Canter Bridge

Of all the possible exemptions from military service that one a man might imagine, delighting his new wife might seem the least probable and the most appealing.

If a man has recently married, he must not be sent to war or have any other duty laid on him. For one year he is to be free to stay home and bring happiness to the wife he has married.

Thus does Deuteronomy’s prescription for an integrated society take aim at the peril of absence. Solitude, after all, was the Primordial Man’s first enemy in the early pages of Genesis, a threat long before the serpent appeared. The lawgiver here picks up that threat and assures that the company of the home outranks the camaraderie of the battlefield. Though it may be too much to posit a neat hierarchy of social duties, one that privileges the family over the nation, it is only a small leap to see such social theory beginning its gestation here.

The text does not stipulate just how the man is to accomplish merriness for his wife. Perhaps the ambiguity is the arrangement’s chief virtue, allowing for the end to prevail over any number of detailed prescriptions that might exalt the means.

Clearly, the husband’s presence with her lies at the core: one imagines that his role is economic, custodial, sexual, and emotional. Perhaps he endorses her new state as a married woman and eases her transition from a more subsidiary kind of daughterly dependence to the robust camaraderie of a householder on her way to becoming a matriarch.

She is not to make this journey alone, even at the considerable cost of one less set of arms out there where Edomites lurk and Moabites besiege.

It is a remarkable nod to matrimonial accompaniment, weighty not for its legal mass but rather for its triumph over an urgency that might have seemed far more pressing. Warfare, like the serpent, might have been supposed to inflict the greatest harm.

Solitude, we are asked to imagine, stings more lethally.