Everything I will *briefly* touch in this post is there in the biblical text. And once you see it, you see it everywhere. I see it in the opening of the bible when a man “leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife”. I see it when David passes his reign to Solomon. And I see when Mary tells Jesus to turn the water into wine. As I write this, I want to tell Christian girls, those who have struggled just like me, that you don’t have to question the faith just because you only see man, after man, after man, serving the Lord in the Bible.

 

The biblical patriarchy is obvious – you can’t miss it, it’s littered all over the pages of the Bible. But it might surprise you to know that it was the women: the matriarchs, who put it there. They didn’t put a pen to paper- they did something much more influential: they created a culture that relied on remembrance to define them. And the product of that remembrance is the Bible that sits on our shelves.

This week in Genesis we are going to cover a topic that has been touched in the last three weeks: the matriarchy. And we are going to do it by really stepping into the culture in a whole new way. And when we do, we will be able to answer this question:

WHY DID LOT’S DAUGHTERS SLEEP WITH THEIR OWN FATHER? (GEN. 18:30-38)

Three weeks ago, when I started this series, I explained that Sarai, and her family would have practiced matriliny instead of patriliny. Then, in the past two weeks, I broke down Genesis 16 to explain the true source of the drama that is displayed between Hagar, Sarai, and Abram. And a major part of that explanation is that Sarai was trying to build her own household. It is because of this that Hagar and Sarai end up in a conflict with both women trying to assume the role of matriarch.