Have you heard the one about Adam and his "spare" rib? Well, as you know, in the beginning God made Adam and put him in Paradise. Adam was allowed to enjoy all the many wonders of the Garden of Eden and was given the job of naming all the animals. But after he had named them – rather a long task – he got bored. He wanted some company. Someone he could talk to and impress. God understood the situation perfectly, "I can see that you’re lonely," he said to Adam. "Let me make a woman for you."

"What’s a woman?" asked Adam.

"A woman will love and adore you. She’ll cook perfect meals and always look nice. She’ll laugh at all your jokes and she’ll never complain."

"That’s wonderful!" said Adam with enthusiasm, "but … she sounds very expensive. What will she cost me?"

"Ah," replied God, "A woman like that will cost you an arm and a leg."

Adam considered this carefully for a moment, then turned back to his Maker, "What will I get for one rib?"

OK, so men aren’t perfect either – and we certainly don’t live in Paradise anymore. Are we asking the impossible of marriage? Can we really live happily with each other’s imperfections and strange, annoying habits – let alone our tendency for downright selfishness? Even if we start off feeling that our partner can do no wrong, doesn’t that phrase "the honeymoon period" sum up the truth that the blissful period of perfect love and contentment is but a short stage quickly passed through? The truth is that marriage is hard work – and many are often far from successful.

Marriages started to fail with Adam and Eve. When they were thrown out of Paradise because of their disobedience, they soon encountered difficulties, but their reduced circumstances were the least of their problems because they themselves had changed – and changed for the worse. They had both discovered the difference between good and evil, and at the heart of this discovery was the desire to do what they wanted. This wasn’t necessarily what God or the other person wanted and it immediately led to conflict.

Like many couples, they also found that having children didn’t bring them closer together. It’s hard enough for two people to want the same thing at the same time, but when there are three or four people in the family it becomes more and more difficult for them all to agree – especially when the children start growing into independent adults. Family gatherings, such as mealtimes, often become battle grounds.

One, admittedly tongue in cheek, definition of the family is that it is a group of individuals who are united by a common TV set. And as a family increases and starts to fragment, the number of TV’s it owns also increases. To take the analogy back to early times, a family could be identified as a group which sat around the same camp fire and when members of the same family started to sit around different fires, relationships had clearly gone seriously wrong. … It wasn’t long before Adam’s camp had a whole constellation of fires!

God is realistic about the problems of individuals living together and from the beginning he had a plan designed to help couples stay together and which goes some way to dealing with our quarrelsome individualism.

In other words, God says, "When a couple get married they must leave their parents’ home and set up a new home of their own." This sounds like very simple advice, but it is effective and in fact was quite counter-cultural to the people of the Old Testament. Two adults will have more than enough trouble living together happily without twenty-four hours a day of ‘helpful comments’ from their parents.

There’s a second part to God’s instructions and the first part only works if we follow this as well: "When you get married, whatever happens, stick together as though you were one person."

If the advice is followed, a man and woman will get married and commit to each other totally. They will promise to stay together and try to act like one person. God tells them to leave both their family homes and make a new home – and he makes sure that no one else joins them for at least 9 months. When the new person does arrive, he or she will only gradually develop an independent will, so that the couple has time to get used to the idea of having another individual living alongside them, with their differing needs and expectations.

Children soon become individuals, of course. They quickly find out how to say "No!" when they don’t want to do something. They learn how to argue and then as teenagers they begin to think seriously and may reject a lot of what their parents tell them. It’s not too long before they start to notice the opposite sex and then before the parents know it, their offspring have found someone they want to marry. After a painfully expensive, though joyous, wedding, things get better. The newly-marrieds leave mum and dad to set up home together and the conflicts and frustrations experienced between parent and child are resolved. They find that their parents can be friends and confidantes rather than oppressive tyrants, and God’s wisdom is proved once more.

More in this chapter...

But in practice …

The cruel world of the ancient Near East

Moses makes things better

Equality under the Law of Moses

Are marriages any better today?

To conclude: God's law in an imperfect world

The world which God made, including marriage, was perfect and wonderful but everything was spoiled when we rebelled and became selfish. God told Adam and Eve that as a result of their sin, growing food would become difficult and there would be problems in the relationships between men and women (Gen.3.16–19). Many harvests failed and many marriages too. When marriages failed, the woman, being more vulnerable, usually suffered. The Law of Moses limited the damage which divorce inflicts by forcing men to give their ex-wife a certificate that allowed them to remarry.

In the next chapter, we will see that the laws of the Old Testament have even more to say on the subject of a broken marriage and that it is always on the side of the victim, whether it is the man or the woman.

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