Marriage in the Bible

is an honest engagement with the relevant passages in the two primary Testaments of the Christian Bible. Rather than making the Bible confirm a specific stance on marriage, the author invites her readers to be honest about what these biblical stories, laws, commands, and sayings meant in their original contexts. In doing this, the author engages the conflicting messages about biblical marriage from such figures as Jesus, St. Paul, and St. Augustine. The first part of the book addresses four passages that many people believe defines “biblical marriage” as being intended for procreation, only between a man and a woman, anti-divorce, and holy or sacred. While these passages quoted out of context may be read to mean these things, when read in context the first two are not even talking about marriage, and the latter two assert that wives should be fearfully submissive to their husbands and show Jesus affirming a non-binary gender and non-hetero