Genesis and Family Values‪.‬

The phrase "family values" currently reverberates in political, religious, and even academic circles. The conversations are complicated and the tone is often heated. Various organizations spend vast sums of money to promulgate their views on issues such as pro-natalism and gay marriage. People argue vigorously about the very nature of the family. Those debates involve important and foundational questions: What is a family? Is there a normative family structure? What does marriage mean? One might think that these questions belong primarily to the purview of sociologists, anthropologists, and ethicists, among others. However, as many of us know, the aforementioned conversations regularly involve appeals to biblical literature. When examining the issue of the Bible and family values, Jay Newman recently wrote, "In modern Western democracies, the religious texts that have had by far the greatest cultural impact have been Biblical texts, so it is not surprising that in recent debates in the West about religion and the family, religious cultural critics and reformers have concentrated much of their attention on the values ostensibly imparted by Biblical texts. Questions thus arise concerning, for example, what family values the Bible actually imparts...." (1) If Newman's assessments are accurate, we biblical scholars have a role to play in the current debates, since who better than one of us is in a position to talk about family values as they are depicted either in the Hebrew Bible or in the New Testament.