The family in the Bible

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Fall, 2002 by James A. Sanders

The family, nonetheless, was the basic unit of Israelite culture and society. It was also the basic unit of Israel's stewardship of the land which belonged to God, and the basic unit in the experience and preservation of the covenant relationship with Yahweh. Having a large family was a blessing of God. The earliest courts in the Bible were formed in the presbyterial system of justice wherein the elders or heads of families formed the court that sat in the City Gate (Exodus 18 et passim). While intending to avoid the emergence of an elite oligarchy of those who amassed great wealth, the presbyterial system sometimes developed into a power structure itself in which the Elders, or heads of households, became an elite power group.

Meritocracy and Honor/Shame

The Book of Job posits a situation in which an extremely wealthy patriarch, Job, was deprived by four disasters of all the evidence of his position in the clan, and indeed beyond the clan. In fact, the major reason Job is presented as non-Israelite is to provide for Israel or early Judaism a horror story of what can happen to the powerful in any society should they forget that all they have is in trust to God. And this was so even when they faithfully engaged in all the cultic practices of the faithful, as Job did. When the disasters happened Job held a position of immense prestige "among all the people of the east" in having "seven sons, three daughters, 7000 sheep, 3000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, 500 she-asses, and very many servants." After the disasters Job sank to the absolute destitution of losing all of that in addition to being abandoned by his wife and sitting on an ash-heap scratching his boils with potsherds.

The first basic lesson of the Book of Job is that the trappings of great prestige in society, indeed all the evidence that the rich are honored by God, may be snatched away in one fell swoop (Job 1-2, 29-31). The second basic lesson of the Book of Job is that the traditional arguments about national responsibility in the pre-exilic prophets and in Deuteronomy should not be simplistically applied to an individual after the exile, as Job's friends insisted on doing in the dialogues. This is probably the meaning of the otherwise enigmatic statement of Yahweh to Eliphaz and the friends in 42:7, in which God castigates the friends for not saying "what was right" about God in their debates with Job (Pyeon).

All forms of meritocracy are challenged by the Book of Job. Job himself is usually seen sympathetically by modern readers, and God as rather arbitrary. But within the patriarchal structure of ancient Israel and of the ANE generally the Book of Job stood as a sharp attack on patriarchalism when it became a meritocracy. All societies in the ANE, and indeed in the later Greco-Roman world, were structured by an honor/shame system or syndrome. The rich were honored by what they owned, and the poor shamed by what they did not own. The biblical family system of justice, however, was designed to make it clear that no one owned anything, but held whatever they had responsibility for in trust to God who alone owned both land and people, and indeed all means of creating wealth. The most that a patriarch or head-of-house should have claimed was that he was a steward responsible in his limited lifetime for a sizeable portion of God's creation.