Communion with God: Marriage as Metaphor in the Old Testament

Abstract

Our Lord Jesus Christ, when engaged on the topic of divorce by the Pharisees, replied to them, "for your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but it was not so from the beginning" (Matt 19:8). Hence we need to seek the truth about God's original plan for man and woman and children and family, by going to the book of "the Beginning;" the book of Genesis. "The sacrament of Matrimoni" declares Pope John Paul II, is distinguished from all the other sacraments, in that "it is the sacrament of something that was part of the very economy of creation" (Familiaris consortia, 68). There are, of course, two distinct narratives of the creation of man in Genesis. The first is Gen 1:26-28, while the second, more folkloric account is in Gen 2, which tells of the creation of Adam and Eve. These texts are the primary sources, the premises or first principles one might say, of scriptural anthropology, that is, an account of the essential constitution of man by the Creator at the beginning. As such they form the prelude to the entire subsequent drama of sin and salvation. What essential truths about man and woman can be elucidated from them?