Living Together: Marriage
May 5, 2024Pastor Travis Deatherage presented today's message, "Living Together: Marriage." Here's a video of the message.
My "gotta look that up" bells went off when Pastor Travis noted toward the end of his message that in a good marriage offenses are "covered up," i.e. forgiven, atoned for, etc. by the other spouse in grace.
It turns out that there's a Biblical Hebrew word that, at its root, means "cover" but is also translated as ransom or atonement. The root is k-p-r (כפר). One of the most well known uses is in the name of the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur (Leviticus 23:16-32). Kippur's root is k-p-r and here means Atonement. It's the day one "covers up" their sins by asking forgiveness from both the victim and God and making good on any harm done.
Other words and meanings that come from this k-p-r root include:
- Pitch, as in Noah covered the ark with pitch
- Cover one's face so as not to see offense
- Ransom, price of a life
- Purge, related to atone
- Covering, as in the covering of the Mercy Seat on the Ark of the Covenant
- Cluster(s), where an outside covering protects the inside, and can be applied to anything from insect clusters to communities of people ("villages").
- Bowl (most obscure) probably with a covering of a precious metal
Bonus
Most Impactful Bible Verse
I'd like to nominate Exodus 20:13...
I had something of an ah-ha moment while teaching a Torah-related class at Pillar Institute recently (see tab above labeled "PILLAR"). Actually, the kernels of the revelation occurred during my prep for the class when I noticed that Commandments 6-9 all occur in the same verse, as follows (in abbreviated form):
Exodus 20:13a - Do not murder
Exodus 20:13b - Do not commit adultery
Exodus 20:13c - Do not steal
Exodus 20:13d - Do not lie
There, in one verse, is everything we need to make as perfect a society on earth as is possible. (Utopia is not possible.) Imagine if everyone followed just the laws in this one verse...
Do not murder. The Biblical Hebrew word means murder. There are about six other Hebrew words that could have been used here but were not, including a word for kill. It might be clearer to say "no unjust killing of humans." Self-defense, defense of the innocent, killing in a just war, and capital punishment would be examples of just killing of humans. This is not a verse on which pacifists can hang their hat.
Do not commit adultery. The primary Torah-focus here is the children and the family (and by extension the community). While the mother of a child is clearly identifiable, the father is not so easily identified, especially if adulterous shenanigans are involved. Family life and proper child rearing are key to a society's success.
Do not steal. Note that this is a totally unqualified imperative. That is, "what" you can't steal is not stated, so the bottom-line is you can't steal anything from anyone. This includes not just property. One could say that this command covers the other three commandments noted here because you can't steal another's life (murder), their spouse (adultery), or justice (truth). This law would also preclude stealing another's reputation, intellectual property, and dignity as well as not returning loans, plagiarism, engaging in false advertising (stealing a purchase), and seducing the opposite sex (stealing use of their body). I'm sure you can think of more.
Do not lie. Lying not only undermines any justice system, it also undermines other persons' abilities to consider and select their actions based on the real world as opposed to acting in a world that doesn't exist, i.e. isn't true. The latter can easily end in anything from inconvenience to disaster. Prager often points out that many of the world's greatest evils were based on lies such as the Holocaust and slavery, both of which were predicated on the wide-spread and widely accepted lie that some groups of people were sub-human. This law also prohibits paying attention to lies such as malicious gossip, campaign lies, etc.
You would think that any group of people (town, city, state, nation, etc.) could agree on these four rules. Less likely, history tells us, is that those same people would continually enforce those rules. Sometimes enforcement is avoided because it's simply impossible to prove. No one saw or heard anything. Sometimes people choose not to enforce them, like when "protesters" loot and burn buildings or take over (steal access to) the provost's office. Their consciences were worthless. It's amazing what the human being can rationalize. This is when a "higher authority" comes in handy, like a God who knows all about you, and you know that you will ultimately be judged appropriately.
Now, I fully understand that God didn't speak in verses nor did the original writers include any delineations like chapter and verse. That all came later, much later. But still, it's interesting to ponder... Did the folks who added chapter and verse notations know what they were doing when they combined these four commandments into one outrageously powerful verse?