3. Marriage and Woman (Remastered)

Marriage and Woman

R.J. Rushdoony

Our Scripture is 1 Corinthians 11 and our subject, ‘Marriage and Woman.’

“Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ.

Now I praise you, brethren, that ye remember me in all things, and keep the ordinances, as I delivered them to you. But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God. Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonoureth his head. But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head: for that is even all one as if she were shaven. For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered. For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man. For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because of the angels. Nevertheless neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord. For as the woman is of the man, even so is the man also by the woman; but all things of God. Judge in yourselves: is it comely that a woman pray unto God uncovered? Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering. But if any man seem to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither the churches of God.”

This passage is one that has long been a highly controversial one, not always because it is misunderstood, but sometimes because it is understood.

Now as we analyze the doctrine of marriage and woman, the best place to begin is with God's definition of woman as we meet it in Genesis 2:18; she is defined as a help meet, or as Leopold renders it, “a helper like him.” ⁱ Others, a helper or “as agreeing to him,” or “his counterpart.” ⁱⁱ Robert Young: “an helper—as his counterpart.” ⁱⁱⁱ Very literally from the Hebrew: “a help as his front, his reflected image.” ^iv So that, in some sense she is a mirror.

Now according to our text, man was created in God's image, and woman in the reflected image of God in man. Order and subordination permeate the whole universe, and are basic to its existence. 

The covered head is cited by St. Paul as a sign of being under authority to another person. In church, whatever authority men may be under outside the church, a man is under no authority in church except directly under God. The woman is there under the authority of her husband or father. So, St. Paul says, the covered head is a sign of being under authority. Therefore a man worships with uncovered head, a woman with a covered head. And hence the custom which, unfortunately, has been dropped by the Catholic churches, although still retained to a degree by the Episcopal churches but beginning to fade, of the prayer shawl or prayer handkerchief on a woman’s head as a sign of her station.

St. Paul says that an uncovered woman might as well be shorn or shaven because it is shameful for her to be uncovered as it is to be shaven. Then comes the verse ten, which is the most misunderstood verse in this passage. 

“For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because of the angels.”

1 Corinthians 11:10.

This has been very strangely rendered by some. For example, James Moffatt in his paraphrase renders it as: 

“Therefore ought the woman to have a symbol of subjection on her head because of the angels.” ^v

However, the literal Greek is: “A sign of her authority,” ‘power’ or ‘authority.’  

Now, some people immediately see a contradiction here because on the one hand St. Paul insists on the subordination of the woman to the man, and second he seems to speak in contradiction to this when he speaks of her long hair and her prayer cap as a sign of authority. The reason why this seems to be contradictory to the modern mind is that we have an anarchistic concept of authority. Now, all true authority on the face of the earth is under authority. A colonel for example has authority over his men only so long as he is under the authority of his general and recognized in his authority. Retire him from the army, and he has no authority over those men, he is no longer under the authority of the general. Therefore, his authority is precisely the fact that he is under authority. All human authority rests on being under authority, ultimately, the authority of God since God alone transcends all things and is the source of all power and authority. Thus, even as with the colonel, so with woman; her subordination is also her symbol of authority. For this reason until very recent times, in most societies all over the earth, a prostitute was forbidden to wear the same kind of clothing as a wife or daughter. She had to wear something different as a sign of what she was, and she could not have her head covered because to do so would be to claim an authority and a protection that was not hers because she had separated herself from the authority of a father or of a husband, and any woman could claim at any time the authority of any man and their protection because she carried the symbol of authority. 

This was true, as I have pointed out previously, in many a frontier town where conditions were very precarious. The woman who was a wife or daughter could have the protection of any man under any circumstances.

St. Paul then goes on to declare in verse eleven that men and women are mutually dependent, the one cannot exist without the other, for the one is not without the other. The woman was originally formed out of the man, and the man is born of the woman.

Then he goes on to speak of the hair, the long hair, as a woman’s crowning glory. And to speak of it, moreover, as shameful in the man. Now, it is a curious fact that all of our religious pictures today show Christ and the Apostles with long hair. All of the evidence we have indicates both among the Romans of the day and among the Hebrews, that hair wasextremely short, generally too short even to comb. It was cut almost on a crew cut basis. Among the Romans it was combed straight forward, the very short hair. But it was extremely short everywhere in that day. There is no ground whatsoever for the long hair of religious art. It comes out of some of the curious popular customs of the Renaissance, and of the hippie movements of the day which finally took over almost all men. And so religious art reflected the practices of the day. 

As a matter of fact, church councils, because as the Roman Empire was falling apart, curious practices began to creep into Roman society; Church councils again and again censured long hair in men, it was grounds for being kicked out of church. Thus there is no evidence, and a great deal of evidence, against what religious art portrays.

The Biblical doctrine of woman, therefore, reveals her as one crowned with authority in her subordination, clearly a person of the closest possible rank to God's appointed vicegerent over creation. She is not man’s plaything, she is man’s helpmeet.

The sad fact is that sometimes in Western history theologians have often pointed to Eve as the one who led Adam into sin, as though sin were entirely woman’s fault. Well, the fact is that Adam didn’t have to listen to Eve. But also, Eve was exercising her God-given function of giving advice, of giving counsel. Now she happened to give evil counsel at this point, but it was her God-given function to speak to him. Men as sinners very often take their ideal of women from the Medieval story of Patient Griselda, who submitted to any and every humiliation her husband subjected her to and this is very clearly not Biblical. In fact, in woman like Patient Griselda’s, men would very quickly be bored with them.

But men, being sinners, they very often wish for a patient Griselda. Martin Luther on one occasion, and he very dearly loved his Katy, said that in exasperation that if a man wanted a meek wife, the only way he could get her was to carve her out of stone because unless he made her there was no way he could get one.^vi Now, if he had gotten what he wanted, he would’ve been very, very unhappy because when you reflect on the Luther household, the children, eighteen or more students that were boarded for meals, plus the stream of visitors from all over Western Europe that always called on him, anyone short of the strong-minded Katy would have fallen apart in a hurry. So he had what he needed.

Now, it is a common illusion that man in his ‘evolutionary past,’ so-called, made woman his slaves and in cave-man days, women were slaves of the worst sort, the creatures and playthings of men. First of all, the idea of cavemen, incidentally, is a total illusion. But this is nonsense, in every known society, women have never been slaves. Even in Moslem society where perhaps the role of women is as bad as any, women have their way of getting what they want, and of ruling the men.

We will go into what happens in polygamous societies on another occasion where the men wind up as the total losers, but that is another subject, we will come to it later. But anyone who knows women knows that the idea that they can be reduced to slavery, and they will just cringe in the corner and come hopping when their husband snaps his fingers, well, they are living in a dream world, women have never been like that. So the idea of women as nothing more than playthings and slaves is ridiculous. Women have been women in every age and every society.

A few years ago, a woman, an anthropologist, made a study of the natives of Australia, in particular of the function of women in Australian society. And the natives, about as primitive a people as any in the world, reveal some very interesting things as to the high and important status of women among them. The men would die very quickly without the women. Their knowledge and their wisdom is so important, even in that society.

Now, we must say, having said all of this, that the role of women has not always been enviable, and the somewhat depressed role of women outside of Moslem society, is a fairly modern thing. It has come about, primarily, as a result, of the Enlightenment. The so-called ‘Age of Reason.’ The Enlightenment treated women as an ornament, that is, upper-class women. The age of reason said that man was the rational creature and women were emotional. And since reason was to rule the world, then women had better bow out. And it was the function of women to be pretty, and to be charming, and to be ornamental, to be on a pedestal, as it were, and no more. This very quickly with the Enlightenment took over in Europe. 

This had not been true previously. If you go back to seventeenth century England, for example, what you find is that women were normally the partners with their husbands in business. They were very highly competent managers. If their husbands were ill or if their husbands were abroad, or if their husbands died, women took over and ran the business, and you find in seventeenth century England, women prominent in the shipping trade as insurance brokers, as manufacturers, in every branch of life. This was brought over to America by the Puritan women, this same tradition. And this is one reason why the Yankee shipping vessels were so successful. The Yankee shipping traders could go to China and be gone a year or two years, or three years, and come back in the confidence that their wives were managing the business successfully and competently.

Up to the eighteenth century, therefore, this older tradition, which was thoroughly Biblical, of women as a helpmeet, prevailed throughout western Europe. A legal revolution, brought about by the ‘Age of Reason,’ the Enlightenment, changed the status of women. Because the Age of Reason saw men as reason incarnate and women as pure emotion and will and therefore inferior, the age of reason therefore progressively destroyed the legal status of women.

Incidentally, it also contrasted the Age of Reason to the Age of Faith, as though reason and faith were contradictory and therefore since faith was a thing of emotions, women therefore were to be concerned with religion, and religion, church work and all that was of the eighteenth century relegated to the women’s realm. Thus, the more pronounced the triumph of the Age of Reason, the more pronounced the reduction of women to ornaments. 

The man who almost single-handedly wrote this into the law of England, it happened through other men elsewhere in the continent, was Chief Justice Edward Coke of England, who, as some recent judges, rewrote the law when he was chief Justice of England. 

Now, Sir William Blackstone codified Coke’s legal revolution, and after about 1800, between 1800 and 1815, Blackstone’s works on law became the text book for lawyers in this country, and the legal revolution was written into American Law, and the result was a radical change from the 1700’s to 1800’s, from the colonial and the Early Constitutional period, to the period that followed.

Let me read to you from some law manuals of about 1815, here in America, as they speak of women’s status. 

“Walker’s Introduction to American Law: The legal theory is, marriage makes the husband and wife one person, and that person is the husband. There is scarcely a legal act of any description that she is competent to perform.… In Ohio, but hardly anywhere else, is she allowed to make a will, if happily she has anything to dispose of.

Roper’s Law of Husband and Wife: It is not generally known, that whenever a woman has accepted an offer of marriage, all she has, or expects to have, becomes virtually the property of the man thus accepted as a husband; and no gift or deed executed by her between the period of acceptance and the marriage is held to be valid; for were she permitted to give away or otherwise settle her property, he might be disappointed in the wealth he looked to in making the offer.

Wharton’s Laws: The wife is only the servant of her husband.” ^vii

Now there is one phrase that is significant in all these quotes from law books of the period, from Roper’s Law of Husband and Wife. He begins: “It is not generally known.” You see, this was new, it had just been read into American law by lawyers who had been brought up on Blackstone. It was the educational revolution of the day that was affected in legal training. 

Now, the full implications of this, therefore, were not known around 1815, but they came to be known very soon, and unfortunately were supported by men and by the churches, as this legal revolution was gradually known and accepted.

And so, the attitude of men was precisely that of the Age of Reason in Europe; women belonged on a pedestal, they are ornaments, they are to be charming and no more, they know nothing about anything practical, and they should never attempt to know anything. 

It is not surprising, therefore, that the woman’s rights movement began. Certainly, some such movement should have begun because a woman was rendered by law, as a result of this legal revolution, completely helpless. At one of the early women’s rights meetings, when some of the men hecklers said that they were going to destroy the position of women, women should be on a pedestal, the next speaker, Sojourner Truth, whom I mentioned last week, the ex-slave, the negress, who had been a slave in New York, answered these hecklers with this statement, and I cannot reproduce the dialect, because she was an uneducated women who could neither read nor write. Incidentally, no connection with the South, only a northerner. 

“Well, chillen, whar dar’s so much racket dar must be som’ting out o’ kilter. I tink dat, ‘twixt the niggers of de South and de women at de Norf, all a-taking ’bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking ’bout? Dat man ober dar say dat woman needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have de best place eberywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles, or gives me any best place; And ar’n’t I a woman? Look at me. Look at my arm. I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ar’n’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man, (when I could get it,) and bear de lash as well—and ar’n’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen chillen, and seen ’em mos’ all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard—and ar’n’t I a woman? Den dey talks ’bout dis ting in de head. What dis dey call it?” [“Intellect,” whispered some one near.] “Dat’s it, honey. What’s dat got to do with woman’s rights or niggers’ rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint and yourn holds a quart, wouldn’t ye be mean not to me have my little half-measure full? Den dat little man in black dar, he say woman can’t have as much right as man ’cause Christ wa’n’t a woman. Whar did your Christ come from?‘

[2] Whar did your Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man had noting to do with him. That if de fust woman God ever made was strong enough to turn de world upside down all her one lone, all dese togeder, ought to be able to turn it back and git it right side up again, and now dey is asking to, de men better let ’em. ‘Bleeged to ye for hearin’ on me, and now old Sojourner ha’n’t got nothin’ more to say.” ^viii

Well, women’s rights was a legitimate movement, but the tragedy of women’s rights was that it developed very quickly into feminism, it pitted women against men, and it was the men’s fault. So when we condemn feminism, we must condemn the men who created it. Before long the women’s rights movement was speaking about the father/mother god, which Mary Baker Eddie inherited, and before long they were referring to god as “she” and were rewriting the Bible to eliminate anything that was pro-male. 

And as a result we have today an unhappy situation because of the legal revolution of the age of reason. Instead of men and women working together as God's Law requires, you have the competition of men and women. You have the masculinization of women and the feminization of men. In March of this year, the Paris couturier, Pierre Cardin, had a fashion show for the new advanced styles for men, and the first garment displayed was a sleeveless jumper designed to be worn over high vinyl boots; in other words, a dress for men.

The Age of Reason brought about the irrational supremacy of men, and it has led to the war of the sexes. And as a result, today the legal situation of men and women is ridiculous. The law in many, many States is pro-feminine. It is true in California. In some States, especially Southern, it reflects the old ‘Age of Reason,’ anti-women position. And this incidentally is why the Southern women used to concentrate so much on charm, that was about all they were allowed to have.

But in some Southern States within recent years, things like this have happened because the woman has no property rights where a man has deserted his wife and disappeared for a few years, and she because there is no reason to know whether he is dead or alive, has to wait a certain period of time before she can have him legally declared dead, has gone ahead and worked and built up a business or property. He on his return has been able to take it all and sell it and go off again because she has no rights.

Our position today, therefore, is one of the rationalistic pro-male legal situation, and the feminist legal situation and as a result, family life has been thrown out of kilter because of this. But the Biblical doctrine is that the wife is a helpmeet. Eve was created to be Adam’s counterpart, his image. This means, therefore, in the first marriage which is a pattern of all marriage, there was a racial, a cultural, and especially religious similarity and congeniality. Therefore we must say that mixed marriages; religiously and culturally and racially are not in conformity to the Biblical standard. The wife cannot be a help meet, a counterpart to her husband if she reflects an alien standard. As a result, cross-cultural marriages are normally failures. How can, for example, a business man who is a Christian find a help meet in a Buddhist who believes that nothingness is ultimate, and that the world of trade is an evil way? How can she be a help meet? She can be no more than a plaything. How, similarly, can a man, let us say a German, be married to a Moslem woman and find any real help in her? Because their cultures are too alien. Moreover, when there are cross-cultural marriages, the man cannot discern the differences between women in that culture, and as a result, he is unable to judge wisely. 

We have a very vivid description of what the Biblical woman is like in Proverbs 31 where we are given a picture of the woman, “whose price is far above rubies.” And it tells us that because such a woman is a competent manager, he can be involved in sitting at the gates, which meant in those days to be a city councilman, to be a judge, because his wife was fully capable of handling all the business. Her husband can trust in her moral, commercial, and religious integrity in confidence, we are told. She manages her household and the family business with ability. She is a good merchant or a capable farmer as the case may be; she can manage the business or the farm with equal ability. She is good to her family, to the poor and to the needy, she is in every respect competent. And very important in the Proverbs 31:26:

She openeth her mouth with wisdom;

And in her tongue is the law of kindness.

Now this is important. Women have acquired a reputation as being flannel-mouthed and gossipy. Now, where does this come from? You do not find it in Biblical literature, this is an interesting fact. There is nothing in the Bible that indicates that women have a monopoly on loose talk or in gossip. It is spoken of as a common evil in some men and in some women. Where does this come in? Well, again, with the Age of Reason. When women were rendered ornaments, upper-class women, in the ‘high society’ of Versailles and of London, and later of Boston and New York and in the South, in southern society, the woman, having been rendered an ornament, talked about trifles and talk became her realm. And so it is that it was the useless woman who was given to loose talk, and you find to this day that it is, say, the old-fashioned southern belle who talks and talks and the socialite and the jet-set women, as well as men because they are basically useless creatures. They don’t worry about consequences, and so they can run at the mouth.

But, the godly woman, because she is a working person and responsible, 

…openeth her mouth with wisdom;

And in her tongue is the law of kindness.

When women are trifles, they can then be triflers in word and deed; loose talk is the luxury of the irresponsible.

Then we are told: 

She…eateth not the bread of idleness. 

That is, she is not a mere luxury, she more than earns her keep. 

Her children rise up and call her blessed; 

her husband, too, and he praises her: ^ix

Charm is deceitful and beauty is passing, 

but a woman who reveres the Lord will be praised. ^x

Scripture does not say anything about physical beauty as though it were not a wonderful thing, but states that above all else a woman who reveres the Lord, who is godly, is the one to be praised.

Now, as we have analyzed these passages that deal with women, there is an important point that appears by absence. When the Bible speaks directly of woman and her significance, it says next to nothing about her as mother. Now, this goes completely contrary to the modern description of a woman wherein she is primarily a mother. But the Bible presents her essentially as a wife, as a helpmeet. Whenever her role as a mother is referred to it is never in isolation, it is the man and women together as parents, as father and mother. But today the woman is seen primarily not in reference to her husband, but in reference to her children, and this is a mistake many women make. They often have a greater loyalty to their children than to their husband, and this is wrong because God defines her as a helpmeet, primarily thus in reference to her husband and his calling in terms of the Kingdom of God to subdue the earth and to exercise dominion over it.

Marriage, thus, is not primarily in terms of procreation or in terms of sex; important as these are. There are some branches of the church, the Catholics in particular, although they are beginning to change in this direction, have said that marriage is primarily as a remedy for the sexual instinct, and to provide for children and that is the basic purpose of marriage. It is interesting that even with respect to the sexual side of marriage, that Luther had a change of heart there after his marriage. And Edith Simon in her biography of Luther writes: 

“Before Luther had himself cast off celibacy, he had condemned it merely as a source of continual temptation and distraction to those who were not equal to perpetual chastity—in other words, his attitude then was still basically orthodox [i.e. orthodox in terms of the Catholic tradition - RJR], accounting chastity as the higher state. Upon his own experience of marriage, however, that attitude was changed dramatically to one more positive. Perpetual chastity was bad. Only in marriage were human beings able to acquire the spiritual health which they had used to seek in the cloister. So the strange thing was that before he had ever experienced sexual release himself, Luther saw marriage as a primarily physical affair, and afterwards saw its benefits as primarily spiritual—evidently not for want of physical communion.” ^xi

And that I think puts it very well. God's own definition of Eve, as we have pointed out, is that she is, or was, a helpmeet. Thus, as important as motherhood is, it cannot take priority over God's own declaration concerning the nature of a woman. She is in her single estate as well as her married estate, a help meet to man in exercising dominion over the earth and in subduing the earth to God and His kingdom.

Let us pray.

* * *

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee for thy Word and for its plain speaking. Give us grace ever to be faithful to thy calling and to thy Law-Word to the end that the kingdoms of this world might become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. Grant us this we beseech thee. In Jesus' name. Amen.

Are there any questions now?

Yes?

[Audience Member] Could you comment on Paul and his teachings on marriage, and the misrepresentations of his teaching? ^xii

[Rushdoony] Well, Paul is greatly misunderstood on marriage. Paul, first of all, was a widower. All the evidence in Scripture indicates that St. Paul cannot be spoken of as a bachelor because he was on the Sanhedrin and voted. He tells us he cast his vote for the death of St. Stephen. No one could be on the Sanhedrin unless they were a married man or a widower. As a result, Paul was apparently a widower. 

Then, St. Paul is quoted in the seventh chapter of 1 Corinthians as saying that, “it is better to marry than to burn.” The reference there is not to a general situation, he says, “for the present distress.” I believe he says this in 1 Corinthians 7:26. In other words, he is writing there to the Corinthians, and he tells them in that passage that they are going to face severe persecution in the near future, they are going to be on trial for their life. How then are they going to be able to stand? They had better consider this, the young men, before they get married. If they have a wife and a baby at home, if they have just left, it is going to be hard to stand the test without breaking. 

So, he says, “For the present distress, it is better not to get married now. After this is over, then the conditions are different. But,” he says, “if it is too difficult, then it is better to get married than to burn.”

[Audience Member] Didn’t he give the impression that it was better for him not to marry? ^xiii

[Rushdoony] No, what he says is that it was his right, like the other apostles, to take a wife around at the expense of the churches. But he had not done so, that is all he said.

[Audience Member] Is it because he didn’t need a wife? ^xiv

[Rushdoony] Oh yes, he had chosen. He doesn’t say he doesn’t need it, but there is no pressing feeling of any necessity, and he has given himself to a life where a wife would be a problem because going out as he was into areas that were controversial, he was in and out of prison. And he felt that marriage would be too difficult, it would impose an impossible burden on a wife. So he chose to remain single.

[Audience Member] Didn’t he require celibacy of some somewhere in his writings? ^xv

[Rushdoony] Well, I don’t know what some scholars have said, but Paul has very severely been misunderstood here. He does not lay down any requirement of celibacy as some have tried to say for the clergy, nor does he speak of celibacy as a higher way. What he does say is that there are conditions where it is inadvisable because of problems for a man to be married, but he says this is not a law, this is a man’s choice in a situation, to evaluate the situation. And he says:  “In this present distress, with the coming persecution in Corinth, where some of you are going to die for your faith, it may be more difficult for you in this present distress to face death if you are going to leave a young widow and a newborn baby.”

Yes?

[Audience Member] What of the woman’s right to vote? ^xvi

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, first of all, today we have made the individual the basic political unit in our political life; this is a mistake. However, we have to live in terms of the present situation practically, because the Bible does call upon us to be practical. Therefore it is wise for a woman to vote because their vote is needed as a corrective. But in terms of a Biblical standard we will say, and this has been the standard as sometimes in the past and in some countries, that the vote should be in terms of the family. And of course I just referred to the fact that Paul could not have been on the Sanhedrin or cast a vote had he not been a married man. 

Why? Well, the Biblical principle is that the basic social unit is not the individual, but the family because it is the family that has a stake in the future. Therefore, the head of the family, if it is the man or the widow, should be the voter. This then preserves to the family the basic function in society. But today when it is the atomistic individual, the family has progressively suffered an erosion because the law does not move in terms of the family, but in terms of the individual, and the rights of the family have been progressively trampled on. And yet society always falls apart when the family is destroyed.

[Audience Member] Should women hold political office or be a judge, do you think, Dr. Rushdoony?

[Rushdoony] No, I do not believe that women should have such office. We do have evidence of one woman, a prophetess, serving as a kind of judge in an emergency situation, Deborah. But it was not the normal thing, and it should not be the normal situation.

Yes?

[Audience Member] What about women confronting moral evils in public life in the political arena?^xvii

[Rushdoony] I would say under normal circumstances no, but in emergency circumstances where there is no one else to do it or doing it, then you have to say we don’t always have things in terms of an ideal situation. So, since the law today makes that provision, if there is no one else who will step forward to do it, I would say we can in that sense deal with the reality of the situation. But we should work toward a situation where men resume their rightful responsibilities in every area.

Yes?

[Audience Member] Could you speak about the office of a Nazirite, Dr. Rushdoony? Couldn’t they legitimately wear their hair long?  ^xviii

[Rushdoony] A good question. In the Old Testament there were the Nazarites. These were men who took a vow to the Lord that they were going to do some particular thing. During that period, they maintained a specific diet and did not shave or cut their hair. So that, this was in a sense a public testimony to the fact that they were engaged on a particular vow to perform a particular action.

Now the Nazarites normally vowed to do something on a short-term basis, so the vow of the Nazarite was thirty or sixty or ninety days at the most under normal circumstances. It was rare that it was for an extended period. So that you see, it did not make of them long haired characters, because thirty days to go unshaven or without a hair cut is not anything remarkable, if it was stretched to ninety days that was different.

We have a case, for example, in the New Testament of some Jews who became Nazarites, they took a vow that in so many days they were going to kill St. Paul, and that was why St. Paul was spirited away from Jerusalem by the Roman guard. Now, at the end of that period of course, they had not been able to keep their vow, but the time of the vow was ended. So they would have gone to a barber.

So, this was the function of the Nazarite. It was to indicate his dedication, and to set him apart as a man who had vowed to do a particular thing.

Yes?

[Audience Member] Wasn’t Sampson a Nazirite for a long, long time, Dr. Rushdoony? ^xix

[Rushdoony] Yes, in Sampson’s case it was a life long thing, and that was a rarity. It was not the normal thing. He was a Nazarite from his youth. But that was totally alien to the normal practice.

Yes?

[Audience Member] How can we make sense of the fact that the Jews today cover their head with a skull cap in worship? I think the Pope does the same. ^xx

[Rushdoony] With regard to Jewish worship today the men wear a skull cap, they cover their head, and this is a sign of subjection and of slavery. They picked that up somewhere during the centuries, and they continue to use it in real defiance of Scripture. Similarly, long hair has been elsewhere in society a sign of subjection, the Chinese ‘queue’ was worn because the Manchus, when they conquered China, wanted all Chinese to wear the mark of submission, that they were now no longer men, that was what it indicated. So the queue was a sign that they were under the Manchu authority. So that wherever the cap is worn in worship by men or the long hair worn it is a sign of submission. I don’t know whether the Pope wears that little cap in worship, but if he does, it is completely inappropriate and it is wrong.

Yes?

[Audience Member] Question relating to the relatively small sizes of business in the past and the bearing that might have on the present age where most many businesses are significantly large in scale.

[Rushdoony] These were not the days of small businesses entirely, some of the businesses were very, very large ventures where they dealt internationally. Now, the change came about, not because business became bigger, but because the complexion of business changed. I sent a book to the publisher recently, The Politics of Guilt and Pity, and in it I have a chapter on limited liability laws, and this is what changed the picture. Before limited liability laws, a businessman was totally liable. Today when you invest, say, a $100 in a share in some corporation, the extent of your liability should the company fail is the $100. Until a century ago, in this country it was beginning about the Civil War that this changed, and about the same time in England or a little earlier in England, about 1834 or thereabouts I believe. Before that, if you invested $100 in a company and the company went into debt to the tune of millions and foundered, you were liable for the whole amount, and they could come to you as a share holder and confiscate your home, your clothing, and everything you had.

Now, when you had this unlimited liability, what did it mean? It meant that the owner of a company managed it. Anyone who invested in it, took care that he voted very carefully at the corporation meetings because he was not going to allow them to go into debt over their head because he was liable. As a result, management then was intensely personal. It meant that the man not only managed it thoroughly and kept the corporation from going into debt, but his wife, because it meant her welfare and her children’s welfare, took a great deal of interest in the corporation and its management and very often, on the financial side, became far more capable than her husband. But once you introduced limited liability, you see, then there was no necessity for the shareholders to be responsible, he had protection from irresponsibility. And there was no need for the wife to be concerned about her husband’s business, because, well, he was only involved to the extent that he had any money in it. This led to the present financial situation where you had the boom and bust mentality. You can expand on endless credit because you don’t have to worry about liability. And today according to a report that was shipped to me recently, it is about a 70-80 page report on the precarious financial balance of major corporations, most major companies today are so much in debt and living so much on borrowed money that some of the biggest corporations in the country have a three day liquidity, a three day liquidity, just enough cash for 3 days operation.

Well, this is a very critical situation, and this is the problem that we face today; in one of our Chalcedon Reports of about a year or so ago, he pointed out the IBM which was one of the most conservative corporations, needs of $600 million in new credit every year. It’s borrowing more and more each year to pay off old debts with cheaper money.

Now, this has come about precisely because of limited liability, and limited liability works together with the old legal revolution of Coke in the Anglo-Saxon countries and others on the Continent, to push the women out of any responsibility, and then to make the man irresponsible as well in the exercise of his business, because unlimited debt is the order of the day. And this is why of course disaster is written into the economic life of nations today.

Well, our time is more than up, and we are adjourned.

i. H.C. Leupold, Exposition of Genesis (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1942), 129.

ii. H.C. Leupold, Exposition of Genesis (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1942), 130.

iii. Genesis 2:18, Robert Young. The Holy Bible Containing The Old And New Testaments, Young’s Literal Translation. Covenant Press, 2017.

iv. R. Payne Smith, “Genesis,” in Ellicott, I, 21.

v. 1 Corinthians 11:10. James Moffatt. The New Testament A New Translation By James Moffatt. Parallel Edition with Introduction. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1922.

vi. "If I were to marry again," Luther vowed, "I would hew me a meek wife out of stone: for I doubt whether any other kind be meek."

Edith Simon. Luther Alive; Martin Luther and the Making of the Reformation. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1968, p. 336.

vii. Charles Neilson Gattey, The Bloomer Girls (New York: Coward-McCann, 1968), p. 21.

viii. Gage, F. D., “Sojourner Truth.” New York Independent. April 23, 1863: 1.

ix. Proverbs 31:28. Gerrit Verkuyl, trans. The Holy Bible, The Berkeley Version, In Modern English. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1959.

x. Proverbs 31:30. Gerrit Verkuyl, trans. The Holy Bible, The Berkeley Version, In Modern English. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1959.

xi. Edith Simon, Luther Alive, p. 337. Simon obviously means “celibacy” where she speaks of “chastity.”

xii.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

xiii.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

xiv.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

xv.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

xvi.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

xvii.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

xviii.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

xix.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

xx.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.