On Betrothals
December 5, 2021
For the past 3000+ years, people have been reading and studying Scripture, learning from it and being shaped by it (or, more precisely, learning from and being shaped by God through it). No other writings have had such a profound impact on human experience. If the Bible is anything, it’s a phenomenal (one might say, divine) piece of literature.
Once we see Scripture as literature, however, it opens up a new way of reading it! The key isn’t just that you can read Scripture as literature, it’s that, when you do, you get some surprising insights. The Art of Biblical Narrative by Robert Altar is the book that started this trend.
He points out ancient literary conventions and uses them to analyze the narrative writings of the Old Testament. One example here will suffice—he points out that there are type-scenes in the Old Testament—they have a particular structure so that when you start reading one, you know what to expect.
One of these type-scenes is “the encounter with the future betrothed at a well.” It happens with Abraham’s servant and Rebecca, the future wife of Isaac. It happens with Jacob and Rachel, and Moses and Reuel’s daughters (Ex. 2.15-21). It happens a lot. The stories aren’t identical (Ruth 2 is very different, from a very different perspective), sometimes expectations aren’t met (with Saul, in 1Sam. 9.11-13), but on the whole, you know what to expect when you find a single man of marriageable age hanging out at a well. He’s about to find a wife.
So when you come to John 4 you want to scream at Jesus, “Get away from that well! You’re not supposed to get married! Especially not to a woman who has so much experience of that institution!” It seems like Jesus is about to find a wife, but it doesn’t end that way. The woman leaves without Jesus, without inviting him to her home to meet her family, without sharing a meal together and becoming formally engaged. The woman runs off and brings the people to Jesus. The disciples encourage Jesus to eat, but he refuses—the meal he’s looking for isn’t a betrothal meal, it’s to do God’s work. Jesus isn’t there to find a bride, but he is there to make one—the church. We expect Jesus to get married to the woman at the well, but he doesn’t, but he does end up with a bride, a bunch of people coming to believe that Jesus is truly the Christ, the awaited Messiah.
If we jump all the way to John 21 we see another creation/marriage scene. Jesus is in the garden where he was buried with a giant gash in his side, and who does he meet there but Mary, who mistakes him for a gardener. “Mary,” he says, “go, for I have work for you to do, and we have work to do together.” Here the second Adam lays down and gives up his very flesh to create his second Eve, the Church, who he meets in the garden. Now the two of them go about in the garden, being fruitful and multiplying, filling the earth and subduing it, having dominion over every living thing. And it was very good.
—John Coffey
