The Problem of Paternity

Today we are going to take a cultural journey into the literature that comprises the older portions of our Bible.

Three important factors underlie some of the stories, behavioral admonitions and restrictions that are found there, especially in first five books, Genesis through Deuteronomy.

First: the notion of honor and shame.  Family honor is a huge issue. Keep in mind that “family” encompasses the whole larger clan, all under the leadership of a patriarch.  If one person in the clan is insulted or degraded in some way, then shame falls upon the entire family group.  When that happens, something must be done to regain family honor.

Second: far more than other possessions, land represented wealth and security.  If a family had land, there was hope of economic survival.  Without it, more than likely the family would have to offer themselves as slave labor to a larger landowner.

Third: the law of primogeniture. The eldest brother in any family would inherit the land of his father, the patriarch, with the understanding that he needed to provide for the entire family from it, including those who worked as slaves.  Once that elder brother himself became the patriarch, he also inherited the responsibility of keeping the family honor intact.

Now, this quick overview can’t even prick the surface of the underlying culture, but it is a starting place to being to understand the necessity of knowing for sure the parentage of all children.

When a young woman married, she became a part of her husband’s extended family, and her birth family no longer had any claim on her or any responsibility for her.  Her children then became part of her husband’s family, not her birth family.

Should she have married the eldest brother, her first son will then be in line to be the next patriarch.  Even so, no matter where in the family structure she marries, her children will come under the protection of the clan. If one of them is hurt or dishonored in some way, the entire clan has a responsibility to avenge that hurt and regain honor.  In other words, each child born into the clan has a claim on the entire family for protection.  Each child born into the clan, however, is coming from a womb of a woman who is NOT originally part of the clan.

OK, if you have hung with me this far, can you see just how important the issue of paternity is in this kind of cultural family structure?  If there is any question at all about the paternity of the child (remember, no DNA tests available!), the glue that holds the family together could melt away, leaving them all in chaos and poverty.

Now, how do you ensure the paternity of a child?  Thank about it–how does someone make absolutely certain that a child born into a family is actually fathered by the correct person?

It’s really pretty simple:  keep all young women under lock and key, contract to marry them off the moment they develop the capacity to bear children, i.e., at puberty, check the bedsheets after the wedding night to find “proof” of virginity, and continue to keep them secluded after marriage.

For multiple reasons, the paternity issue is equally as significant today as it was in those patriarchal times.  However, it is also pretty impossible to keep our daughters under lock and key, and since many are reaching puberty when still pre-teens, and since we just don’t do arranged marriages any more, we’ve got a real issue on our hands.

The exploration of this question is all part of this larger series:  why are our older teens and young adults leaving the church?

Join us on Sunday when I’m going to bravely wade into one of the big reasons that they have expressed–our extremely inadequate theology of sexuality.  Oh my!