Lately biblical interpretation has become the frontline in a heated battle to determine what God really thinks about sex and marriage. As a biblical scholar, historian and Baptist pastor, however, I find this debate to be misguided and destructive. The Bible is simply too complicated and too contradictory to serve as a guide to sexual morals. Treating the Bible as a rulebook impoverishes the biblical witness and short-circuits our ability to speak honestly about sex. Since the Bible never offers anything like a straightforward set of teachings about marriage, desire, or God’s perspective on the human body, the only way to pretend that it does is to refuse to read it.

To this I want to add another element. The Old Testament is a document that reflects culture during a certain time and in a certain region. People argue over the exact time and date of events reflected in this set of documents, but for our purposes we can usefully generalize. The region of concern is often called the “Middle East” or “Near East” but at a smaller scale there are uncertainties as to whether much of this history occurred in Egypt vs. the Arabian Peninsula vs. the Levant. However, wherever we see realistic information about the cultural ecology of the people in the old texts, they are herders, planters, or people living in towns surrounded by herders. For this reason, we can comfortably state that the Israelites and their friends and enemies were living in regions of Northeast Africa and Southwest Asia, in and between the Western Dessert and Nile Valley trough to the Tigris and Euphrates valley, and nearby highlands. This is a region with spotty forests and extensive grasslands during wet periods, and arid lands. The time period of concern is perhaps as early as the middle and late Bronze Age, but all of the actual texts we know of come from later. Historians put the conquest of Canaan by he Israelites at the Bronze Age-Iron Age boundary (about 4200 years go). But with respect to cultural practices like marriage, the Old Testament almost certainly describes a patrilineal system where livestock equals wealth, marriages among high status men were polygynous, and men were raised to be warriors.

In other words, the Old Testament describes a “Middle Range Society.” This is a term of art in Anthropology that refers to societies that produce food (as opposed to foragers), where most people live in villages with rarely more than about 150 people, and social relations are arranged by proscribed marriage and kinship patterns favoring a male lineage. If you go and count all the traditional cultures we know of around the world from the last few centuries, most of them are Middle Range Societies (MRS). This is in part because MRSs tend to differentiate culturally over time at a small spatial scale, both linguistically and in terms of cultural identity. When people speak of cultural diversity in a place like “Traditional Africa,” or speak of “tribes” they are mostly talking about the world of MRS where a region the size of the United States could have two or three thousand distinct groups with a great diversity of languages further subdivided into many dialects and distinct cultural practices, origin myths, and kinship systems. If you go around a large region of MRS and ask people what they call themselves, you will get a lot of answers. This is the human condition prior to the formation of larger scale state societies, peasant economies, and industrialized and western economies. It is how most people lived from several thousand years ago until recent times, the present in some cases. And this is a problem.

It is a problem because modern humans are much older than that. Fully modern humans existed on this planet pretty much everywhere humans were ultimately to exist several tens of thousands of years ago. There are those who believe that fully modern humans became widespread about 40,000 years ago, but that the previous humans were very similar to modern humans. Others believe that fully modern humans were in place and spreading across the globe, running into Neandertals and Hobbits and such, beginning at 120,000 years ago. Many of the key features we find in modern humans, such as a large brain and evidence of forethought and planning in stone tool technology, are seen in Africa much earlier, perhaps closer to 400,000 years ago. And, some have argued that key features of human society, including marriage, have origins that go back much farther, to about two million years ago. We’ll get to that earlier time period in a later post. For now, however, we can say with reasonable certainty that moder humans…their bodies, brains, and behavior…were in place at least 40,000 years ago, perhaps much longer, as hunter-gatherer-fishers (foragers).

The transition from forager to farmer or herder involved that transition to MRS (I oversimplify a bit). We have seen this happen in the ethnographic record and there is plenty of archaeological evidence showing this transition as well, and it is very complicated, far more complicated than we have time or space to deal with here. But we do know that the very earliest that this transition happened was about 10,000 years ago, and for several thousand years, that transition was fairly incomplete in any given area it occurred. Even in the Near East, one of many centers of early agriculture, there is evidence of persistent foragers interacting in the early days with more settled farmers.

This is significant. It means that if we want to understand the true nature of marriage by any reference to the historical nature of humans, which can be done if done carefully, we must also recognize that we came into being as the species we are tens of thousands of years before the rise of Middle Range Societies. This is not to say that evolution has not happened in relation to the transition to food production. It certainly has. But most of that evolution probably has to do with removal of certain selective features of a pre MRS ecological landscape and the reaction of our bodies to the diseases of settled life and interaction with livestock and other problems associated with agriculture.

Looking to Middle Range societies such as those in the bible (which is among the weakest sources of information available for human culture compared to the vast ethnographic record of Anthropology) is like looking at Spring Break in Panama City to understand family life in America. Not that the bible was a big party. Rather, it is a poor sample of the human condition. Let me put a finer point on that. With the rise of agriculture in a given region, things like conflict and war become more likely, and social organization trends towards the maintenance of a state of fierceness or bellicosity. Everything else in society follows, including and especially kinship and marriage. Marriage becomes a way for a society to reproduce itself in this form. There are probably features of this way of managing marriage and kinship that have uses today. Today, people marry for strategic reasons that are pretty much the same as found in traditional marriages for alliance in Middle Range Societies. But the reliance on classic criteria for marriage from the tradition of Middle Range Societies is primarily a way to use marriage to reproduce that traditional society, which today serves in only two ways: 1) to continue an out of date religiously determined cultural modality; or 2) to serve in the traditional way as a control by powerful men over others, especially women.

Marriage in Middle Range Societies, in the Old Testament, and in many American churches is a tool of the patriarchy. Codifying this tool in law is a dickhead move.

But first the Naturalistic Fallacy.

This fallacy has two levels. The first is very simple: Given different options for how things should work, the one that matches that which happens in nature is preferable because it is good. For example, since babies in nature drink mother’s milk, breastfeeding is good.

That breastfeeding is good, however, is not because it is found in nature. It is good for a lot of reasons, but being found in nature does not make it good (and maybe it just plain isn’t all good). From the point of view of being nice to little babies, landslides are also found in nature. But when the mountainside falls on the baby and smothers it, we call that bad. And it is bad. That something is found in nature does not make it automatically good.

One of the most common ways of explaining the naturalistic fallacy is to consider smallpox and smallpox vaccines. If that which is natural is good, and in contrast, that which is not natural is bad, then smallpox would be good because it is found in nature, and smallpox vaccine, which is human-made is bad. But we know the reverse is true, right?

Actually, no, the reverse is not uncritically accepted as true. Using Nature to determine what is good has, minimally, the following aspects: 1) A thing is seen as natural (or not); 2) A thing is seen as good (or not); 3) We assume we know what “natural” and “good” are and have got that right for the thing in question.

In the case of smallpox, we can question the naturalistic assumption that what is natural is good by noting that smallpox is natural (1), that smallpox is bad (2) and that we are correct in saying that smallpox is bad (3). But none of that is true. Small pox like many similar viruses is zoonotic. It comes from non-human animals, probably rodents, and it probably umped into human populations because of long term residents in villages supported by agriculture. In other words, small pox is a disease that arises a much from human cultural practices as anything else. One could argue that this is wrong and that “natural” humans like foragers had smallpox too, but that argument won’t get you far because I’ll just change the disease to measles. Measles comes form cows, and domestic cattle is a human invention. Saying that smallpox or measles is bad vs. good is subjective; from the point of view of the virus itself, it is not “bad.” Human made vaccine is bad. Thus, of course, we can’t necessarily define good and bad in an objective way.

Having said all that, I’m personally not that concerned that we are objective with respect to things we measure on the basis of being natural. Let’s stick with a human point of view. From a human point of view, however, we still can’t say that just because something is found in nature (breastfeeding) it is good, because some stuff found in nature sucks (pox).

Therefore, the measurement of “goodness” by reference to nature is a fallacy and should never be attempted. Right?

Actually, wrong. This is the second level of the fallacy, which we might call the “Fallacy of the Naturalistic Fallacy.” Now that we know that the Naturalistic Fallacy is out there, we should not stop looking at nature for clues about whether something is good or bad. Rather, we should refine the question and continue to use nature as a guide to estimating the effects of one or another decision or activity. For instance, it was discovered by researchers 30 years ago that humans “in nature” (foragers in southern Africa) ate a fair amount of meat, but that among all the food they ate, they consumed only certain kinds of fat. Meanwhile, the very unnatural industrially produced diet of Westerners included a different kind of fat in abundance. Those researchers suggested at the time that nutritional science would some day find out that certain kinds of fats and oils were OK, even good for us, and others would be bad for us. And they were right. The logic behind this is simple: Almost all foods have a down side and an upside, and a given organism tends to have adaptations (through prior Natural Selection) to mitigate against the negative consequences and make use of the positive effects of a given food. If you change the diet of such an organism, it may find itself consuming something which, for it, because of this particular history, has a negative effect.

And thus, we who study human hunter-gatherers are not surprised to find that donuts = death. Because there were no donuts, or at least very few donuts, in the “paleolithic.”

Here’s the thing: We can look at nature, or at the “natural” version of some thing, and learn from that. Assuming that something in nature is good requires that we know what “nature” is (and we often don’t), and it assumes that we are explicitly NOT using a human perspective, and all sorts of other things. These assumptions are not unlike assumptions we make when we take advice from people we know are experts on something (using authority to stand in for knowledge) or when we use a rule of thumb as a shortcut to finding the answer to a difficult problem (picking the simpler solution because we believe that life is simple so it must be more correct than the complicated solution) or when we use a guideline to make a basic choice (always wearing one’s seat belt even if we feel we can estimate the actual danger associated with each trip we make in a car). In all of these cases we are doing something that could be very, very misleading, but at the same time doing something that lets us come to a solution that is better than random, if we are thoughtful.

Years ago scientists and engineers who wanted to build robots, especially the kind that would explore other planets, realized that they could look at insects to find ways in which “nature” “solved” problems of locomotion. When they did this a lot was made of it, and there was much press and we saw science reporters fawning all over engineers who were fawning all over robots made to look like insects. I’m not sure what actually happened after that because I was not there, but I suspect engineers quickly discovered that they would have been committing a form of “naturalistic fallacy” by making 900 kilogram robots that looked like insects that are so small that gravity is the least of their problems. And so on. What happened instead was, I think, a quite re-orientation, wherein engineers looked at insects and other creatures to see how they got around, and then uses what they learned along with basic engineering, the results of experiments and experience, and came up with amazing machines that would land on and explore other planets. They looked at nature and they used it.

Nature is like Yoda. Or the swami guy in the cave on top of the mountain. Wisdom in nature, there is; always obvious it is not; learn to use the lessons of nature wisely, we must.

What does this have to do with marriage? This: If we find humans in a “state of nature” and examine their way of marriage, should we say that this is what is “good” or, more relevant to the current political debate, “normal”? And the answer is: Don’t assume that you are looking at humans in a state of nature, that what is found in nature is good, or that its meaning is what you would like it to be. To be conti

For every one of these functions, we can find examples either among individuals or sets of individuals, or cultures or social strata, that defy these expectations. Monarchs may have hung around courts with concubines rather than spouses. In systems where wealth is inherited strictly through a certain (usually male) line, one of the members of the marriage owns nothing, so there is little financial cooperation and no joint ownership. In some societies, men prefer to marry women who have already had a child, regardless of who the father is. In other societies sex between a man and woman is avoided at all costs except to make babies. And so on. Also, there are societies in which marriage serves very important functions that are not mentioned above but that may be considered the most important role of the practice. In societies where dowries are strictly required, marriage is primarily an inter-caste economic arrangement. In the case of the Maasai, written about earlier, marriage is about the cattle.

So, how do we define marriage then? I think there are two ways. One actually has us reaching back into the above described features of marriage and picking out a few key ones that are functions of marriage in many but not all societies. In this case we would make the claim that the other societies are exceptions, even if they have at times in the Earth’s history been widespread. Some of the more elaborate social, economic, and cultural uses of marriage are matters of exapting the practice for purposes that are particular to highly stratified societies or economies based on very vulnerable resources where ultimately some kind of warfare (or Hobbsian state of Warre, if you will) is more important than, say, a nice Valentine’s day gift or a rewarding sex life. Since these societies are almost all a function of changes that have happened over the last several thousand years they may be thought of as exceptional even if common for a long time. We’ll get back to this idea later, in another blog post.

The other way is to think of marriage not as the framework for a couple to have babies and thus reproduce, but for society to organize, obligate, educate and control it’s ascending members and thus reproduce itself writ large.

How this might work will of course vary across societies. Here, I’ll just suggest a laundry list of ways in which the whole marriage thing could be incorporated into the way society perpetuates itself by maintaining categories, relationships between groups or categories of people, and so on. Obviously, “society” itself is not a thing that can reproduce or that has goals or motivations or even mechanisms of the kind that would be needed to do these things. But a given society has groups of individuals with larger than average amounts of power. These individuals and groups can try to make and enforce rules and these can be instituted through cultural practices, marriage being a key one.

• Who gets to marry whom. The reasons to restrict marriage are myriad and may relate to ethnocentrism or racism, caste, society, and so on.

• Who gets the children. Generally, the parents have the children in their care, but if there is a unilineal society (and/or “clans” or something along those lines) girls born to married couples may become social capital for exchange or alliance formation with other groups. Sons, on the other hand …. well, “sons are guns” as the saying goes. And, depending on the economy of production, children may variously grow up to be workers.

• Exchange, concentration, or redistribution of wealth. In American society today, a “typical” “middle class” wedding will cost tens and tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of people get to eat. In other systems, households accumulate bride payments or wealth, or a new couple is set up with a start-up fund. This is all very complicated when looking across cultures, but there are a lot of cases where money or valuable goods exchange hands. Who gets it, how much in relation to the average household economy, who pays, and what happens when you don’t pay varies a lot.

• Who owns property … and how it is redistributed and used is often linked to marriage. Sometimes, the system of marriage (and who marries whom) is determined mainly by the ownership of property. In one famous system, a marriage is always directly linked to a piece of property and there are just so many pieces of property. Nobody gets married outside of those land-linked arrangements.

• Lineage maintenance and development. A lineage, usually a patrilineage, is an organizing corporate entity in many societies. Royal lines and houses, clans based on lineality, and so forth are the elemental units that fight, form alliances, or engage in joint ventures often at the expense of a third lineage. Marriage in such systems has to be between lineages, and which lineages are intermarried in a given union is often determined by elders, who make rules, or simply tell people whom they must marry.

• Religion and heteronormative values. In some societies, people are forced to marry within one religion, so one individual may need to convert; those getting married may be required to promise on pain of eternal damnation to raise their children in that religion. Individuals can only be married if certain “family values” critera are met, for example, only if they are both heterosexual. Other “family values” may be imposed on those being married, often inculcated into the arrangement with required pre-marital counseling sessions or agreements. Sometimes, powerful conservative members of these societies try to impose these and other rules using governmental force or constitutional means.

I wonder which societies do that last one?

This is part of a series of posts on Marriage. To see the full list click HERE.

Photo of Umm Bororo Wedding, Eastern Sudan, by Vit Hassan

“You’re ugly. Where did you get these beads, in a bird’s nest?”

“Who picked you to marry my cousin, did somebody lose at a gambling game?”

“Please don’t go near the cows, we need them to keep giving milk!”

“What was the dog doing down in the forest?”

“Did you know that your future husband has only one cow?”

“Sorry about that large wound on your head. Oh, sorry, that’s you hair, isn’t it!”

“Oh, and your husband’s cow … did you know it has rabies?”

Eventually all the women were in the village located at the top of the hill. Over the next two hours, the insults continued but with less severity and frequency. The women of this Maasai village pruned and preened the newcomer, exchanged items of clothing and jewelry with her, fixed up her make up, and made friends. Eventually the insults went away and expressions of friendship and support replaced them. By the end of the day this young woman would be married to one of the men in this village, a man she had never met (or maybe seen once or twice but never knew of him as her future husband). The women who now worked out the last minute details for the imminent wedding were all married “into” this village. Every one of them had come from some other village, passed through the nearby forest, walked up this hill or a similar one, and suffered the insults. In fact, many of the insults the women used that day were very ones they had heard when they first arrived here, saved up and remembered for later use. And every one of these women had formed strong bonds with the other women in the village. One could say, depending on the individuals involved, that the relationship among the women married into this village was more socially significant, emotionally powerful, and personally stronger than the relationship between many of these women and their own husbands.

After settling in with her new friends, the young woman left the village with a couple of relatives of her new husband, and wandered about the nearby countryside to pick out her son’s cattle. She was allowed to choose a certain number of cattle, any one that she happened to see, as long as she could ask the owner in person for the beast. Needless to say many people chose that day to let their cattle run around unsupervised, but there is a limit to how much one can do that in lion country, so she did manage to get about half her allotment on that day. She would get the remainder over the next day or two. In fact, sympathetic elders would coerce relatives to make available a couple of really good head in order that this small herd be of reasonable quality and potential.

This small number of cattle will form the core of a herd that she will care for on behalf of her future first son, who would then own them. By the time he is old enough to care for them several cow-generations would have passed, and the herd would have grown. Since the offspring of two cattle are jointly owned by the owner of the cow and the bull, which are often different people, the ownership of each of the calves in her herd could potentially be complicated. Also, other cattle may be exchanged as part of the marriage transaction. A future divorce would be allowed by prevailing practice, but only if the ownership of the cattle could be established and every calf, cow, and bull be returned to it’s rightful place. This, of course, would be impossible starting from the birth of the first calves. But, no matter, really, because the herd was in many ways more important than the marriage.

In her marriage, she would eventually bear the “children of her husband” with the girls married off to a different village (usually) and the sons who survived a period of youth that involved banishment from the village during those difficult years (possibly the greatest invention of the Nilotic cultures: teenage boys must leave) would obtain their own herds, possibly marry, and vie for position as village Moran (pronounced “Moh Rahn” … respected adult male).

Those young men would have a certain degree of sexual freedom and even though they technically lived as young warriors most of the time in the bush “on their own” they could also visit the bed of a woman who was interested in them, and the married women could choose though only surreptitiously to take these men as lovers. The society consists, more or less, of a small number of married men, some married to more than one woman, women who are sexually mature who are either married or about to be married or widowed, and a fair number of unmarried men. That is how marriage and sex work together and independently among the traditional Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania, according to what I’ve read about them and been told by them on my visits there.

This is a patriarchal society, and although a Western concept of ownership is probably inadequate, it is safe to say that if something or someone is owned, it is owned by a man or an agent of a man. The economy is based on cattle. I saw a census in Kenya years ago that listed the richest hundred men. About half were Maasai men living in traditional villages, and their wealth was in many head of cattle. In this society, marriage is life long because divorce, while technically not a big deal, requires splitting herds of cattle, and that is too difficult. Sexual liaison and marriage are poorly correlated and that is tacitly accepted, but infidelity can be severely punished.

In other words, it’s complicated.

There are tens of thousands of “different cultures” in the world, either at present or in the recent past known sometimes as the “ethnographic present.” Of these, a few thousand are pretty well known and several hundred are intensely studied. A few “Nilotic” Eastern Rift Valley cultures, including the Maasai, the Turkana and the Pokot form the core of our understanding of this more widespread form of cattle pastoralism, and these and all other cattle-based cultures, while very different in many ways, share these characteristics of the centrality of the cattle, polygynous marriage, and a strong patriarchy.

You should regard my opinion about marriage to be valuable; I’ve had several of them. And in this way, I may be more like a hunter-gatherer than a “modern” Westerner, as the practice among the former is to treat marriage as very important and each partner in the marriage as a critical and similarly empowered member of the contract, while the practice among the latter has been to see women as the man’s property and to form economic, social, and sexual alliances as needed outside the marriage. Who is in on the deal and how they work together to get the job done matters.

As we approach a very important election in the United States, the issue of marriage…what it is and who decides how to do it…looms large as a political issue. People who are of the same sex want to get married, and about half of everybody says no. Why? Why do people of the same sex want to get married, and why does either a slim majority or a bare minority care enough to try to stop this?

One of the things that has been said is that marriage between a man and a woman is what God specified, via his various media outlets. Iron age pamphlets, burning bushes, that sort of thing. That is a religious argument for disallowing people of the same sex to get married, but there is also a secular argument; it ain’t natural. The natural form of marriage is for a man and a woman and nobody else to get married. There are all sorts of interesting questions raised by both arguments, and it is interesting to see where they agree and disagree; almost every person mentioned by name in the old testament who was married whether they were a FOG¹ or not was involved in a polygynous union, not a “one man-one woman” marriage. Clearly, the Biblical argument and the Naturalistic argument are at odds.

I really am kind of an expert on marriage, and not only because I’ve had a few. I am an anthropologist and we anthropologists study, among other things, kinship and related social relations. That’s marriage and some other stuff. Also, as a biological anthropologist I’ve had a great interest in the genetical and Darwinian aspects of kinship and marriage. Finally, as a palaeoanthropologist, I’ve studied the origin of marriage. As a matter of fact, I’m the co-author of a peer reviewed paper that explains the origin of marriage in our species, and that paper is in the top ten of all papers ever published in Anthropology’s flagship journal, “Current Anthropology” in terms of numbers of times it has been cited. (This is not to say that all those people who have cited it liked it, of course.)

Marriage isn’t simple. It is about social relationships, economics, child raising, sex, power, and all sorts of other things. It is important enough that The Patriarchy has owned it, in Western Society, for centuries. The politics of marriage will likely shape the nature of politics in general, to a disproportionate degree for a social issue, over the next couple of presidential election cycles, as the politics of abortion and choice have in years past. They are related, as I’ve already suggested–marriage and women’s reproductive activities. Having, or not having, babies is an activity reserved for women, and this worries powerful men. For this reason babies have, in Western tradition, been owned or controlled by men, and marriage is one way in which that ownership is asserted. But I’m getting ahead of my self. Let’s just say that many of the sociopolitical conflicts we are experiencing today can be blamed on that age old problem: The Patriarchy. We’ll get to that too.

¹Friend of God

Photo by danny.hammontree