Chick-fil-A Biblical Family of the Day

One man and one woman, and one man and another woman.
 

To be fair, I’m sure the wives really enjoyed having someone to do the turkey and the other to do the sides (since Murica/tradition/biblical marriage are all interchangeable).

Have an awesome holiday with your awesome families, everyone and especially Fred!

would they get the family  fun meal discount?

My understanding of the Jewish marriage contract is that the wife is the one who has the right to the enjoyment of recreational sex within the marriage. 

I don’t know how far back that stipulation dates, but I thought that the “sex is just there so that men can have fun and women just have to put up with it” idea comes from our Greek or Roman cultural roots, not our Jewish ones.

The main group opposing gay marriage here in New Zealand has a list a reasons why gay marriage is a bad thing, one of which is, “gay marriage is a slippery slope to legalising polygamy.” Which is something I’ve always found to be silly, if we live in a society based on biblical values then why on earth would we disapprove of polygamy?

One person I read once postulated that the reason the church disapproves of polygamy is that many centuries ago, when a man died without having an heir, all his belongings went to the church. Polygamy drastically increased the odds of successfully giving birth to an heir, so…

This was centuries before either became a thing, so it could just be an artifact, if it’s actually true. It would explain why the “biblical” family is anything but represented in the Bible.

It’d be tough for three people to just jaunt down to the courtyard, sign a standard license, and have everything work out correctly.  But with some effort I’m sure you could put together a contract that worked.  Legal contracts are something we how to do.

I think this was simpler in Biblical times because the answer to “How do Ashhur, Helah and Naarah split the property?” was simply “All of it belongs to Ashhur.”  As far as I know Ashhur just has two marriages, each one behaving like any other marriage, and the only big remaining issue is whose child inherits.  It would be a lot more complex with three or more sets of property to sort out.  The long-term poly couples I know put serious work into this.

Honestly, a lot of married couples would probably benefit from putting more work into the terms of the marriage contract too, rather than accepting defaults.  It’s a specific case of a general problem, which is that in the beginning of a relationship you don’t want to think about endings.  I’ve seen this in a lot of Pagan ritual groups–you never think about “How do we ask someone to leave?” until you have to ask someone to leave, and then it’s messy.  Better to do it at the start, but no one ever wants to.

I believe in biblical marriage.  You know, polygamy.

They existed, sure, just not at the same level of public awareness. Something being “a thing” in my rhetoric means it’s become so widespread that it enters the public consciousness. My admittedly lacking knowledge of historical regard for pregnancy seems to indicate that most people were so ignorant about the mechanisms of pregnancy that many people had no idea how it happened, much less how to prevent it

 I’m not really sure how they failed to make the connection with sexual activity, but I suspect it was the high natural miscarriage rate, infertility caused by poor nutrition, the hit and miss nature of fertilization in general and other variable factors causing people to believe that since sex didn’t always lead to pregnancy, it wasn’t the sole (if even related) reason why pregnancy happened. Given that ignorance, it’s safe to say that a lot of other, more grisly methods of preventing a birth weren’t mainstream until very recently.

 Keep in mind, until, IIRC, the Renaissance, it was commonly believed that life could spontaneously arise from non-life; a slabof meat could spontaneously give rise to little white grubs; a pile of straw could spontaneously give rise to mice; driftwood could turn into geese (No, seriously. According to Irish folklore, there’s a species of goose that grow from pieces of fir that fall into the sea. This may have been a complicated scam to get permission to get them technically counted as fish so that they could eat them on fast days).

It wouldn’t actually have been all that clear to people in a lot of history that the correlation between sex, pregnancy, and heredity was particularly straightforward: they would have had some sense that they were all connected, but they’d be able to think of lots of examples where they’d seen an animal get pregnant even though it hadn’t mated in several reproductive cycles, or of children whose traits more closely resembled that travelling merchant who was in town nine months ago than their father.

 Wikipedia’s History of Abortion and Birth Control articles are good places to start.  Basically, Mediterranean cultures had a pretty good understanding of how to begin, prevent and terminate pregnancies since at least 1500 B.C.E.  Sure, there were weird ideas about multiple paternity and virgin births and whatnot, but the basic ideas were there:  You’ve got to get semen into the uterus to make a baby, you can block that path or neutralize the semen in various physical/chemical ways, you can induce miscarriages via surgery or chemical cocktails or vigorous exercise regimens.

If you look at Hippocrates or Soranus, their recommendations for how to cause an abortion are about as good as you’d get until the 19th century or so.

Abortion and contraception were of course more frowned upon in the Christian and Islamic eras, but medical scholars still knew lots about them and presumably your average doctor or midwife did too.  IIRC Casanova had his partners use lemon-rind diaphragms.