Did Abraham marry his sister as it seems like he says in Genesis 12 and 20? It seems to be common practice to simply read the stories of Abraham passing Sarah off as his sister to Pharaoh and Abimelech and take them at face value and kind of say, “Well it’s weird but I guess that’s what happened?” There’s a lot of wrangling with the text where people say, “Well she was his half-sister” (which was forbidden by the Torah) or some accounts that she was his niece. To the problem with the Torah prohibition on sibling marriages, many say that Abraham was before the Mosaic law, so he wasn’t subject to those laws. But like sooooo many other things in the Old Testament, it’s important to remember that when scribes were writing down the stories of the early patriarchs, they were writing them down with an eye towards the laws and social norms of their time, not ours. So the details that the scribes left in made sense to them, but may not make sense to us.
I would like to start by venturing a guess that the genetic problems associated with close relative marriages were probably known to ancient peoples. Their technology was more primitive than ours, but they weren’t stupid. But their marriage customs and laws were very different than ours and when we try to overlay our marriage laws and customs onto their culture, things get very muddled. A very illuminating article by Christopher Eames from the Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology explains this very well.
When we impose our marriage laws and customs– two adults from different families and households consisting primarily of a married couple and their offspring making a decision to get married and having a wedding– we assume Abraham must have just decided to marry his half-sister and this was allowed because these people were just so ignorant and backwards. I remember reading this in the Old Testament as a teenager and no one really provided any really good answer as to why Abraham was marrying his half-sister. In the back of my mind, something just didn’t seem to fit and I always had a vague feeling that we were all missing something about the situation. It turns out that we are missing a lot of things about the situation because marriage and families in the ancient Levant weren’t like ours today.
Marriages were frequently arranged or contracted by parents on the behalf of the children and it was a multi-step process– not something you did in one day. According to Jastrow and Drachman (n.d.) in the Jewish Encyclopedia, betrothal was not an engagement, but rather the beginning of the marriage. The English word “betroth” or “betrothal” are used to describe the time between when the couple had contracted the marriage and when they began living together. Once the couple had contracted the marriage, they were considered to be legally husband and wife even though they were not cohabiting (and presumably not engaging in sexual relations at this point) and would need a divorce to dissolve the union. In the Levant though, it was common for the father of a young man to adopt a girl or young woman into his household as his legal daughter as a part of the process of contracting a marriage. And in fact this process of the young lady receiving an offer of marriage and then leaving to join her future husband’s household before the marriage has been fully contracted is seen in the example of Isaac and Rebekah (Eames, n.d.). And this is where the pieces start falling into place with the story of Sarah being both Abraham’s “sister” and his wife.
There were a number of reasons for this practice. If a woman had been previously married and brought a child into the new marriage from her previous husband, the child would be regarded as a legal son or daughter of the new husband. Sometimes it was a matter of money. It was cheaper, basically a discount dowry. Whether a girl contracted as a bride or adopted as a daughter, her family had to receive compensation and the price for adopting a daughter was lower than the dowry. However, even when poverty wasn’t an issue, it was still common for the groom’s father to adopt the bride as a daughter and the adoption contract would come with clauses about divorce and the second father. If the woman was a slave, she wasn’t free to contract a marriage. However, if she was adopted into the household as a legal daughter, then she was legally freed and could marry (Eames, n.d.) For poor families and slaves, adoption into a potential husband’s family might have been a way to obtain a better life for their daughter. More mercenary parents may have had an eye on the money, however I can see how a family with very little opportunity for their daughter might see adoption and marriage as a way to give their daughter more security and even freedom. (There’s a possible example of this in Hosea 3:1-3 with Hosea and Gomer:
Then said the Lord unto me, Go yet, love a woman beloved of herfriend, yet an adulteress, according to the love of the Lord toward the children of Israel, who look to other gods, and love flagons of wine.
2 So I bought her to me for fifteen pieces of silver, and for an homer of barley, and an half homer of barley:
3 And I said unto her, Thou shalt abide for me many days; thou shalt not play the harlot, and thou shalt not be for another man: so will I also be for thee
And since the couple was regarded as legally married once the marriage had been contracted, even it hadn’t been consummated, the betrothed woman would have, for all intents and purposes, been regarded as the daughter-in-law (and legally daughter) of the groom’s father, so adoption of the bride into the groom’s family would make sense with how the marriage was legally regarded anyway.
Abraham’s explanation in Genesis 20 that Sarah was the daughter of his father, but not his mother (an arrangement that would likely have been recognized in the ancient world to involve adoption since the father would have been the one to legally contract the adoption) and the statement in Genesis 20:12 “and so she became my wife” implies a causal relationship between Sarah’s status as daughter of his father and her becoming his wife, so it seems very likely that Abraham’s father had adopted Sarah into the household with the objective of her marrying Abraham at some point (which she did), rather than her being a stepsister. Eames (n.d.) also points out that in Genesis 11 when Terah’s sons are named, Sarai is not listed among them, but as one of his son’s wives and that in verse 31 she is explicitly referred to as Terah’s daughter-in-law, not his daughter. Again, the evidence points to Sarah having been adopted as a potential bride. Whether the arrangement was more like Isaac and Rebekah where she came from a distant relative or associate’s family or she was a slave who was freed through marriage isn’t very clear. But the evidence points to her having been from another family and married to Abraham through adoption and betrothal. Eames (2022) speculates that it is possible that Sarah may have been Hittite and the strongly worded command for Abraham to change her name might have been because she had a name associated with a foreign deity.
So, in short, Abraham was very likely married to a woman from a different family whom his father had adopted into his household as a daughter as part of the betrothal and marriage contract. She was not his half sister. This process of adopting future brides as daughters by the groom’s father was very common and would have been understood by the audience of Jews to whom the Old Testament was written for.
References
Eames, C. (n.d.). Evaluating Abram and Sarai’s marriage in light of ancient practices. Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology https://armstronginstitute.org/1399-evaluating-abram-and-sarais-marriage-in-light-of-ancient-practices
Eames, C. (2022 December 21). What does the name “Sarai” really mean? Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology https://armstronginstitute.org/818-what-does-the-name-sarai-really-mean
Jastrow, M. and Drachman, B. (n.d.). Betrothal. Jewish Encyclopedia https://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/3229-betrothal
