At the Jesus Creed blog, a guest post by Tim and Anne Evans discusses “Marriage before the Fall.” Discussions of anything “before the Fall” can be a tricky business — if we’re intent on returning to Eden, we’re going to miss out on the New Jerusalem. Garden Good, City Bad is just one of the many wrong turns we can end up taking if we decide to treat the Eden story as categorically normative. (What of the kingdom of God? Eden doesn’t allow for kings.) But set that concern aside for now.
I’m not highlighting the Evans’ post in order to critique it. I’m pointing to it because it’s a succinct and solid example of what the American church at this point in history typically teaches about marriage. Happily, the Evans avoid the whole “complementarian” horror show, and they refreshingly keep their discussion of Adam and Eve focused on Adam and Eve rather than using it as a launching pad to attack Adam and Steve.
The core of this typical teaching is the idea that the marriage of Adam and Eve is an example and a model for Christian marriage today.
Let’s not get distracted here by the strange insistence that Adam and Eve were historical people. The idea is the same, based on the same story in Genesis 2-3, and the approach doesn’t really differ for those who read this story as the historical account of some absent witness or for those who read it as it’s actually written. My question here doesn’t involve any of that debate.
My question here is far more basic: Where, exactly, does this story ever say that Adam and Eve were married?
I don’t see that it does.
They certainly did not get married in anything like the way that Tim and Anne Evans got married. Or in anything like the way the Slacktivixen and I got married. They had no clergy around to conduct such a ceremony (unless we want to have Melchizedek do the honors), and no one to serve as witnesses. They never seem to have exchanged vows. The strongest claim we can make for their marriage, based on the story itself, is that it was a kind of common-law arrangement.
In the story itself, Adam and Eve simply shacked up together. Although, of course, shacks — like clothing — had not yet been invented. Neither had marriage, for that matter. All of these things — shacks, clothing, clergy, marriage, common law — are anachronisms we reflexively project back into the story. But none of them can be found there, and the story itself works hard to prevent us from expecting to find them in it.
The one place the story itself suggests that the relationship of Adam and Eve was something like a kind of marriage is in one verse, Genesis 2:24: “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.”
Jesus himself cites this verse in Matthew 19 in response to the Pharisees’ questions about divorce. Clearly, then, Jesus regarded that verse as a teaching about marriage.
I agree that it is, of course. That verse clearly is about marriage.
But even more clearly, that verse is not about Adam and Eve. It explicitly does not and cannot apply to them. Adam, the story tells us, adamantly, did not have a father and mother. Adam did not “leave his father and mother and cling to his wife.” Adam, rather, chose to cling to Eve after first evaluating “every animal of the field and every bird of the air” as potential partners first.
Genesis 2:24 is an aside — a parenthetical comment to the reader declaring one “moral of the story,” but not a part of the story itself. That “moral of the story” is that we non-Edenic readers should “therefore” leave our parents and cling to our spouses just like Adam and Eve did in their relationship.
The timing and placement of this aside seems well-chosen. The storyteller wants to be clear that the clinging to one another bit is the important part, lest anyone get the idea that the prior consideration of all the beasts and birds should be the takeaway lesson here. (“Therefore, a man leaves his father and his mother and gets himself a dog to see if that makes him happy.”)
Even there, though, in this explicit fourth-wall-breaking address to the reader, the story does not name or characterize that relationship of Adam and Eve as a marriage. (Nor does Jesus’ citation of that verse in Matthew 19.) The story makes it very, very difficult for anyone to do that.
And yet Christians do do that. We’ve been doing that for centuries — turning to the story of Adam and Eve to see what marriage was like “before the Fall.” That’s an odd move. It’s not wholly mistaken, in that the story itself includes that editorial aside inviting us to reflect on what the relationship of Adam and Eve in this story can teach us about the later invention of marriage.
But if we turn to the story itself, on its own terms, and ask what it tells us about “marriage before the Fall,” then what it seems to tell us is this: Marriage did not yet exist. There was not yet any such thing as “marriage” in Eden.
Whether or not that conclusion strikes you as outrageous likely depends on whether or not you’re invested in treating everything about the Eden story as normative. For the sake of your teeth and gums, I hope you’ll be at least somewhat nuanced in how you go about such a normative reading — Adam and Eve did not brush or floss. But, again, that is a separate discussion.
I’m not arguing here that Adam and Eve were not married and therefore non-marriage is normative. (I’m married and I have to say it can be pretty terrific.) I’m simply pointing out that in the story itself, Adam and Eve did not get married because, in the story itself, getting married was not yet a thing that existed as an option for them.
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