Question Time with Fr John Flader
Question: The Bible speaks of Our Lady and St Joseph being “betrothed” when Jesus was conceived. How did people prepare for marriage then, and was betrothal the same as our engagement?
MARRIAGE customs in the Jewish tradition at the time of Our Lady and St Joseph were very different from ours today.
Henry Skrzyński, in his wonderful book The Jewess Mary, Mother of Jesus (Chevalier Press 1994) tells us much about these customs and I will take much of what follows from that book.
First, it was the custom that husband and wife should be of the same social class, and this was widely practised.
For this reason, marriages between close relatives, such as first or second cousins, or between uncles and nieces, were common.
Great discrepancy in age was also to be avoided.
It was customary for girls to marry around the age of fifteen and so St Joseph was probably around eighteen, for this was considered the right age for a man to marry.
According to the sages, “God curses him who is not married by twenty”.
Also, young men were advised to look not only for beauty in their prospective bride but especially for virtue.
As the book of Proverbs says, “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised” (Prov 31:30).
When young people reached the age for marriage, the parents of the two would get together and arrange for them to meet each other, usually in the company of one of their relatives.
Family arranged marriages were common in Palestine at the time, as they were and still are in many parts of the world.
With this introduction to each other, there was no commitment on anyone’s part to proceed with betrothal.
If after spending some time getting to know each other, the two young people agreed to marry, it fell to a member of the man’s family to approach the father of the woman to suggest the possibility of marriage.
If this was accepted, arrangements were made for the official betrothal, the Erusim.
On the day itself, or the day before, the heads of both families signed a document known as the Shitre Erusim, binding both parties and stipulating the amount of the woman’s dowry.
On the day of the full moon, considered especially propitious for betrothals, the man would go to the woman’s family home and hand her a small coin, as a token of her dowry, and the Shitre Erusim.
He would put a gold ring on her finger,saying: “Be thou betrothed unto me with this ring in accordance with the laws of Moses and Israel”.
From then on, the couple were officially betrothed.
The man and his family would then give presents to the woman’s father, a custom established by Abraham, when he betrothed his son Isaac to Rebekah (cf. Gen 24:53).
The woman’s father would in turn prepare a feast, attended by both families, and he would bless his daughter, that she be favoured with many sons, as Raguel did when he gave his daughter Sarah to Tobias to be his wife (cf. Tob 10:11-13).
At law, betrothed people were legally married and were already referred to as husband and wife. We see this in the gospel of St Matthew: “When his (Jesus’) mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit; and her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to send her away quietly…” (Mt 1:18-19),
During the betrothal period, the wife could be set free from the commitment only on the death of her husband or by him divorcing her.
Therefore, Joseph faced the dilemma of how to leave Mary without subjecting her to shame, and he resolved to “send her away quietly”.
After the betrothal ceremony, the wife continued to live with her parents until the wedding, which was usually a year later in the case of a woman marrying for the first time.
Widows and divorcees could wed again after three months.
During these months, the husband was expected to prepare the new home with all its furnishings, and the wife to prepare her trousseau – the clothing and linen, etc, which she would bring into the marriage.
During this time, conjugal relations and cohabitation were forbidden, and infidelity carried all the consequences of adultery.
As you can see, betrothal was different from our present-day engagement.
