The family in the Bible

The crux of the story of Esther is in Queen Esther's cunning in getting the Persian enemy, Haman, to appear to be seducing her on her own bed when King Ahasueros unexpectedly entered her chambers from the garden outside. Thus Persian royal jealousy saved the Jewish people. The stories of Tamar, Ruth, Esther, Hannah, Abigail and many other women in the Bible, heroic as each was in her own right, are built around the family heritage theme of God's fulfillment of the divine promise of progeny and land God had made to Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 12. All had consciously or subconsciously sinned in some way that the family might survive, and the Bible honors them all.

The Family and the Land

Property too was a family affair. The laws of Jubilee stress the point. The property was to stay in the family to which originally assigned. Redemption of debt-slaves and of property in the Jubilee years was family- or clan-centered.

The institution of the monarchy and the gradual urbanization of Israel undermined the family network somewhat, but not entirely. A great deal of both the pathos and the marvel of Jewish stories from the Persian and Hellenistic Periods (in the Hagiographa, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha) is in how enough of a remnant of the continuing family or clan of Jacob refused to assimilate religiously to foreign domination, and thus kept their identity. They absorbed many aspects of the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman cultures through which the stories were told and were woven (foreign calendars, foreign names, finances, etc), but there was always identity enough in a remnant to refuse to abandon belief in the One God of All who made the promises of progeny and land to the patriarchs in the first place.

In sum, Israelite society was family oriented. The family, the bet `av or household, was the basic unit of society as a whole. It was gathered around the character of the head of the house, the father. Since marriage was often at a very young age, polygamy was practiced, and slaves were part of the household (the yelid bayit), so that the household might include four generations, or even five, and was often quite large. Wives left their family to become a part of the husband's bet `av, which could number as many as a hundred persons at any one time. A number of such households constituted a mishpahah, often translated family but also clan, or grouping by kinship of a number of bate `ab, or fathers' houses. The mishpahah also had a territorial identity. One returned to one's ancestral home for certain festivals, the observation of Jubilee, territorial obligations, census, and taxation; and at death one was gathered to one's fathers. Finally, the "tribe" was made up of a number of mishpahot, or clans. Israel is described as consisting of twelve such tribes.

When Israel gradually changed the social structure of ancient Canaan, Palestine went from being a city--state culture, with a power-at-the-top/poverty-at-the-bottom pattern--to a social system based on broad equality-of-kinship groups without a centralized elite power base such as a monarchy (Gottwald). The opposition of the early prophets, especially Samuel, to Israel's having a king like the nations, and the searing indictments of the later prophets of the royal households for their oppression of powerless and poor people, indicate the continuing power of the old social structure based on kinship groups. Rich and poor alike belonged to the family; it was a form of "family security." The rich could not keep their wealth to themselves, as in western society.