gengwall

So…truthseeker mentioned elsehwere that she has heard the argument that “head is mentioned hundreds of times in the OT in reference to families and clans, geneologies, etc.” Being the obsessive compulsive researcher that I am, I had to check this out since it sounds quite exaggerated.

The Hebrew word I researched is ro’sh:
1) head, top, summit, upper part, chief, total, sum, height, front, beginning
a) head (of man, animals)
b) top, tip (of mountain)
c) height (of stars)
d) chief, head (of man, city, nation, place, family, priest)
e) head, front, beginning
f) chief, choicest, best
g) head, division, company, band
h) sum

There are 598 verses where this word occurs. Of those, I found 158 which refer to some hierarchical arrangement in human relations. Hardly the “hundreds” that are claimed.

Within that subset, it gets very interesting. I found only 25 that refer directly to the family unit. All of them were recounting some kind of census or other listing of families. I put them under the category of “Factual reality without practical application”. In other words, they simply state a cultural, historical fact without and indication of how that arrangement works (if at all) and without any incling of a Word by God on His view of that arrangement.

All of the remainder fall under categories relating to leaders of people, not heads of a “household”. Although that includes tribal and clan leaders, which the comps would like to include, I reject their inclusion in the “hundreds” as it relates to the family because in reality they were community leaders. The other references refer to kings, princes, military officers, or “chief”, i.e. prominent, community figures. None of these 133 references are applicable to the family.

So, in reality, there are only 25 references to the “head” of a family, and all of them are census related, and they all occur in the pure historical books of Exodus, Numbers, and 1 Chronicles. It is true that all of those heads are male. But what is more important, and really the point, is that there is absolutely NO OT teaching (or even law) that says “the ‘head’ of a family unit is always and only the husband (or worse, any male), and he shall have unilateral and complete authority over all other members of the family.” Of course, such an idea would be nonsense because it would not account for the countless widowed mothers that certainly existed, or even the wives, left at home, of the men who were constantly off to war. It also wouldn’t account for the Proverbs 31 woman’s marriage, which by all indications is about as close as it gets to God’s model. Plus it is simply impratical, as we have been discussing here.

So, truthseeker, I think to call your freinds “misguided” or “mistaken” is putting it too mild. “Liars” comes to mind as a more accurate assessment.