For many, marriage is a sacrament or a covenant given by God, an institution that is rooted in love and gives rise to more love through the interweaving of families and sometimes the nurture of children. For many of my conversation partners in the past three weeks, the notion that trafficked girls could be sold into marriage was incomprehensible. Some of my work in the past three weeks has been to go back to biblical texts that call for, permit, assume and regulate the abduction and rape of girls and women into marriage. I have done this work not to proclaim these rape marriages as normative or even consistent with my understanding of God but to expose the deep and ancient roots of the erasure of the humanity of women and to identify those sentiments in holy Scripture.

Abduction marriages represent the most extreme form of patriarchal marriage. But they are not its sole expression. Whenever marriage is recognized without the consent of the woman or, when the bride is not even a woman but a child, that is also patriarchal marriage. The marriage of little girls, whether pubescent or prepubescent, is patriarchal. Structures in cultures in which a man, usually a father, gives his daughter to another man are patriarchal. The language “who gives this woman to be married?” Is a continuing remnant of patriarchal marriage that is part of many civil and religious ceremonies.

Patriarchy is not confined to antiquity, to texts with their origin in antiquity, “other” religions, cultures or foreign places. Patriarchy, like racism, undergirds our culture.