibly be rendered, "And she bare also (at the same time) his brother Abel." This would be a birth of twins. The only justification for this translation lies in the fact that the adverb "again" is a verb in the original which means essentially "to do at the same time," or "to repeat."
In the New Testament Cain is said to have been born of "that Wicked One" (1 John 3:12), a phrase which is exactly paralleled to that in Matthew 1:20 where Jesus is said to have been conceived of the Holy Spirit. The Greek ek is used in both cases, implying derivation in a special way, in the one case "out of" the Holy Spirit and in the other case "out of" the Evil One. Is it possible that Satan was also mistaken, believing that the first child that Eve bore would somehow or other be the Redeemer and that in some supernatural way he tried to see to it that an Antichrist appeared before Christ?
If this admittedly speculative idea has any justification, then it seems not unlikely that with Cain exiled by God himself from the company of his fellows, Satan might soon tempt other men to claim themselves to be the Promised Seed. Although there are other interpretations of Genesis 4:26, it is not impossible that the statement that at this time "men began to call upon the name of the Lord" should more properly be rendered "men began to call themselves by the name Jehovah." The Hebrew allows this, and it may be that notable individuals were tempted to make this claim for themselves openly for the first time.
In Exodus 6:2 and 3 there is a passage the meaning of which has always been a subject of debate. In this passage the Lord says to Moses, "I am the Lord: and I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name God Almighty, but by my name Jehovah was I not known to them." It has always seemed strange that the Lord who was about to redeem Israel should say that He had not been known by name to the patriarchs, who met Him and talked with Him face to face. I should like to suggest this possibility. When Mary was told that she would bare a Son who was to be the Redeemer, she was also told what His name was to be, namely, Jehovah the Savior, shortened into the form, Jesus. It seems to me not unlikely that God might have told Eve that when the Promised Seed came His name would be Jehovah. But--and this is the point of importance here--she was not told that Jehovah was God's name. Accordingly, as the knowledge was passed from generation to generation, the tradition was well known that the name of the Promised Seed when He appeared would be Jehovah. But still no one knew that this was God's name. As I see it, God was here saying to Moses, "You know as others have known that when the Redeemer comes his name will be Jehovah; but now I am revealing to you that I, God Almighty, am that Jehovah." Or in very simple words, "I am that I am," the second "I am" being a translation in a sense of the word "Jehovah." Moses now knew that the Promised Seed was not a great mortal one but was to be God Himself. This fact was clearly understood by Isaiah (35:4).
There is a further observation that might be made regarding Cain, though I must confess that I am not certain that the text warrants what I am reading into it. Of the descendants of Cain, we are never told of their death. This might be simply the result of the fact that we are not given their age. But there were many subsequent historical figures in the Old Testament who were either enemies of the Lord's children or, though actually Israelites, were without faith, yet these people have their deaths recorded, even though we are not told how old they were when they died.
Some believe that Cain was supernaturally born of Eve through the agency of Satan who thereby hoped to present the Antichrist supposing that Abel was actually the Promised Seed. The Hebrew of Genesis 4:1-2 has always presented problems to the translator and it almost seems as though Adam knew his wife only once in spite of the birth of two children who are not presented to us in the usual terms reserved for the birth of twins. There is an ancient belief, and one still preserved by many primitive people, that when twins are born one of them is actually a child of the devil. Having no means of identifying which child is the evil one, such societies customarily insisted that all twins must be destroyed at birth.
Now, however fanciful such an idea may be, we are not altogether without some encouragement in holding it in the light of other passages of Scripture which bear upon the subject. If we attach any importance to ancient traditions, we may observe that the legendary giants of antiquity were believed to have had supernatural birth and to have enjoyed a kind of super-natural life. They lived and continued to grow in size as long as they lived, and because they lived for such lengths of time they became giants in size and vastly superior in knowledge. If these beings were descendants of one supernaturally born, they may have formed a race of giants and given rise to the tradition which seems to be reflected in Genesis 6:4. These men were not merely giants in size, they were men of renown. And certainly one gets this feeling of those who are listed as Cain's descendants. While they did not die naturally, they were certainly capable of being slain, as Goliath was. And in Matthew 24:39 speaking of the Flood destroying the old world, we are told not that they died in the Flood but merely that they were "taken away." The abhorrence of twins in some cases reflects a knowledge of details regarding the birth of Cain and Abel which has not been preserved for us in Genesis.
GENESIS 4:19, 22, 23: And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah...And Zillah, she also bare Tubal-Cain, an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron....And Lamech said unto his wives...Hear my voice...for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt.
In Genesis 4:22 the son of Zillah is given as Tubal-Cain, and although the name does not appear in this form of antiquity, R. J. Forbes, one of the outstanding authorities on metallurgy in antiquity, points out that Cain means "smith." And according to the same author, one of the tribes long associated in the ancient world with metalworking was the Tibareni, whom many scholars identify with Tubal, the l and r being interchangeable.
We may go one step further in this when we discover that the name of the individual who came to be constituted as the god of the Tiber (a clearly related word) was Vulcan. To my mind, there is not much doubt that Tubal-Cain is the earliest form of the name Vulcan, which in its later stages was merely shortened by the omission of the Tue. In his commentary on Genesis, Marcus Dodds points out that everything is so faithfully perpetuated in the East that the blacksmith of the village of Gubbatea-ez-zetum referred to the iron "splinters" struck off while working at his forge as "tubal."
Now the traditions regarding Vulcan are rather interesting. He is, of course, associated with fire and the working of metals, later appearing as the divine smith of the Roman tubilustrum. He is said to have been a cripple, having been thrown out of heaven by Jupiter as a punishment for having taken the part of his mother in a quarrel which had occurred between them.
In Genesis 4:23 there is the rather extraordinary story of how Lamech took vengeance on a young man for wounding him. Lamech's son was Tubal Cain, perhaps none other than Vulcan, subsequently deified. In the brief account in Genesis, it is stated that Lamech had two wives, one of whom was named Zillah. Let us suppose, for a moment, that it was with Zillah that Lamech quarreled and that Tubal-Cain, the son of Zillah, took his mother's part and got into a fight with his father Lamech. Whatever happened to Lamech is not clear, although he appears to have been wounded, but Tubal-Cain himself was injured sufficiently to become thereafter a lame man. Moreover, it is customary in a society where polygamy is allowed, to name the child not after the father but after the mother, since this obviously assures better identification. In early cuneiform one of the curious words which has puzzled Sumerologists is "parzillu," a word for "iron." Now, surely, this word is none other than a masculinized form of two Semitic words, "Bar Zillah," i.e., "Son of Zillah." In the course of time because the ending -ah tended to be reserved for words of feminine gender, the word became "Parzillu," or "Barzillu," with a correct masculine termination.
Putting all these things together, one has a remarkable series of fragments of tradition in which there is a continuity of name-forms, all related in meaning or association and wrapped up in a trade of very ancient origin, attached to a deity who had the strange experience of being ejected from his home and rendered lame for taking his mother's part and who thereafter lent his title, "Son of Zillah," to the Sumerian people as their word for "iron."
Such, then, is the light which this very early story in Genesis seems to shed upon much that is otherwise strange--and even absurd --in ancient tradition. That there is a basis of fact throughout is clearly confirmed by the very continuity of the blacksmith's art. Yet only in some form of Semitic language does one find any meaning to the venerable name, Tubal-Cain, or any light upon the origin of the hitherto mysterious word "Barzillu" or "Parzillu," meaning "iron," a word evidently bearing witness to the very early practice of naming children after their mother wherever polygyny was in effect.
GENESIS 9.20-25: And Noah...planted a vineyard: And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father...And Noah awoke from his wine, and he knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan...
It has often been wondered why Canaan was cursed rather than Ham, who was the true offender against his father's honor. It has been suggested that the curse originally was "cursed be Ham, the father of Canaan," and there is apparently one ancient manuscript to support this view.
But I think perhaps there is a better explanation. As we have seen in Chapter 2, 16, it has in other cultures been customary to attach the credit or blame to the father (in some cases to the whole family) for some good or evil deed performed by a son. By a quite logical process of reasoning, if Noah had cursed Ham he would in point of fact have been discrediting himself, since he was Ham's father. This was avoided by cursing Ham's son and in this way discrediting Ham who was his father.
The principle is very interestingly illustrated in 1 Samuel 17:50-58. There, David has just performed a deed of great national importance by destroying Goliath. Now David himself was no stranger to Saul, for he had on many occasions played his harp to quiet the king's distracted spirit. Yet here in verse 55 we find that when Saul saw David go forth against Goliath, even though he had actually offered David his armor, he said to Abner, the captain of his armies, "Abner, whose son is this youth?" And although Abner must certainly have known David by name, he replied, "As my soul liveth, O king, I cannot tell."
This has always seemed a strange remark both for the king and for his commanding officer to have made. But I think the explanation lies in a proper understanding of the social significance of verse 58: "And Saul said unto him, Whose son art thou, young man? And David answered, I am the son of thy servant Jesse, the Bethlehemite." This was apparently simply an occasion upon which, following a widespread social custom, Saul was planning to give credit where he saw credit was really due, namely, to the father. Because David was Jesse's son, it was to Jesse that recognition must be given.
In the New Testament we find a further instance in a slightly different form. It is quite obvious that while a man can publicly seek to give credit to the father of a worthy son, it was less discreet for a woman to make reference to a father in complimentary terms for fear of being misunderstood. She therefore refers instead to the son's mother who rightly shares in the worthiness of her children. This fact is reflected clearly in Luke 11:27, where we read of a woman who suddenly perceiving the true greatness of the Lord Jesus Christ, cried out in spontaneous admiration, "Blessed is the womb that bare Thee and the breasts which Thou hast sucked."
GENESIS 11:25-31: And Nahor lived after he begat Terah an hundred and nineteen years, and begat sons and daughters. And Terah lived seventy years, and begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran...and Haran begat Lot. And Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees. And Abram and Nahor took them wives: and the name of Abram's wife was Sarai; and the name of Nahor's wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah, and the father of Iscah...And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son's son, and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees...
GENESIS 12:1, 5, 9-13: Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred...And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son...and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan...And Abram journeyed, going on still toward the south. And there was a famine in the land: and Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there...And it came to pass, when he was come near to enter into Egypt, that he said unto Sarai his wife, Behold, now, I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon. Therefore it shall come to pass, when the Egyptians shall see thee, that they shall say, This is his wife: and they will kill me, but they will save thee also. Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister...
GENESIS 20:1-12: And Abraham journeyed from thence toward the south country, and dwelled between Kadesh and Shur, and sojourned in Gerar. And Abraham said of Sarah his wife, She is my sister: and Abimelech king of Gerar sent, and took Sarah. But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night and said to him, Behold, thou art but a dead man, for the woman thou hast taken; for she is a man's wife. But Abimelech had not come near her: and he said, Lord, wilt thou slay also a righteous nation? Said he not unto me, She is my sister? and she, even she herself said, He is my brother: in the integrity of my heart and innocence of my hands have I done this. And God said unto him in a dream, Yea, I know that thou didst this in the integrity of thy heart; for I also withheld thee from sinning against me....Now therefore restore the man his wife...Then Abimelech called Abraham, and said unto him, What hast thou done unto us?...And Abraham said, Because I thought, Surely the fear of God is not in this place; and they will slay me for my wife's sake. And yet indeed she is my sister; she is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my wife.
The circumstances surrounding these events are wonderfully illuminated by many observations as set forth in the former part of this paper. It is the cryptic statement of Abraham, "Indeed, she is my sister; she is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother," which really receives the most light in this respect.
Genesis 11:25-27 can be set forth schematically as follows:
Up to this point, the sons and daughters of Nahor who were Terah's brothers and sisters are not named, but information given in the following verses provides very good grounds for believing that one of these was named Haran. We shall examine this shortly, but for clarity we now modify the above genealogy as follows:
It will be noted that Terah's brother, Haran, had two daughters, Iscah and Milcah. The former of these, Iscah, was Sarah by another name. This identification is very widely agreed upon, was accepted in Jewish commentaries, and is assumed by Josephus in his Antiquities (Bk. 1, vi, 5).
It may appear to the reader that large liberties are being taken with the text, but this is not really the case. Like many others, the Jewish people commonly accepted the principle that if a man's brother married a woman and subsequently died before the children married, he took his brother's place and became in effect both her husband and the father of her children. This is the basis of the Pharisees' hypothetical question in Luke 20:27-38. If therefore Terah's brother Haran had died, the duty of becoming in effect the father of Iscah and Milcah would automatically devolve upon Terah. Terah's "new" children would then become sisters to his own sons and when Abraham and Nahor subsequently married Iscah and Milcah, they would, socially, be marrying their own sisters. Genetically they were not, the two girls being cousins. However, they were a special kind of cousin, namely, "parallel cousins." The term has been invented by anthropologists to signify the following relationship. My father's brother's children are parallel cousins. By contrast, my mother's brother's children are cross cousins. In a Semitic society the ideal wife for a man was one of his parallel cousins. Furthermore, where several sons existed and there were several female parallel cousins, it was assumed that the oldest son would marry the oldest girl and so on down the line. The expected wife for Abraham would therefore be his uncle Haran's daughter of comparable age (Cf. Chap. 2, 11).
Now this seems a little complex, but it is particularly striking in this instance because even today among many Arab tribes in all their love stories the man looks upon his paternal uncle's daughter as his "princess." This is the term by which he refers to her in his poetic moments. In Hebrew the word for prince is Sar, the feminine form of which is Sara, meaning "Princess." The terminal possessive pronoun "my" is a long i so that Sara becomes Sarai meaning "my princess." This is how Abraham referred to his beautiful wife. Her name was Iscah but he called her "My Princess" or Sarai.
Thus Terah's brother Haran, who predeceased him, is identified in verse 29 as the father of Milcah and Iscah, whereas Terah's son Haran, who also predeceased him, is referred to as the father of Lot (v. 31). Because his son Haran (no doubt named after his uncle) died prematurely, Lot became in a special sense the charge of Terah and subsequently of Abraham (Cf. Chap. 2, 12). So when Terah's brother died, Terah took his brother's wife and became the father of his brother's children. Because he was also the father of Abraham this allowed Abraham to say with perfect truth (though with ulterior motives) that Sarai, his princess, was indeed his sister, being the daughter of his own father, but not the daughter of his own mother.
There is, therefore, not the slightest element of invention here in so far as the record of Genesis goes. Genesis 11 gives us sufficient information, if carefully read, to see that there is nothing fanciful about the circumstance which so compounded Abraham's relationship with his own wife.
Only one further observation seems appropriate here. And that is that every brother in a society of this nature is given a particular responsibility for the sister who is next to him in age. He bears a special protective relationship towards her and must approve her husband. He will, moreover, be called upon to chastise her children if necessary, while her husband will not be allowed to do so. It was thus important to curry the favor of any brother who was manifestly the protector of the sister whose hand might be sought in marriage, in which position Abraham must have appeared in the eyes of Pharaoh. This is why Abraham felt sure of his own safety, and indeed, of being favored by Pharaoh or anyone else who might be in a position to desire Sarai (Cf. Chap. 2, 6).
GENESIS 15.2-4: And Abram said, Lord God, what wilt Thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus. And Abram said, Behold, to me thou has given no seed: and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir. And, behold, the word of the Lord came unto him saying, This shall not be thine heir; but he that shall come forth out of thine own loins shall be thine heir.
This appears to reflect a custom which, as we have seen, was evidently quite common, namely, the adoption of some member of the household who is nevertheless not a blood relative, who becomes the potential heir of the adoptive father. It would appear from the story, however, that the head of the house in this case at any rate made his adoptive son his heir so long as he had no sons of his own. It seems as though this could not but engender hard feelings if a son should be born unexpectedly. But perhaps if the adopted individual was quite aware of the tentative position he held as heir, his subsequent downgrading in this sense, might not be quite such a blow. On the basis of Genesis 24:2 it seems to me not unlikely that it was the same faithful member of his household who, as it says, was his eldest servant and ruled over all that he had, was sent on the delicate mission of finding a wife for the heir who displaced him. In which case, it is surely an evidence of the humility of his spirit and perhaps more understandable that the Lord was able to meet him so graciously while he was on his mission. At any rate, the adoption of a servant to become an heir of his master is a not uncommon custom among many cultures.
GENESIS 16:1-3; 21:2, 8-14: Now Sarai Abram's wife bare him no children: and she had an handmaid, an Egyptian, whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said unto Abram, Behold now, the Lord hath restrained me from bearing: I pray thee go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her. And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai. And Sarai Abram's wife took Hagar her maid the Egyptian, after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan, and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife...For Sarah conceived, and bare Abraham a son in his old age...And the child grew, and was weaned: and Abraham made a great feast the same day that Isaac was weaned. And Sarah saw the son of Hagar...mocking. Wherefore she said unto Abraham, Cast out this bond woman and her son; for the son of this bond woman shall not be heir with my son, even with Isaac. And the thing was very grievous in Abraham's sight because of his son. And God said unto Abraham, Let it not be grievous in thy sight because of the lad...in all that Sarah hath said unto thee, hearken unto her voice; for in Isaac shall thy seed be called...And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and took bread, and a bottle of water and gave it unto Hagar...and the child, and sent her away.
This is an illustration of the fact that the wife who fails to provide an heir to her husband is aware of having broken part of her marriage contract. Sarai had the alternatives of either finding a sister who could become Abram's second wife, or providing him with some other woman entirely of her own choice. Abram was not permitted and probably did not seek to choose, a second wife for himself on the specific grounds of a broken contract, but he did accept Sarai's choice. Hagar became his wife and in due course bore him a son, Ishmael. But thirteen years later, Sarah herself became pregnant and bore him a son, Isaac. During this interval Hagar seems to have caused considerable irritation to Sarah but not sufficient that she could demand of Abraham that he dismiss her from the household. When, however Sarah's child was weaned, it appears that Ishmael was quite unwilling to accept gracefully the reduction of his status as the heir of Abraham and his behavior became so unpleasant that Sarah demanded the expulsion of Hagar and her son from her household. According to law, a law which is reflected in the Code of Hammurabi, Abraham was called upon to take action on his wife's behalf and he "cast out the bond woman and her son," albeit with some reluctance (Gen. 21:14). In justice to Hagar, it does seem from Genesis 16:6-9 that Hagar was somewhat less to blame for the situation than her son Ishmael was. In Galatians 4:29 it is Ishmael who is accused.
In Genesis 30:1 and 5 it will be noted that the same custom is applied in the relations between Jacob and Rachel. She gives her maid Bilhah to Jacob who bears a son. Rachel said, "God hath given a son" (v. 6). Clearly Rachel really did consider this was her child and the reality of her faith is borne out (vv. 7, 8) when she again gives her maid to Jacob and claims the second child as double vindication.
GENESIS 24:2ff. And Abraham said unto his eldest servant of his house...thou shalt go unto my country, and to my kindred, and take a wife unto my son Isaac...And he arose, and went...unto the city of Nahor...And (the servant) said, O Lord God of my master Abraham, I pray thee, send me good speed this day...And it came to pass, before he had done speaking, that, behold Rebekah came out, who was born to Bethuel, son of Milcah, the wife of Nahor, Abraham's brother...And Rebekah had a brother and his name was Laban: and Laban ran out unto the man. And it came to pass, when he saw the earring and bracelets...said, Come in, thou blessed of the Lord...Behold, Rebekah is before thee, take her and go, and let her be thy master's son's wife...
Therefore, Isaac married his father's brother's daughter. It will be remembered once again that this is the marriage of parallel cousins, rather than cross cousins, which is somewhat rarer a practice. Nevertheless, such a marriage is quite acceptable, provided that the man is marrying his father's brother's daughter. It would not be at all acceptable for a man to marry his mother's sister's daughter. The difference in these two alternatives is that in the latter case there is a measure of incest involved because the bride has received her body (according to social belief at the time) from a woman who is too closely related by blood. On this crucial point, see Chapter 2, 10.
Now the circumstances surrounding the search which Abraham initiated for a wife for his son Isaac are particularly beautiful, and the literary form in which the story is cast in Scripture is surely the equal of any such love story in the English language. The old and faithful, though nameless, servant was sent by his master Abraham to find a wife for Isaac from the land from which he himself had come to this present place. So he set forth with camels and gifts and he came to the city of Nahor, that Nahor whose relationship to Abraham has already been established in Genesis 11. In due time, he comes to a well outside the city and there he decides to wait, asking the Lord that He will send out to him the maid of His choice and will reassure him by this sign, namely, that she would offer, not merely to him something to drink, but to draw water also for his camels.
It would be a pity to tell the story in any other words than those of the original but we may note that before the faithful old servant had finished praying (v. 51), a girl came to the well, very fair to look at, and her name was Rebekah, "born of Bethuel, son of Milcah, the wife of Nahor, Abraham's brother."
The genealogy which we have already repeated twice is now repeated a third time in order to bring out a striking fact about the relationship in time between Isaac and Rebekah. For the fact is that Isaac was born so late in the lifetime of Abraham and Sarah that he could not appropriately have found a wife in what would strictly have been his own generation, namely, the generation in which Bethuel was born. Had he married a sister, let us say, of Bethuel's, he would have been marrying a woman perhaps twenty or twenty-five years older than himself.
Now the interesting thing about Bethuel is that although he was the father of the girl whose hand was sought in marriage, it is very evident from the record, as Blunt was perhaps the first to underscore, that he is virtually ignored in all the transactions which surrounded the betrothal of Rebekah. It is Rebekah's mother and Rebekah's brother, Laban, who are the chief actors in the story. When the servant first speaks with Rebekah, he asks her, "Whose daughter art thou? Tell me, I pray thee, is there room in thy father's house to lodge in?" She answers that she is the daughter of Bethuel and that there is room. But when he thereupon declared who he was and whence he had come, we are told that "the damsel ran and told them of her mother's house these things also." This is not the normal thing for her to have done as is evident by Rachel's behavior when, later, Jacob introduced himself (Gen. 29:12) under somewhat similar circumstances.
This might all be accidental except for the fact that we are then told that Rebekah had a brother whose name was Laban and that "Laban ran out unto the man and invited him in."
This strange circumstance in which Laban acted as host rather than the father of the household has led some people to propose that perhaps Bethuel was dead. But this is clearly ruled out by the subsequent statement (Gen. 24:50) to the effect that Laban and Bethuel together answered the servant's inquiries once he was in the house. So everything is agreed upon and Rebekah is to go with the servant who then makes the presentation of gifts. But these gifts are now presented not to the father but to the brother Laban and to her mother (Gen. 24:53). At the same time, it is suggested she should stay a few days before leaving; and once more the suggestion comes not from Bethuel but from her brother and her mother.
Some encyclopedias, when dealing with Bethuel, propose that he may have been sickly or even imbecile, able to assent to what is proposed but not to make decisions nor to be a sensible recipient of valuable gifts. Personally, I think there is another possible reason for his taking such an insignificant part in all these proceedings which in no way casts doubt upon his character but results from the fact, already noted before, that in Oriental society, as among many native people today, there normally exists a special relationship between each brother in a family and the sister nearest him in age (Cf. Chap. 2, 6).
We have already noted the widespread custom which required that the groom bring a substantial bride price when seeking a wife. We have also noted that the special brother is often largely dependent upon the gift brought to his sister to enable him, in turn, to fulfill the proprieties when he takes a wife. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that Laban, who seems to have been Rebekah's "special brother," should have been so interested in the gifts which were brought by the faithful old servant and at the same time should have played such a prominent part in the whole transaction.
But the genealogy as set forth above reveals another fact which might otherwise be missed. Isaac was born under circumstances which in effect made him one whole generation late, being the child of Abraham's and Sarah's old age. Had he been born routinely, Bethuel himself would have been "of his generation." As things transpired, Bethuel's children, not he himself, were of Isaac's generation. In our modern terms, this is perhaps the first generation gap of which we have record. At any rate, it is quite certain that Bethuel himself could hardly have had a sister of appropriate age to be Isaac's wife, for Isaac was young enough, due to circumstances, to be his son. He therefore did not receive the gifts. Because the two families were closely related, it is virtually certain that Bethuel would know very well that Isaac was a special child of his parent's old age. Even if he didn't know this already, the faithful old servant would certainly explain it all while he was in the house; and since he was not looking for one of Bethuel's sisters and did not wish to cause embarrassment to them, he would almost certainly have avoided Bethuel's household. Thus, the two people chiefly interested in the proposal which was being made would be Rebekah's mother, who would be very anxious to see her daughter so well married, and Laban, who would be very happy to see the valuable gifts exchange hands.
GENESIS 28:1-2: And Isaac called Jacob, and blessed him, and charged him, and said unto him, Thou shalt not take a wife of the daughters of Canaan. Arise, go to Padan-Aram to the house of Bethuel thy mother's father; and take thee a wife from thence of the daughters of Laban, thy mother's brother.
GENESIS 29:1, 4-6, 9-28: Then Jacob went on his journey, and came into the land of the people of the east....And Jacob said unto them, My brethren, whence be ye? And they said, Of Haran are we. And he said unto them, Know ye Laban the son of Nahor? And they said, We know him. And he said unto them, is he well? And they said, He is well: and, behold, Rachel his daughter cometh with the sheep. And while he yet spake with them, Rachel came with her father's sheep: for she kept them. And it came to pass, when Jacob saw Rachel the daughter of Laban his mother's brother, and the sheep of Laban his mother's brother, that Jacob went near, and rolled the stone from the well's mouth, and watered the flock of Laban his mother's brother. And Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted up his voice and wept. And Jacob told Rachel that he was her father's brother, and that he was Rebekah's son: and she ran and told her father.
And it came to pass, when Laban heard the tidings of Jacob his sister's son, that he ran to meet him and embraced him, and kissed him, and brought him to his house. And he told Laban all these things. And Laban said to him, Surely thou art my bone and my flesh. And he abode with him the space of a month.
And Laban said unto Jacob, Because thou art my brother, shouldest thou therefore serve me for nought? tell me, what shall thy wages be? And Laban had two daughters: the name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah was tender eyed; but Rachel was beautiful and well favoured. And Jacob loved Rachel; and said, I will serve thee seven years for Rachel thy younger daughter. And Laban said, It is better that I give her to thee, than that I should give her to another man: abide with me. And Jacob served seven years for Rachel; and they seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had for her.
And Jacob said unto Laban, Give me my wife, for my days are fulfilled, that I may go in unto her. And Laban gathered together all the men of the place, and made a feast. And it came to pass in the evening that he took Leah, his daughter, and brought her to him; and he went in unto her. And Laban gave unto his daughter Leah Zilpah his maid for an handmaid. And it came to pass, that in the morning, behold, it was Leah: and he said to Laban, What is this thou hast done unto me? did not I serve thee for Rachel? wherefore then hast thou beguiled me? And Laban said, It must not be so done in our country, to give the younger before the firstborn. Fulfil her week, and we will give thee also this for the service which thou shalt serve with me yet seven other years. And Jacob did so, and fulfilled her week: and he gave him Rachel his daughter to wife also.
In Genesis 28 above we have a beautiful illustration of a potential cross-cousin marriage. The Hebrew people accepted either a parallel or cross-cousin marriage, in the latter instance the man being permitted to marry either his father's sister's daughter or his mother's brother's daughter. In neither case is there taint of physical incest. As we have already noted, Laban was evidently Jacob's mother's "special brother." So Jacob went to find Laban.
Evidently Rachel was a remarkably beautiful girl. In verse 17 the Authorized Version tells us that "Leah was tender-eyed; but Rachel was beautiful and well favored." The Hebrew in this passage is interesting, for there is a suggestion that in fact Leah was "weepy-eyed," more literally, "watery-eyed." For Rachel the original implies not only beauty but a certain fire. Rachel sparkled! Perhaps it is no wonder that Jacob loved her at first sight.
We have noted that whenever a suitor sought the hand of a man's daughter but came without the requisite bride price to demonstrate the seriousness of intent, or wherever there was little portable wealth in terms of jewelry and precious metals (such as had been given to Laban), which would have enabled the bride to depart immediately with her new husband, the husband-to-be could agree to work for a certain length of time to compensate the father-in-law for losing a pair of working hands (Cf. Chap. 2, 6).
Evidently Jacob did not inquire carefully enough as to the rules of the society. Had he been a student of social anthropology he might have realized that marrying a younger daughter before an older one could create real problems. Perhaps if Laban, in his turn, had been completely honest with Jacob, he might have told him to begin with: but then he ran the risk of not having an extra pair of hands for 14 years. It always strikes me as being a particularly beautiful touch that the writer tells us how the time flew for Jacob on account of "the love he had for Rachel," though it must be noted (in v. 20) that it was the first seven years which thus passed so quickly. One wonders about the second period of servitude.
GENESIS 38:2-30: Judah saw there a daughter of a certain Canaanite, whose name was Shuah; and he took her, and went in unto her. And she conceived, and bare a son; and he called his name Er. And she conceived again, and bare a son; and she called his name Onan. And she yet again conceived, and bare a son; and called his name Shelah...
And Judah took a wife for Er his firstborn, whose name was Tamar. And Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the LORD; and the LORD slew him.
And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother's wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother. and Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother. And the thing which he did displeased the LORD: wherefore He slew him also.
Then said Judah to Tamar his daughter in law, Remain a widow at thy father's house, till Shelah my son be grown: for he said, Lest peradventure he die also, as his brethren did. And Tamar went and dwelt in her father's house.
And in process of time the daughter of Shuah, Judah's wife died; and Judah was comforted, and went up...to Timnah...And it was told Tamar, saying, Behold, thy father in law goeth up to Timnah to shear his sheep. And she put her widow's garments of from her, and covered her with a veil, and wrapped herself, and sat in an open place, which is by the way to Timnath; for she saw that Shelah was grown, and she was not given unto him to wife.
And when Judah saw her, he thought her to be an harlot...And he turned unto her by the way, and said, Go to, I pray thee, let me come in unto thee; (for he knew not that she was his daughter-in-law.) And she said, What will thou give me, that thou mayest come in unto me? And he said, I will send thee a kid from the flock. And she said, Wilt thou give me a pledge, till thou send it? And he said, What pledge shall I give thee? And she said, Thy signet, and thy bracelets, and thy staff which is in thine hand. And he gave it her, and came in unto her, and she conceived by him. And she arose, and went away, and laid her veil from her, and put on the garments of her widowhood.
And Judah sent the kid by the hand of his friend the Adullamite, to receive his pledge from the woman's hand: but he found her not. Then he asked the men of that place, saying, Where is the harlot, that was openly by the way side? And they said, There was no harlot in this place. And he returned to Judah, and said, I cannot find her; and also the men of the place said, that there was no harlot in this place. And Judah said, Let her take it to her, lest we be shamed: behold I sent this kid, and thou hast not found her.
And it came to pass about three months after, that it was told Judah, saying, Tamar thy daughter in law hath played the harlot; and also, behold, she is with child by whoredom. And Judah said, Bring her forth, and let her be burnt. When she was brought forth, she sent to her father in law, saying, By the man whose these are, am I with child: and she said, Discern, I pray thee, whose are these, the signet, and bracelets, and staff. And Judah acknowledged them, and said, She hath been more righteous than I; because that I gave her not to Shelah my son. And he knew her again no more.
And it came to pass in the time of her travail, that, behold, twins were in her womb...therefore his name was called Pharez. And afterward came out his brother...and his name was called Zerah.
This story provides a beautiful illustration of how the Levirate practice was applied and how God judged a man for being indifferent to it when it suited his purposes. The text supplies us with the following genealogical data:
Er married a girl named Tamar but the Lord destroyed him for his wickedness, and Tamar was left a widow. According to custom she was then given to Onan, Er's next oldest brother, but Onan refused to play his part (v. 9) and his life was also taken by the Lord. Judah then promised that the next son, Shelah, who was yet a child, should be given to her as a husband when he grew up. But then Judah betrayed his promise, for when Shelah was grown he was given another wife instead of Tamar who in the meantime continued to live with her father (v. 11). Tamar then took things into her own hands when she found that her father-in-law had denied her a lawful husband, and by pretending to be a harlot she compromised him. When Judah discovered what he had done (v. 26), he immediately admitted his guilt but in the meantime twins were born to Tamar, namely, Pharez and Zerah. In due course the great grandson of Zerah was he who greatly troubled Israel and caused many to lose their lives (Josh. 7:1).
According to Numbers 26:20 Judah's younger son, Shelah, did marry but not Tamar, and he and his children were therefore disqualified from the royal line. Tamar, on the other hand, was strictly the wife of Er, the firstborn, and on this account her children were considered strictly as children of Er, the son of Judah. The circumstance illustrates the fact that the mother, whose identity is always known for certain, is more important than the actual father, in terms of the children born. According to law, the question is, Who is the legal husband?--not, Who is the actual father? This matter is of prime importance in the case of Joseph, who was the husband of Mary and therefore the legal father of Jesus. Meanwhile, the royal line is traced through Pharez, the son of Tamar, and therefore by law the son of Er, the son of Judah.
In the beautiful story of Ruth and Naomi, there is an illustration of this custom. Ruth insists on staying with Naomi, but she tries to discourage her on the grounds that "if I should have a husband this very night and should bear a son," (Ruth 1:12), it would still be a long time before one was old enough to be given to Ruth as a husband to compensate her for her loss. Hence Naomi asks her, "Would ye tarry for them till they were grown?" (Ruth 1:13).
LEVITICUS 18:17: Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of a woman
The terminology used here has seemed to many commentators rather odd. The injunction itself is clear enough, the object being to state clearly those relationships in which marriage is not permissible. But I think the use of the phrase "uncover the nakedness of..." may be a reflection of the implications involved in the "joking relationship" to which reference is made in Chapter 2, 12.
2 SAMUEL 13:1: And it came to pass after this, that Absalom the son of David had a fair sister whose name was Tamar; and Amnon the son of David loved her...
When this verse is analyzed, it is obvious that Absalom and Amnon were brothers, both being sons of David and that Tamar was a sister to both of them. But what we know now from the cultural habits of other people indicates that the situation was not quite so simple. David had more than one wife, and Tamar was the daughter of one of these wives, whereas Amnon was the son of another of these wives. Absalom was evidently a true brother to Tamar and bore that special relationship which we have noted that one particular brother will bear to a particular sister. Tamar was Absalom's special sister (Cf. Chap. 2, 6).
According to the views of many cultures with respect to the definition of incest, Tamar was not related to Amnon in any incestuous way, for, although David was the father of both, they did not share the same mother and their bodies were not therefore derived from the same source (Cf. Chap. 2, 10).
According to verse 2, what really vexed Amnon in his relationship with Tamar was that for some reason he could not conveniently have his will with her. It was then that a certain "friend" of his offered to arrange things for him. In verse 4, Amnon told his friend that he loved Tamar, "my brother Absalom's sister." I think this is clear recognition on the part of Amnon that Tamar was not his own sister. And it is a little difficult to understand, therefore, why he did not go to David and ask him frankly for Tamar's hand in marriage. It may be that he did not want to marry Tamar, that his intentions were not honorable. Tamar herself pointed out to Amnon that he was wronging her unnecessarily for she said (v. 13): "Now, therefore, I pray thee, speak unto the king; for he will not withhold me from thee."
One can only assume, therefore, that Amnon's heart was evil and that he had no good intentions towards Tamar except to satisfy his own lust. The story in its sorry detail is not so much a record of the evil effects of incest, for such a marriage would not have been counted incestuous. But it is a record rather of the ultimate evil of lack of self-control in human behavior.
Absalom's vengeance undoubtedly stemmed from his genuine feelings towards Tamar, but it may have been reinforced in his own mind by the realization that Tamar could no longer supply him with the help he might have expected from her dowry towards the obtaining of his own wife (Cf. Chap. 2, 6).
It is important to realize that God in His graciousness meets the needs of people within the framework of their own culture. In the present instance the Word of God sets forth Tamar's words to the effect that her father, David, would not deny her as a wife to Amnon in such a way that Tamar is not judged for making this observation--though to us it would seem quite an improper proposal...an important point which missionaries have to face up to.
MATTHEW 1:25: And (he) knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name JESUS.
Joseph fulfilled the conditions which were required by law to constitute him as the father of Jesus and therefore, to make Jesus officially his heir, not only by giving him his name but by teaching him the trade of carpentry (See also Chap. 2, 3).
LUKE 15:11,12, 31: And he [Jesus] said, A certain man had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living...And he said unto him [his elder son], Son, thou art ever with me and all that I have is thine.
Once again, little comment is necessary in view of what has already been said in Chapter 2, 18. But it is worth noting a significant departure from the expected wording of the father's response. We are told that "he divided to both his living." In other words, having only two sons and having already been requested to give the younger son his inheritance, the older son at the same time received his, since now it was a foregone conclusion. As was customary, the elder son did not wait until his father died to come into possession of his due inheritance. Since there were only these two boys, the elder son naturally received and at once possessed "all that his father had" exactly as it is stated in verse 31.
I suppose part of the elder brother's concern was that his younger brother would now be in a position to rob him of some of his possessions after having squandered his own. After all, the fatted calf which was slaughtered potentially belonged not to the father but to the elder son, "all that I have is thine." Yet apparently he had not been asked if he would surrender this choice animal. There is a sense in which he had a legitimate grievance, and yet the father was right. The conflict of interests, the conflict between what is "good" and what is "right," is common.
A final comment is perhaps in order. According to Old Testament injunctions, the oldest member of the family, i.e., the firstborn, was always given a double portion of the inheritance in order that he might have sufficient wealth to redeem a brother who got hopelessly into debt. In this instance, therefore, the inheritance had not been divided in a 1-to-1 ratio but in a 2-to-1 ratio, so that the older brother would actually have been provided with the requisite means to redeem the prodigal in any case. In this sense the old father was justified in using his son's property....But perhaps he should have advised him or asked his permission before doing so. Evidently he had not done this (vv. 25-28).
LUKE 15:20: And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.
Very little comment is necessary here in view of what has already been said in Chapter 2, 17. Although the young man's diet had probably been changed sufficiently that his body odor was no longer familiar, the old man fell easily and at once into the old way of showing his affection by burying his face where body odor had once been sensed as a proof of belonging.
The custom is reflected in the behavior of Jacob when he met his defrauded brother Esau after a separation of many years (Gen. 33:4); as also when Joseph was united with his brethren (Gen. 45:14). It might appear that when Isaac blessed Jacob, he too was being guided by body odor (Gen. 27:21f.), but I rather think here that it must have been the clothing itself which provided the identifying odor for presumably Jacob and Esau shared the same table.
GALATIANS 4:1, 4, 5: Now I say, That the heir, as long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all...But when the fulness of time was come, God sent forth His son...to redeem them...that we might receive the adoption of sons.
It seems strange to us that a man, though he is born in the family, should not automatically be recognized as the heir. But as we have seen (in Chap. 2, 3), even true sons have to be officially adopted by the father in many societies in which the father is likely to be away from home for long periods of time. Moreover, where there are no children, servants or even captives may be adopted as legal heirs with the full rights of true sonship. In writing to the Galatians, Paul probably had in mind the need to emphasize to the Jewish people that they were not children of God automatically, merely because their father Abraham was God's special child; nor are the children of Christian parents automatically children of God. There must be a clearly defined process of adoption in which the relationship of true sonship is established by an act of the Father.
Part VII: References:
1. Tristram, H. S., Eastern Customs in Bible Lands, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1894.
2. Rassam, Hormuzd, "On Biblical Lands, Their Topography, Races, Regions, Languages, and Customs, Ancient and Modern," Trans. Vict. Inst., London, 30 (1896-97): 29-85.
3. Gordon, Ernest, "Light on the Old Testament from Primitive Society," The Sunday School Times, Nov. 3, 1945, p. 851.
4. Livingstone, David, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, Harper, N.Y., 1858, xxiv and 732 pages.
5. Lubbock, Sir John, The Origin of Civilization, Appleton, N.Y., 1882.
6. Barton; George A., Archaeology and the Bible, The American Sunday School Union, Philadelphia, 1916.
7. Levi-Strauss, Claude, Race and History, UNESCO publication, 1952, p. 28.
8. Dawson, J. W., Fossil Men and Their Modern Representatives, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1880, p. 317.
9. Haimendorf, Christoph von Furer, The Reddi of the Bison Hills, Macmillan, N.Y., 1945.
10. Driberg, J. H., The Lango, A Nilotic Tribe of Uganda, London, 1923.
11. Murdock, George Peter, Our Primitive Contemporaries, Macmillan, N.Y., 1951, p. 344.
12. Lubbock, Sir John, ref. 5, p. 100.
13. Lowie, Robert, Social Organization, Rinehart, N.Y., 1948, p. 57.
14. Lubbock, Sir John, ref. 5, p. 96.
15. Ibid.
16. McIlwraith, I., "Lectures in Social Life of Pre-Literates," at University of Toronto, 1953.
17. Driberg, J. H., ref. 10.
18.Tayyeb, Ali, himself a native of Arabia, in a seminar on Cultural Anthropology presented to the Anthropology Dept., Univ. of Toronto, 1953.
19. Briffault, Robert, "Group-Marriage and Sexual Communism," in The Making of Man, ed. V. F. Calverton, Modern Library, N.Y., 1931, p. 497.
20. Herskovits, Melville, Man and His Works, Knopf, N.Y., 1950, p. 297.
21. Murdock, G. P., ref. 11, p. 34.
22. Ibid., p. 179.
23. Goldenweiser, Alexander, Anthropology, Crofts, N.Y., 1945, p. 419, n. 8.
24. Jackson, Dugauld, C., "Engineering's Part in the Development of Civilization," Science, 89 (1939): 234.
25. Herskovits, Melville, ref. 20, p. 292.
26. Malinowski, Bronislaw, "The Relations Between the Sexes in Tribal Life," in The Making of Man, ref. 19, p. 569.
27. McIlwraith, I., ref. 16, quoting from W. Bogoras, The Chukchee, Vol. II, Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist. Memoirs, 1904.
28. McIlwraith, I., ref. 16, quoting H. A. Junod, Life of a South African Tribe, 2 vols., Neudlatel, 1912.
29. Cairns, Huntington, "Law and Anthropology," in The Making of Man, ref. 19, p. 355.
30. Diamond, A. S., Primitive Law, 1935, p. 230.
31. Bogoras, W., ref. 27, p. 579.
32. Dobell, P., quoted by A. G. Morice, "Northwestern Denes and Northeastern Asiatics," Trans. Roy. Can. Instit., Univer. of Toronto Press, 10 (1915): 177.
33. Schapera, I., A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom, London, 1938.
34. Briffault, Robert, ref. 19, pp. 207-210.
35. Gordon, C. A., "Notes on Philosophy and Medical Knowledge in Ancient India," Trans. Vict. Instit., Lon., Vol. 25 (1891-92): 236.
36. Coon, C. S., A Reader in General Anthropology, Holt, N.Y., 1948, p. 247.
37. McIlwraith, I., ref. 16.
38. Murdock, G. P., ref. 11, p. 197.
39. Goldenweiser, Alexander, ref. 23, p. 337.
40. Barton, George A., ref. 6, p. 287.
41. Coon, C. S., ref. 36, p. 190.
42. Cassirer, Ernst, An Essay on Man, Yale Univ. Press, 1944, p. 132.
43. McIlwraith, I., ref. 16.
44. Murdock, G. P., ref. 11, p. 72.
45. Haimendorf, C., ref. 9.
46. Speck, Frank G., Naskapi Indians, 1935.
47. Murdock, G. P., ref. 11, p. 417. See also, J. G. Frazer, Adonis, Attis, and Osiris, London, 1906, p. 323; and Gordon Brown, Melanesians and Polynesians, London, 1910.
48. Taweb, Ali, ref. 18.
49. Coon, C. S., "Race Concept and Human Races," Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology, 15 (1950): 251.
50. Murdock, G. P., ref. 11, p. 273.
51. Ibid., p. 490.
52. Garbar, Clark, "Eskimo Infanticide," Sci. Monthly, 1947, p. 100.
53. Lubbock, Sir John, ref. 5, p. 34.
54. Ibid., p. 35.
55. Ibid.
56. Livingstone, David, ref. 4, p. 577.
57. Coon, C. S., ref. 36, p. 230.
58. Goldenweiser, Alexander, ref. 23, p. 302.
59. Murdock, G. P., ref. 11, p. 61.
60. Coon, C. S., ref. 36, p. 91.
61. Maine: quoted by Sir John Lubbock, ref. 5, p. 464. Since this passage was largely responsible for initiating the thread of the argument in the first part of this paper, we merely refer the reader to Part I and Part II-2 without further comment here.
62. Toronto Globe, Aug. 5, 1949, reported such a case under the title, "Born 26 Hours Apart: But Two Sons, Not Twins."
Corrections, July 7, 1997.