How Much Shalom?

How much shalom do you want?

Sometimes you have to spell things out for people, because they can’t even think like heart-led people of faith. I’ve spent a lot of time studying the Hebrew culture and history specifically, and for the Ancient Near East generally. Over the years I discovered an awful lot of false assumptions I had about things in the Old Testament simply because I had been taught to read it from the perspective of my own times.

For example, we know that during the entire 1500 years of Israel’s history, the common man would never even get close to a non-family female until he was about 30. That’s when he was likely to have enough income to afford getting married. If he was wealthy, he might start moving on it as early as 25. Either way, the next step was to seek an arranged marriage. If no one in his family did the matchmaking for him, he would ask around until he identified one or more families with eligible daughters. If he had a good reputation, it’s likely fathers with such daughters would seek him out.

Those girls would have been around 15 years old. It was customary to make sure she was okay with marrying this guy. He would leave a symbol of betrothal, then go home and build on some onto his father’s extended family home, then come back in about a year and claim his bride. The wedding feast would take place in their new quarters.

God had all kinds of opportunity to notify Israel if He had a problem with this arrangement. It is conspicuous by its absence. In that part of the world, there was nothing “dirty” about a 30-year-old man marrying someone half his age and having children with her. It was ubiquitous. Why in the world would you be surprised that adult men lust after teenage girls? That’s how God wired us. It’s not evil; it’s not something that comes from the Fall. It’s not a curse; it’s normal.

“Well, not any more,” you might say. Now it’s considered creepy in our American society. But it’s our American society that is creepy.

I’m not suggesting that Christians suddenly start passing off their teenage daughters to adult men. Most adult American men who aren’t married by age 30 are likely creepy, indeed. Nobody is calling for a sudden shift of some small select portion of social custom like that, without a complete matching shift in the wider background of things that go with it.

What I will say is this: We don’t have to ape the Hebrew culture to have shalom. We don’t have to speak their language, live in adobe houses and survive on agriculture using their technology. We aren’t in the ANE, so we have a different agricultural context. God doesn’t condemn the use of what our world provides in order to build a shalom that witnesses to His glory. We start where we are.

On the other hand, there are a host of changes we might make if we could, changes that would bring us back to a much better lifestyle that is more consistent with how God wired us and the reality in which we live. I am utterly certain that if we got as close to Biblical Law as possible, we would use very little of modern technology. We would live in a more rural setting with no interest in what happens in cities. Not frozen in time somewhere back a century or two, but we would definitely have little interest in a lot of things that occupy the rest of the world. A genuine pursuit of Christ to the hilt would mean living a far more primitive existence, closer to nature, and missing a lot of material comforts.

That’s very nearly impossible right now, so you aren’t likely to see God putting much conviction on heart-led Christians to do that. It remains an ideal we long for, knowing we will never see it. So instead of having some rather uniform doctrinaire set of cultural demands (like the Amish, for example), we are all over the map on such things as our convictions demand.

However, we should know that the shalom we receive is somewhat less deep than it might be if we could come closer to the ideal. If we weren’t distracted by computers, TVs, cars and heavy industry, but lived more in harmony with the natural world, our shalom would be much greater. If we had a culture where heart-led was normal, and mysticism was the common approach, it would be quite different. Do I have to explain why? Our minds would be much purer and much easier to bend to the authority of the heart.

I don’t think we can pretend God demands that of all His children. At the same time, I think He wants His children to be aware of all the various factors recorded in His Word on the matter. It’s the kind of thing where you should be praying the Lord let you get as close to this fuzzy and ill-defined ideal, so that you can shine His glory. You’ll take as much as He grants you in that direction.

Meanwhile, it would help a lot if you would understand what God considers “normal” in human behavior. Not just a few items here and there, but to form a very big picture of what it would look like to have a more ideal society and culture, so that we aren’t surprised when human nature manifests that revealed ideal. It’s not evil for adult men to be delighted by teenage girls. It is surely inappropriate in our current context for them to act on that interest, but not evil to have it.

Nor is it somehow weird if teenage girls find themselves attracted to adult males. Given how thoroughly unprepared they are to marry one, it would never work out for the majority of them. Our society is so nasty and corrupt that it’s almost illegal to train a girl the way they were trained in the Old Testament. It’s almost universally illegal for them to marry at age 15, and certainly considered scandalous if her husband is already an adult. But that’s because American society is an awful long way from how God intended us to live. Do let your daughters know that a mutual attraction between teenage girls and adult men is quite natural and normal.

It’s part of the path to a much deeper level of shalom that most of us will never see, but may long for.