Biblical Doctrine of the Family

Marriage and Property

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 08

Dictation Name: 08 Marriage and Property

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

{?} in this session is Marriage and Property. Property in the Bible is family-based. The basic premise of property ownership, according to scripture, is “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein.” God is the owner and he gives to the family property as a stewardship. This the premise also of the tithe. Only God has the right to tax man and the earth, and nothing can be collected in the way of taxation from men except by God’s permission. If a state goes beyond that, it is being godless. The civil order, of course, is limited to a head or pole tax, the same for every man age 20 and over. God controls the use of money, and no man can even collect a debt except of God’s terms.

Man has the use of the earth as a stewardship from the Lord, but not as a right. He is required to exercise godly dominion and to subdue the earth. The family is the custodian of property; property and land and property and other forms. It is not the state. It is God who is the owner and the family under God. The family has a duty, therefore, under God, to capitalize God’s kingdom and to pass on that capital, or development, to its godly seed. In scripture, it is the godly children who inherit.

The legitimate possessors of property are thus, the husband and the endowered wife. In the Bible, concubinage was the name for a lesser form of marriage when you married someone but did not give them a dowry. The dowry is assumed in the Bible for marriage. It meant that a man, before he could marry, had to demonstrate his responsibility by accumulating enough money, which was then turned over to the bride as the family capital, her protection. The Bible does not specify the amount, but we are told by non-biblical sources it was normally equivalent to three years’ wages, depending on the man’s calling. Well, take three and multiply it by your income at the time you got married and you see that it comes to a tidy sum.

Now, this sum, which as I said, was normally three years (in Laban’s case he required seven years of Jacob before he would allow a marriage), we encounter in scripture in a number of laws. Centuries later, by the way, after the Old Testament times, but after the Old Testament law was given, but in the Old Testament and in the New Testament times, rabbis set a minimum dowry of two hundred denares, the equivalent of two hundred days wages. For a widow it was a hundred denares. For a priest’s daughter, because of her superior home training, the legal minimum was four hundred denares. The dowry could be in money or its equivalent in property, livestock, or jewelry. Now, this was the family’s capital. The wife was entitled to one-tenth of it for pin money. Otherwise, it was the family capital and a security against the woman being abandoned. It was capital for the couple. It was an inheritance for the children, and it made for a very secure marriage. Men who had worked three years to accumulate a capital first had a chance to think two and three times about the prospective bride, and then they thought a long time before they walked away from that much money, because they lost it. The wife could only lose it if she had sinned and was responsible for the breakdown of the marriage. This, off and on over the centuries, was Christian marriage also.

It is an interesting fact that the first life insurance company in the United States, Presbyterian’s Life, was started to enable ministers to provide a dowry, because most of them were assigned to places out in the woods, new settlements, where it would take a long time to accumulate any money because there was very little, and as a result, by buying the equivalent in life insurance, they created the first insurance company. A hangover of that was the fact that, until at least very recently and possibly still so in some states, any life insurance policies to marriage went to the wife if the husband left her, and he had the legal responsibility to maintain them.

Now, two examples of the case laws dealing with these things which referred to the dowry are Deuteronomy 22:28-29 and Exodus 22:16-17. First of all, Deuteronomy 22:28-29, “If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.” And then Exodus 22:16-17, “And if a man entice a maid that is not betrothed, and lie with her, he shall surely endow her to be his wife. If her father utterly refuse to give her unto him, he shall pay money according to the dowry of virgins.”

We have two types of case here, one involving rape and the other seduction. In neither case does the guilty man have any option. He has to marry the girl unless the father rejects the man. The girl had a secondary opinion to the father, of the primary verdict. In both instances, however, he shall surely endow her to be his wife. That’s what God’s law requires. This means that even if he were rejected as a husband, when another husband came along, he had to provide a dowry so it was an asset. In other words, the girl who had been raped or seduced went into a marriage with a double dowry to compensate for the fact that she had had this experience. Now, this is God’s provision.

Moreover, in Deuteronomy 22:28-29, it is specified as fifty shekels of silver in such cases. We’re not told what it is in normal marriages. A shekel in those days was not a coin, it was a weight of silver. We don’t know specifically how much this was, but according to Josephus, who says it was about two hundred and sixty-six grains of silver, in its day, in its purchasing power, it came to a very considerable amount. Fifty shekels, each two hundred and sixty-six grains of silver.

The principle, or premise better, of this type of requirement was restitution and restoration. The girl had to have the full status of a virgin legally, plus an advantage. If the guilty party were rejected, the girl, we saw, went to another man with a double dowry. Thus, in the Bible, because of the dowry system, marriage is not only a legal, sexual union, but also a basic, the basic, property holding unit. The family is the custodian of property. The family and property are united, and the result is that so united, they give social stability to the future, because the most stable unit in society controls property.

There’s an interesting sidelight to this coming from outside the Bible but going back centuries. We don’t know how far back. The Jewish view, or Hebraic view of ownership. The concept of despair comes in here. If a man has something stolen from him and he abandons hope of recovering possession of his property which was stolen, he loses title to it. He has lost faith in justice. He has agreed by his despair to injustice, and so, if he has despaired and it is legally demonstrated, he loses title to that property and whoever stole it can come out with it openly. Despair is regarded in this legal fact, as the abandonment of both property and the future.

Now, while this is not in scripture, in a very real sense it is biblical, because God wants us to believe in justice and to work for it, and he blesses us therein. Property today is seen as personal and present-oriented, whereas in the Bible, it is family and future-oriented, but this should not surprise us, because despair and the modern mind are closely linked. Some scholars have called ours the Age of Despair, because so few people have any real hope in the future, or in progress, and as a result, the term the Age of Despair. In fact, we have had philosophies, existentialist philosophies which have been very influential since World War 2, which are called philosophies of despair. In the Bible, the past and the future are tied to property, to place, to the family and its past. It is interesting that a change came in this country a few years back and the change was heralded by a very interesting phenomenon. Whereas, World War 2, corporations were freely shifting personnel all over the country, they would be in Palo Alto for two or three years, they would be transferred to Des Moines, Iowa, then to Atlanta, Houston, and so on, so that corporate leadership was moving constantly across the country. Then, about mid-70’s a resistance to this set in, and people said, “If you transfer me, I’m leaving the company,” and the amount of people moving has been declining in recent years. As people have sought to develop roots in terms of a place, and people who do have roots have a very, very deep and abiding loyalty to that place and to that tradition, which is very important. I know that my father came from a place where he could go to the graveyard next to the church and trace the ancestors far, far back into the early Middle Ages, and he used to recite, just for fun, their names. Before that, the stones were too worn to read, and the family was in that area for centuries before. Now, that used to be very commonplace, no longer is, but past and future have been tied to property, and in the Bible we see that the dying Joseph, as well as Jacob, wanted their sons to carry their bones back to Israel in due time. In fact, I believe it is in the case of Joseph there is a triple mention of this, which tells us of its importance.

We’ve mentioned the dowry. The dowry, wherever it has been practiced in terms of scripture, has given more stability to the family that any legislation by church or state has been able to do, because the dowry system says you demonstrate your responsibility, and then you’re going to have to maintain that responsibility or you’re penalized. You lose all this, and it’s a considerable loss. Unfortunately, one of the things that happened in Europe was that a pagan dowry system prevailed, which meant that instead of the man working to demonstrate his responsibility and stewardship to accumulate a dowry to give to his wife, in the pagan system, the father pays the son to take the daughter off his hands. It led to a point in the Middle Ages where men felt they were financially ruined if they had two daughters, or three, and even very wealthy lord were compelling their daughters to become nuns, which did not do the convents any good, because they said, “We cannot afford to marry you,” and men were marrying for money, they were shopping around for the girl with the best dowry, and the result was destructive. The husband went to prostitutes for pleasure, and would run through his wife’s money, and if she died, all the better. He had a chance at another marriage, another dowry to run through. In England, we have all kinds of documentation of this fact having taken place, over and over again, and in the 18th century, it became a particularly ugly thing as girls were often kidnapped, because they were an heiress, and had to give a man total control over the property, but going back again to the Middle Ages.

One of the great preachers of the era whose name should be familiar to Californians, San Bernardino, preached strongly against the pagan custom of dowries which prevailed, whereby a wife was married just because she had a huge dowry, and he said in one of his sermons, in the eyes of the husband, “She is fit to have children. She is a good housewife, attentive, attractive, tall, young, and of a good family, with a good dowry, and she has a husband who cares for her no more than if she were made of straw. Oh, how much compassion she deserves. If she bears this patiently, that alone will suffice for her to deserve eternal life. Women, women, I am on your side because you love your husbands better than they love you.”

The biblical dowry works to create an entirely different kind of marriage. Jacob worked seven years to gain the required dowry for his beloved Rachel. However, if it is not three years wages, but one, there is a different psychology in the dowry system than in the present form. If a man must post the equivalent of even one year’s wages to marry his love, both his love and his assessment of his bride to be will be more mature. A hasty marriage will then be ruled out, except for someone who is very wealthy and didn’t have to work to provide a dowry. A man then who invests his life in a woman will be investing in his future and his alike, because he has so much at stake in their life together. He forfeits all claim to her and to the family capital, the dowry, if he is irresponsible. Precisely because God protects the stability and the sanctity of a marriage, he ties it to the ownership of property, and to the dowry, the biblical form of property ownership is community or family ownership, or which we still have a relic. The biblical dowry system thus required maturity, work, and patience. It created a stable social order.

This is why God’s law is important. God knows us. He knows that we are sinners. He knows that we require a tight rein on our lives in every sphere, or we readily go astray, and hence, the close link in scripture of marriage and property. Are there any questions now?

Well, if there are no questions, Yes?

[Audience] What were the roots of the pagan dowry system? How did that ever come to be?

[Rushdoony] Oh, the pagan dowry system had various roots depending on the culture, and in some cultures it was a way of a man buying son in laws who would work with him and fight with him, and align themselves with him, but as we encounter it in the Middle Ages, it’s just become a means of enriching one’s self. Yes?

[Audience] May I trust my Thanksgiving that you did not follow the custom of having your third, especially your fourth daughter become the {?}

[laughter]

[Rushdoony] Any other comments or questions? Well, if not, let us bow our heads in prayer.

O Lord, our God, thy word is truth, and thy way is righteousness and life altogether. Give us grace to follow thee with all our heart, mind, and being, and to rejoice in what thou dost require of us. Bless us now and give us traveling mercies as we journey home, a blessed night’s rest, and joy in our labors on the morrow. In Christ’s name. Amen.

End of tape