Bible Verses About Marriage

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

Three verbs in a fixed sequence and the first is a departure. Leaving comes before uniting, which makes a public separation from the household of origin the precondition rather than an afterthought. Plenty of marriages fail at step one and never get audited for it, because nobody reads the verse as a sequence.

The LORD God also said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make for him a suitable helper.”

"Not good" is the striking phrase, because everything up to this point in the chapter has been called good. It is the first negative assessment in the Bible, and the thing being assessed is solitude. The word translated helper is used elsewhere mostly of God, which is not the connotation English gives it.

Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”

Ten words, and the subject of the first verb is God rather than the couple. What is being prohibited is separating something described as already joined — the prohibition addresses a third party as much as the two people, which is why it was originally said in an argument about who had the authority to dissolve a marriage.

Enjoy life with your beloved wife all the days of the fleeting life that God has given you under the sun—all your fleeting days. For this is your portion in life and in your labor under the sun.

The instruction is to enjoy, and the qualifier attached is bleak: all the days of the fleeting life God has given you under the sun. Ecclesiastes is not being romantic. It is arguing that because the whole thing is brief and largely unexplained, the marriage is one of the few things worth actually attending to.

Marriage should be honored by all and the marriage bed kept undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterers.

"Honoured by all" is addressed to everyone, including the unmarried — the whole community is being made responsible for how marriages are treated. That is a wider assignment than a rule for couples, and it sits oddly with how privately most people now think about the subject.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her

The comparison sets the ceiling and it is a death. Paul had a range of available analogies for how a husband should love and chose the one that ends at the cross. Nothing in the sentence is about authority — the verb is love and the measure attached is what it cost.

In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.

The standard shifts from Christ to something more testable: your own body. Everyone knows how attentively they treat their own comfort, hunger and pain, and Paul makes that the benchmark. It is a lower bar than the previous verse and considerably harder to claim you are meeting when you are not.

Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.

Eleven words and half of them are a prohibition. Do not be harsh — the word covers bitterness and a sharpened manner, the everyday version rather than the dramatic one. Paul evidently expected the instruction to love to be affirmed and the tone of voice to go unexamined.

Husbands, in the same way, treat your wives with consideration as a delicate vessel, and with honor as fellow heirs of the gracious gift of life, so that your prayers will not be hindered.

Two things are said at once and they cut against each other: treat her as a delicate vessel, and as a fellow heir. The first is about care, the second is about status, and Peter puts them in the same sentence so neither can be used to cancel the other. The passage ends by tying it to whether his prayers are hindered.

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Nine words, mutual in both directions, and grammatically the head of everything that follows — the household instructions hang off this participle. The reason given is reverence for Christ rather than the worth of the other person, which means it does not depend on them having earned it.

The sentence runs on from here into the instructions for wives, husbands, children and slaves. Ancient Greek did not use paragraph breaks; the chapter division was added in the thirteenth century.

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, His body, of which He is the Savior.

The word "submit" is not in verse 22 in the Greek; it is carried down from verse 21. And the headship analogy Paul reaches for is immediately defined by what he says next about Christ — giving himself up for her. The model is supplied in the same paragraph, and it is not a model of command.

Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.

The Colossians version is shorter and carries a qualifier the Ephesians one does not: as is fitting in the Lord. That clause sets a boundary rather than issuing a blanket instruction, and it is followed immediately by the command to husbands not to be harsh. Paul writes them as a pair every time.

Nevertheless, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

Paul's own summary of the passage, and he assigns different words to each: love for the husband, respect for the wife. Note what he drops when compressing — the language of headship and submission does not survive into his one-sentence version of his own argument.

A wife of noble character, who can find? She is far more precious than rubies.

The Hebrew phrase behind "noble character" is a strength word, used elsewhere of soldiers and armies. What follows in the chapter is a woman running a business, buying land and trading profitably. The passage is usually read as a checklist for wives; it was written as a poem in praise of one.

Better to live on a corner of the roof than to share a house with a quarrelsome wife.

The proverb is aimed at wives and so are its neighbours, which is a real asymmetry in the text rather than a translation artefact. What survives the asymmetry is the observation: the writer would rather be physically uncomfortable than share space with constant conflict, which is an honest account of what it costs.

The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband.

The symmetry is the point and it was unusual for its time. Husband to wife, and likewise wife to husband — Paul states the obligation twice in identical terms, in a legal culture where the two parties had very different standing. The word he uses is duty, which frames it as owed rather than granted.

with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love,

"Bearing with" means putting up with, over time, without resolution. It is the verse for a difficulty that is not going to be fixed and is not going to end.

Bear with one another and forgive any complaint you may have against someone else. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.

The standard set is "as the Lord forgave you", which removes any calculation about whether the complaint was proportionate.

Above all, love one another deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.

Covering over is not the same as forgetting or excusing. The offence stays underneath; it stops being on display.

“For I hate divorce,” says the LORD, the God of Israel. “He who divorces his wife covers his garment with violence,” says the LORD of Hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit and do not break faith.

The second clause is the one nobody quotes and it identifies the offence: covering your garment with violence. Malachi is prosecuting men who discarded the wives of their youth to remarry. Applied to someone leaving a marriage that was harming them, the verse is being turned to face the opposite direction from the one it was written for.

The complaint runs alongside one about blemished sacrifices. Both are charges of treachery against people the men involved had made commitments to.

Now I tell you that whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”

Jesus is answering a test question about whether a man could divorce for any reason at all — a live rabbinic dispute at the time, and the permissive side of it was being used to discard wives at will. His answer narrows the grounds sharply. The exception he names is stated, not implied.

But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, brings adultery upon her. And he who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

The phrase "brings adultery upon her" puts the consequence on the man's account rather than the woman's. In a society where a divorced woman had almost no means of support, Jesus is describing the effect of the discarding on her, which is an argument about harm rather than about a rule.

To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband. But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife.

Paul gives the instruction and then, in the same breath, provides for the case where it is not followed — but if she does, let her remain unmarried or be reconciled. He does not treat the separated person as beyond the community's reach. The parenthesis is worth noticing too: not I, but the Lord.