perceives that he and she were "one flesh." Then follows the enigmatical utterance that the man shall leave father and mother and go to his wife. In what social horizon could that rule arise? Nobody in the father-family ever did it, except heiress-husbands.[1] However, but for this rule there would be no establishment of pair-marriage in this text. If the husband goes to the wife he will have but one, unless it be exceptionally or by some confusion of usages. The first chapter of Genesis is held to have been written not before 500 B.C. It is very simple and direct, and is written as history, not myth; the human race is created in two sexes, and nothing states or implies pair-marriage. It cannot be supposed that the man was said to go to the woman, in opposition to almost universal usage, in order to suggest pair-marriage. Then modern men have read their own mores into these texts, and established such a tradition that we do not perceive that the text does not contain the institution. How could the Jews practice polygamy through their whole history if on the first page of the law stood an injunction of pair-marriage? They did not see it there because it is not there.
The position of women amongst the Jews at the time of Christ was what it was generally in the Greco-Roman world; their place was domestic and their chief function was to bear children. The New Testament Gospels contain very little about women, but later Christian hagiology created myths about the two Marys and Martha to satisfy the demand. The Epistles contain doctrines of marriage which are not fully consistent. One view is that marriage is a pis aller for sin.[2] The most important question is that of the effect on a pre-
