What does the wedding ceremony program for?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

If you ask friends if they remember what they were told during the wedding ceremony in the church, a large part of them will answer that they did not pay attention to what was happening. But in vain …

However, someone may remember some of the words that the priest spoke to the bride. Well, for example, "… be fertile like Sarah."

Let's refresh the information by finding out in the original source, the Bible, who this Sarah is.

Genesis 16: 1-8.

But Sarah, Avramov's wife, did not give birth to him. She had an Egyptian maid named Hagar. And Sarah said to Abram, Behold, the Lord has shut up my womb, so that I may not bear; Go in to my maidservant; perhaps I will have children by her.

Yes, yes, this is Sarah herself, which Abraham, according to biblical stories, put under the Egyptian pharaoh, however, she was then already over 60. Either the pharaoh was still a gerontophile, or the determination of the age in the main book of Christians is absolutely bad.

And the fact is that Abraham told Pharaoh that his wife was a relative of him. Did the great prophet lie? Here's what the rabbis have to say about it:

Is it true that Sarah, Abraham's wife, was his father's sister, but not his mother's? Is this not considered incest?

Rabbi Benzion Zilber:

Indeed, the Torah says that Abraham says to Abimelech: “Yes, she is truly my sister; she is my father's daughter, but not my mother's daughter; and became my wife”(Bareishit 20, 12). According to the Talmud, a paternal sister, but not a maternal sister, is not forbidden for bnei-Noah (“the descendants of Noah”) - for non-Jews. It is forbidden to Jews, but not to non-Jews. In reality, Sarah was the granddaughter of Abraham's father, the daughter of Aran, the son of Abraham's father - Terah, i.e. She was Abraham's niece.

In general, a relative or not, for Jews or non-Jews, but Sarah gave birth when Abraham was already 100 years old, while she herself was just under 90 years old.

But let us quote more precisely the phrase that spouses are spoken according to all the canons of Orthodoxy:

And you, bride, be exalted like Sarah, rejoice like Rebekah, multiply in posterity, like Rachel.

So, we have two more characters, in addition to 90-year-old Sarah - Rebekah and Rachel.

What do we know about Rachel from the Bible?

Rachel remained sterile and envied Leah's fertility. Desperate, she, as before Sarah (Gen. 16: 2–4), gave her maidservant Bilhu as a concubine to her husband; Dana and Naftali were born by Rachel as their own sons (Gen. 30: 1–8).

Subsequently, this character, Rachel, dies during the birth of Benjamin, his second son.

Not a bad wish for newlyweds?

In understandable words, such programming occurs at the very beginning of the family path:

Exalt like Sarah - who was put under every right person, who was a relative of her husband, be cheerful like Rebekah, whose one son betrayed the other, multiply like Rachel, who died in second birth.

In general, if you have decided to "strengthen" your family union with an age-old religious rite, you should think about whether you want to be like Sarah and Abraham. Or does it make sense to look for more worthy role models?