If you start talking about marriage in the Bible, most people are going to pull out Ephesians 5. The Ephesians 5 passage is beautiful and applicable; but it is not the first time marriage is discussed, nor is it the only passage that talks about marriage.
Let’s start at the beginning and work our way through the story. It is the same story that Paul is actually retelling in Ephesians 5- because God is always telling a cohesive story throughout Scripture- but I think we miss that because we rarely look at marriage anywhere else.
Right after God makes woman as man’s “ezer,” He proclaims the story of marriage. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). This is fascinating to me because Adam didn’t have a mother or a father. But Moses wrote this hundreds of years after it happened in a context where all men getting married did have a mother and father. (Do a little digging into patriarchal cultures. Women were just absorbed into their husband’s family.) Instead of a woman losing all that she could be, the man was supposed to leave what he had and hold fast to her.
