Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering
Israel, whom he covenantally unites to himself as his son.
Pitre takes up Hahn’s insight by remarking that at the covenant at Sinai (sealed in Exodus 24), Moses threw sacrificial blood on the altar and on the elders, thereby symbolizing that “the Creator of the world and the twelve tribes of Israel are now in a ‘flesh and blood’ relationship—that is, they are family,” which explains the ensuing covenantal meal in God’s presence.113 By turning to the prophets of Israel, however, Pitre takes things a step further. He explains, “From the prophets’ point of view, what happened at Sinai was not just the giving of a set of laws, but the spiritual wedding of God and Israel,” so that God becomes Bridegroom and Israel becomes Bride.114 Among the prophetic passages that he cites are Jeremiah 2:2, where the Lord recalls Israel’s “love as a bride”; and Ezekiel 16:8, where the Lord recalls that “I plighted my troth to you and entered into a covenant with you . . . and you became mine.” In Hosea, too, God looks back to the days when he redeemed Israel from Egyptian slavery and Israel answered him as his bride; and God looks forward to restoring and renewing this marital relationship once and for all: “And in that day, says the Lord, you will call me, ‘My husband.’ . . . And I will betroth you to me for ever” (Hos 2:16, 19).
The point for Pitre is that these prophets present Israel, at the time of the covenant at Sinai (Exodus 24), as God’s youthful bride, with God in the role of covenantal Bridegroom. The covenant establishes not simply an adoptive sonship (with Israel becoming the son of the divine Father), although it certainly does establish such a relationship. Even more fundamentally, the covenant establishes a relationship that is so intimate as to be comparable to the love, mutuality, and friendship of a marriage.
How do the laws given to Moses fit in with this portrait? Who would give his wife a set of laws as a wedding gift? Pitre notes that the laws are not mere arbitrary rules; rather, they describe the contours of an intimate relationship. At the core of this relationship is the commandment against idolatry. To be covenantally married to God means to know the one to whom one is married; and Israel is covenantally married to the one Creator God. When Israel worships other gods, therefore, Israel treats them as only God should be treated. Just as the prophets depict God as loving Israel so much as to be Israel’s Bridegroom, wishing to draw Israel into perfect intimacy with himself, so also the prophets depict Israel as not simply God’s Bride but as God’s unfaithful Bride, due preeminently to the sin of idolatry, but also due to Israel’s other sins that undermine its relationship with God. The paradigmatic biblical example of Israel’s idolatry is its fashioning and worship of a golden calf—symbolic of an Egyptian god. As Pitre points out, what the people do after worshiping the golden calf is part of the problem: they “sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play” (Exod 32:6). In his commentary on Exodus, Thomas Dozeman notes that the meaning of this verse is that their worship “quickly devolves into ritual chaos, suggesting a sexual orgy.”115 After explaining what the Hebrew words discreetly convey, Dozeman remarks further: “The manufacturing of the golden calf already violated the altar laws in 20:22–26. Now the sexual orgy of the people further violates the more specific prohibition against ascending an altar, lest one’s nakedness is uncovered (20:26). Exodus 32:25 adds to the chaos of the ritual, describing the people as ‘out of control.’”116
In pagan worship, temple liturgies and sexual orgies were not uncommonly linked; thus when the Bride of YHWH worships a false god, it is not surprising to find this action linked to sexual acts outside of marriage. The prophets describe this situation in terms of spiritual adultery. Pitre cites a number of prophetic texts to make this point. Examples include Isaiah 1:4, which describes Israel as “estranged” from the Lord, having “forsaken” him; Isaiah 1:21, which describes Israel as “a harlot”; Jeremiah 2:32–33, which compares Israel to a “bride” who has become adulterous; Jeremiah 3:20, in which the Lord complains that “as a faithless wife leaves her husband, so have you been faithless to me, O house of Israel”; and Ezekiel 16:17–18, in which God describes his bride Israel as a “harlot” who took his gifts and made idols out of them. God sums up his charge against Israel in terms of failure to be his faithful bride. Desiring a relationship of profound covenantal intimacy and faithfulness with Israel, God instead is forced to condemn Israel: “Adulterous wife, who receives strangers instead of her husband!” (Ezek 16:32). No wonder that when God wants to symbolize this situation, he commands Hosea to “take to yourself a wife of harlotry” (Hos 1:2) and to “love . . . an adulteress; even as the Lord loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods” (Hos 3:1). Hosea obeys the Lord’s command, thereby acting out the situation of God and Israel. Beyond mere condemnation, Hosea is preparing for the day when Israel will truly be God’s faithful Bride: “in that day, says the Lord, you will call me, ‘My husband,’ and no longer will you call me, ‘My Baal.’ . . . I will betroth you to me in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord” (Hos 2:16, 20). The knowledge will be so intimate as to be comparable to the sexual “knowledge” of husband and wife.
Pitre’s book focuses on the coming of the Messiah, as the “Bridegroom God of Israel” whose purpose is to establish the marriage of God and his people once and for all.117 Pitre is looking ahead, then, to the fulfillment of God’s promises. The purpose of God’s dealings with his people is to make us sharers in his life, not to intimidate us with rules and punishments. Pitre again cites numerous prophets to indicate the promise of God to renew forever his covenantal marriage with his people. In addition to Hosea 2:16–20, he mentions Isaiah 54, where the Lord promises that he will not permit to endure the breach in the covenantal marriage caused by Israel’s sins. Isaiah proclaims, “For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name. . . . For the Lord has called you like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit, like a wife of youth when she is cast off, says your God. . . . In overflowing wrath for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you” (Isa 54:5–6, 8). It has seemed that God would abandon Israel, because of the punishment of exile caused by sin; but God, as Israel’s covenantal husband, will restore his bride to her dignity forever, with “everlasting love.” Likewise, Pitre cites Jeremiah 31, where God recalls the “covenant which they [Israel] broke, though I was their husband” and where God promises a new covenant that will forever ensure that Israel obeys God’s covenantal law and enjoys the blessings of covenantal marriage: “I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jer 31:32–33). Lastly, Pitre cites the promise of God in Ezekiel 16, one of the chapters in which (as noted above) God condemns Israel as a spiritual adulterer. In this chapter, God promises dire punishment, but God concludes with words that foretell the full renewal of the covenantal marriage in perfect mercy: “I will remember my covenant with you [Israel] in the days of your youth, and I will establish with you an everlasting covenant” (Ezek 16:60).
Rightly, then, Pitre speaks of Israel’s God as “not a distant deity or an impersonal power, but the Bridegroom who wants his bride to ‘know’ (Hebrew yada’) him intimately, in a spiritual marriage that is not only faithful and fruitful, but ‘everlasting’ (Hebrew ‘olam).”118 This restoration of the covenant will redeem Israel not merely juridically, but by truly renewing and perfecting God’s people in a profoundly intimate relationship with him. God never ceases to be the Bridegroom, even though his bride—as a sinful people (like all the peoples of the world)—turns away from him. The very purpose of the biblical story of salvation is for God to bring about a marriage of God and humans that is unbreakable and whose intimacy cannot be exaggerated. The goal of human history is for the Bridegroom to take to himself his pure Bride, bringing about the spiritual consummation of the ineffably glorious marriage.
In this regard, Pitre adds that “ancient Jewish interpreters also read the Song of Songs as a symbolic description of the future wedding between the Bridegroom God and his chosen people.”119 Jacob Neusner remarks in the introduction to his translation of the Song of Songs Rabbah (composed around 500 AD), “The sages who compiled Song of Songs Rabbah read the Song of Songs as a sequence of statements of urgent love between God and Israel, the holy people.”120 The Song of Songs appeared to the Rabbis to be a dialogue between God the Bridegroom and Israel the Bride. Neusner states that “Israel’s holy life is metaphorized through the poetry of love and beloved, Lover and Israel.”121 Pitre cites two sayings of Rabbi Akiba (c. 50–135 AD), in which