Yahweh's Marriage Pt. 1
How did God use marriage laws to speak to his people?
For a long time I was deeply bothered by the fact that God emphasizes in certain places that he would never break his covenant with his people and in others that the covenant was broken. How was it that God could use such intense language of unconditional mercy but also seem to wad it all up and throw it away when his people’s sin reached a certain level?
Throughout Scripture, God uses many metaphors to describe God’s relationship with his people. As the Israelites’ relationship with Yahweh unfolds throughout the Old Testament, the metaphor of marriage becomes primary. Many other Ancient Near Eastern religions used this metaphor, but in different ways. In one Ugaritic myth dating from the 1400s BC, two sisters marry El, and some cultures had myths about a city being married to a god. Israel was unusual in that God portrayed himself as being married to Israel as a nation.
From the Exodus on, God invited Israel to think of him as a husband to her. He used the laws and customs of the surrounding nations as a sort of imaginative palette to describe different dynamics of their covenant together. When God forbade Israel from making any image for worship, the reason was that “. . . I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.” (Ex. 20:5, RSV) When Moses neared the end of his days, God told him that, “. . . this people will rise and play the harlot after the strange gods of the land, where they go to be among them, and they will forsake me and break my covenant which I have made with them.” (Deut 31:16, RSV) When God sent prophets to bring his people back to himself, God’s people were rebuked for “playing the harlot,” and for forsaking their marriage covenant with Yahweh. The prophets also used these marriage and adultery images as metaphors through which Israel and Judah could see their blessings and obligations within their covenant with Yahweh.
Something that is fascinating to me is how God did not come to his people “from scratch,” but rather introduced himself to his people through the existing marriage customs of the time. The laws laid out in the first five books of the Old Testament are not a complete legal system; they assume a familiarity with the Mesopotamian marriage laws of the time. The laws that we have in the Torah comment and expand on those laws: some confirmed, some negated, and some adapted those existing laws. So comparing the existing laws to God’s amendments can reveal to us much about God’s character.
Additionally, David Daube has shown that the Torah should not be thought of strictly as positive law. A book like Deuteronomy exists somewhere between law and wisdom literature. As God’s people meditated on, loved, and studied the Torah, they would gradually become the sorts of people who obeyed God and did what was right.
The basic terms for a marriage covenant were that a husband was to provide “food, clothing, and marital rights (the word was originally “oil”)” for his wife (Ex. 21:10). If he would not provide these things, it was considered grounds for divorce. A wife, in turn, took the raw materials her husband provided, and used them to make clothing and meals, and to reciprocate the love of her husband. An additional requirement for wives was sexual fidelity (this could obviously not apply to men in a polygamous society).
These requirements for a husband’s and wife’s obligations were used throughout Scripture to show how the Lord provided for his people. In Psalm 132, the Psalmist describes the food and clothing he provides for his bride Zion:
For the Lord has chosen Zion;
he has desired it for his habitation:
“This is my resting place for ever;
here I will dwell, for I have desired it.
I will abundantly bless her provisions;
I will satisfy her poor with bread.
Her priests I will clothe with salvation,
and her saints will shout for joy. (Psalm 132:13-16, RSV)
It was in the worship of Israel in the Tabernacle and Temple that we see God’s people most clearly fulfilling these marital vows. From the beginning, Yahweh provided food, materials to make clothing, and oil for his people. In response, Israel’s priests ensured that the worship of Yahweh was marked by beautiful, finely embroidered garments for the priests and curtain, freshly baked loaves of bread, and pure oil for the lampstands.
When Israel went astray, the food, clothing, and oil Yahweh provided for his people were given to foreign gods. The prophets showed how, in the rift between Yahweh and his people, it was the people who were in the wrong. It was not that Yahweh had abandoned his people; he was the one abandoned.
In the next installment, we’ll take a look at how the prophets used this marriage and divorce imagery to provoke God’s people to return to him.