Texts in Conversation
In Matthew 19, Jesus alludes to Genesis to describe marriage as more than social arrangement, echoing a Jewish tradition that presented it as the recovery of an original, holistic unity between man and woman.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
LXX Genesis 2:24
Septuagint
22 And the Lord God formed the rib which he took from Adam into a woman, and brought her to Adam. 23 And Adam said, This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of her husband. 24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cling to his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. 25 And the two were naked, both Adam and his wife, and were not ashamed.
Date: 300–201 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Matthew 19:5
New Testament
3 Then some Pharisees came to him in order to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful to divorce a wife for any cause?” 4 He answered, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and will be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” 7 They said to him, “Why then did Moses command us to give a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her?”
Date: 70–90 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... Genesis 2:24 is responding to the question of why a person would leave the closest biological relationship (parents to children) in order to forge a relationship with a biological outsider. The answer offered is that marriage goes beyond biology to recover an original state, for humanity is ontologically gendered. Ontology trumps biology. This has shown Adam that the woman is not just a reproductive mating partner. Her identity is that she is his ally, his other half. We can now see that Genesis 2:24 makes more of a statement than we had envisioned. Becoming one flesh is not just a reference to the sexual act. The sexual act may be the one that rejoins them, but it is the rejoining that is the focus. When Man and Woman become one flesh, they are returning to their original state. (This also makes much better sense of Matthew 19:5-6 / Mark 10:7-8, 1 Corinthians 6:16-17 and especially Ephesians 5:31, where Paul is talking about being members of one body. Ontology is more central to this discussion than sex is. Genesis 2:24 may therefore have less to say about the institution of marriage and the nature of marriage than has been commonly thought) ..."
John H. Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2–3 and the Human Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2015), 65.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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