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Summary: A follow up, summarizing, clarifying paper/sermon, addressing "head-body," "submission," and husbands and wives. For those who wanted more.

A note to my readers: I wrote this in preparation for the past two sermons, (1) as a way of collecting my own thoughts, (2) to make a resource for those who wanted more, (3) to link it to my earlier study of 1 Corinthians 11, and (4) to pull the arguments all together from three separate sermons on husbands and wives into one place.

I wasn't sure going in how exactly I'd use it-- as a follow-up session summarizing everything, as a rough outline I'd broadly/loosely work off of in a third sermon, or as something I could email to those who wanted to pursue all of this in more depth. It's written to some degree in the format of a seminar paper, as one might find at an academic conference in biblical studies.

It ended up being something I had to write to make sense of all of it, and I learned a lot from the whole experience, and ended up in a different place-- and perhaps most importantly, ended up resolving to be a better, different sort of husband.

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Introduction:

Much of contemporary NT scholarship about the nature of the relationship between husbands and wives seems to be stuck in an unhappy, unsettled debate over the meaning of one single sentence in Paul's letters: "The husband is the head of the wife."

This paper attempts to resolve this debate by starting in Ephesians 5:15-33, and then working secondarily to 1 Corinthians 11. It argues that Paul is using a head-body metaphor to push husbands to love their wife-body, and wives to respect their husband-head who loves/cherishes/sacrifices for them.

I thought much of this paper was new, but I have apparently independently come to many of the same conclusions as R.S. Cervin, "On the Significance of Kephale ('head'): A Study of the Abuse of One Greek Word," (PriscPap30, no. 2 (2016): 8-20. In the end, it's only my understanding of 1 Corinthians 11:3 that's perhaps new.

Cervin's article is available here:

https://juniaproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Cervin-Sig-of-Kephale.pdf

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Body:

In the endless debates between complementarians/mutualists and egalitarians/hierarchicalists, there are certain well-defined battles lines. Two of the key questions revolve around the word "head."

What does it mean that the husband is the head of the wife?

What does "head" mean?

The meaning of "head" is central to the debate because husbands are elsewhere never given a label that has connotations of authority or power. In churches, it's common to hear men called "leaders," or "servant leaders," or "heads of the house," but the NT itself doesn't do this. If "head" doesn't mean leader, it seems likely that complementarian approaches to marriage fall apart. Without the "head," they have nothing to hang their hat on, so to speak.

A search of lexicons, the Greek Old Testament, and classical Greek literature, has typically led scholars to conclude that there are four possible choices for the meaning of "head" when it's used in connection with husbands and wives. Head might mean "ruler," "source," "beginning," or "prominence." Possibly, there might be overlap among these four things, with head meaning more than one of those four things at once, but broadly speaking, those are typically considered to be the four choices.

Head as Ruler

Head clearly means ruler in three places in the Greek Old Testament. In Judges 11:4-11, the people desire Jephthah to be a ruler (?????, verse 8) over them, and in verse 11 that desire is fulfilled-- the people place Jephthah over them (?p' a?t???) as head (?efa??) and as leader (??????? ). In 2 Kings 22:44/Psalm 17:44, King David looks back on his life, and speaks of himself as being the head of nations.

He then elaborates on this in the next parallel line by saying that a people he didn't know "served" him. The significance of a few other references is debated [Jeremiah 38:7 (31:7); Lamentations 1:5]; Deut. 28:12-13, 43-44).

It's sometimes argued that "head" means "ruler" in Plato's description of Philadelphos as being the "head of kings" (Moses 2.29-30). However, as Cervin notes, Philadelphos is dead when this was written about him, and it's unclear how a dead king could rule over living kings. More likely, Philadelphos is remembered as being "prominent" above the other kings.

It should be noted that "head" as "ruler" is used exclusively, and only in three places, to describe political leaders in the Greek OT, and that it's never used to describe husbands. It should also be noted that Greek philosophers never use head to mean "ruler."

Head as Source

The evidence for "head" as source is more complicated. I find myself persuaded by Cervin (page 3 of his article) that the arguments for "head" as "source" are not actually that strong. There is famous fragment of a poem, The Orphic Fragment 21, which describes Zeus as follows: "Zeus is the head, Zeus is in the middle..." This is often taken to mean that Zeus is the source of all life. However, rather than take "head" here as meaning that Zeus is the source of all living things, it seems better to take "head" as "beginning." Zeus is the beginning; Zeus is in the middle; presumably, Zeus will be (in) the end." Similarly, Herodotus, in Histories 4.91, describes the "headsprings" of the Tearus as giving the best and most beautiful waters. This could just as easily be understood as the "beginnings" of the Tearus, without a focus on how all the water in that river is sourced from the "headsprings."

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