A Man’s Place in the Home: A Biblical Perspective

Living in Exile

“Reflect on what has been assigned to you.” Sirach 3:22

Today, fewer than half of adult American women are married. While that percentage was notably higher in the 70s, I witnessed firsthand a key feature of the shift away from marriage and home life. In a public grade school in a left-leaning community in suburban Maryland, my family’s support of the candidacy of Ronald Reagan did not go unnoticed. One teacher took pleasure in haranguing me for my backward views. From her, I heard that “a woman’s place is in the House, and in the Senate too!”

It seems this slogan had the dual function of ridiculing the purported traditional view of women while cleverly showcasing a new, improved view. I don’t think I had ever heard the saying “a woman’s place is in the house.” It seems another dual function of my teacher’s slogan was to inform me of my own outdated view and to chastise me for it. I remember feeling confused, embarrassed, and unsure of what to think.

Today, I often think about the complexity of the widespread rejection of “a woman’s place in the home.” Around the same time I was getting schooled in Maryland, Wendell Berry offered a trenchant observation in The Unsettling of America (1977):

The suffering of women is noticed, is noticeable, because it has no considerable status of compensation. If we removed the status and compensation from the destructive exploits we classify as “manly,” men would be found to be suffering as much as women. They would be found to be suffering for the same reason: they are in exile from the communion of men and women…

Many who attack traditional home life, as well as those who defend it, focus on a woman’s place in the home, and her liberation or alienation therefrom, without reckoning with the dramatic shift in the nature and practices of the home as such. Consequently, we have almost completely missed or ignored a man’s alienation from the brave new home. In reality, both men and women are alienated from home, and so also from one another.

Berry indicates a major reason why. Men and women are captivated by “the destructive exploits we classify as ‘manly.’” Even if we back off from Berry’s term “destructive,” the fact remains that the things commonly sought and praised today are alien to, if not also at odds with, the traditional home. For instance, the valiant efforts of many well-intentioned men and women notwithstanding, the demands of “career” advancement and success often stand in opposition to the demands of home life. That this is taken as standard and acceptable—just one of the “normal” challenges of life—says much about our society and has consequences evident all around us.

Eviscerated in theory and practice, the household today is no longer the richly complex and profoundly human project that explains and justifies complementary roles expressive of womanhood and manhood. It is no surprise then the suggestion that a wife has a unique connection to home came to be seen as denigrating. By the same token, the idea that manhood is intimately tied to what a man does in the home became simply far-fetched.

The current cultural mood regards as perfectly normal that both man and woman are away from home most of the time pursuing their careers, their self-improvement, and even their leisure. Home is a place to take off their shoes and rest when they are done with their “job” and other commitments, or perhaps a headquarters from which to outsource everything from food prep to conversation to child-rearing.

According to a largely forgotten wisdom and practice, shared life in a household—a complex and demanding community of daily life—is the communion from which we all are in exile. From this vantage, it turns out that man, too, has a significant place in the home. Rediscovering and restoring the household is not simply a matter of fine-tuning our “priorities.” It calls for a radically different understanding and practice of life in the home, and so also in the professional world—one that is at once new and very old. For women and men.

Household in the Wisdom Literature

“By wisdom a house is built.” Proverbs 24:3

The wisdom literature in Scripture offers a compelling account of the “communion of men and women” at home. This account fits with a transcultural and trans-epochal model of household, and it renders intelligible two complementary, serious roles in the home. In Wisdom, Cosmos, and Cultus in the Book of Sirach, Jordan Schmidt, O.P., suggests that according to a divine plan, the household is a primary context for the daily formation of wisdom and virtue. It is no surprise, then, that both man and woman have therein a place uniquely demanding of their attention and constitutive of their own flourishing.

Proverbs highlights the wisdom of a good wife, and along with Sirach is replete with very concrete works (such as seeking wool and flax, considering a field and buying it, opening her hand to the poor, as well as attending to children) which, just as the works of physicians or manual artisans, are a divinely ordained manifestation and cultivation of wisdom.

Discovering the role of man in the household calls for a close examination, since there is no pericope in Sirach or Proverbs lauding the good husband as such. One might conclude that the good wife runs the home, overseeing its essential functions, while her husband pursues his own work, more or less like the 1950s model of home life. But this post-Industrial commonplace is not the historical norm; or in any case, there is a time-tested alternative going back as far as history reaches wherein the husband and his work are more proximate to, and integrated with, life in the home.

A careful reading of Sirach reveals a man intimately involved in significant household activities largely absent from the modern home, including the purportedly “traditional” home of the early to mid-20^th century. Significantly, Ben Sira’s teachings are directed primarily to men who are preparing to be scribes. Surely these scribes—like most contemporary men with significant engagements outside the home—had much that pulled them away from the duties of home life; presumably more, even, than the practitioners of the medical and manual arts that Ben Sira describes.

Even so, he paints a picture and indeed gives instructions for a man deeply engaged in the daily life of home while having significant obligations beyond it. Here, being a good husband and father is no “after-hours” labor, and a man’s work beyond the home must be well integrated with his serious obligations in the home. Three aspects of what a man does, according to Ben Sira make this clear. And while the Hebrew scribe’s life will necessarily be remote in certain ways for men of today, these essential features can characterize a man’s place in the home in any age.

What a Man Does

“Enjoy life with the wife whom you love” (Ecclesiastes 9:9)

First, a man performs complex and regular work in the home to provision it, seemingly regardless of the scribe’s need for leisure to pursue his studies.

• “Do not hate toilsome labor, or farm work, which were created by the Most High” (Sirach 7:15)

• “Do you have cattle? Look after them; if they are profitable to you, keep them” (Sirach 7:22)

• “While you are still alive and have breath in you, do not let anyone take your place. For it is better that your children should ask from you than that you should look to the hand of your sons” (Sirach 33:20–21)

Here we see a man who is practiced in the agricultural arts. To what extent specifically agricultural work is necessary or fitting for a husband across cultures and times is a topic worth considering. But this much seems clear: providing for the needs of the household, and this at least in part by works very much in and of the household, is a point of obligation, and to fail in this or simply leave it to his wife would be a disgrace.

Second, a man serves the broader community in more direct ways, depending on his station.

• “He [a scribe] will serve among the great and appear before rulers; he will travel through the lands of foreign nations…” (Sirach 39:4)

• “And give the physician his place, for the Lord created him; let him not leave you, for there is need of him” (Sirach 38:12)

• “Without them [manual artisans] a city cannot be established, and men can neither sojourn nor live there” (Sirach 38:32)

Clearly, these three classes of men have works that are at least somewhat distinct from their work in the household. While these works also support life in the home, they are also ways to serve broader society. The household is not the only or even the ultimate context of life. A married man’s service to others—and in the end, this is especially constitutive of any person’s flourishing—has a clearly bifocal character: the household and the broader community. Ben Sira’s directives to his students indicate that both must be given their full due.

Yet these two obligations, while surely calling for something of a “balancing act” a father of any era could relate to, were two interwoven parts in a complex whole rather than, in more modern fashion, two opposing demands. His attention to his wife and children in a well-functioning home and his labors outside the home are simply distinct aspects of cultivating wisdom in himself and others, and so of being a good Jew and a good man. There is no hint in Sirach of a man’s work being abstracted or separated from home as though what goes on there is simply or even primarily his wife’s domain. The household remains very much a shared project and the main context of enacting their married life. And nothing makes this so clear as the third feature of a man’s role, namely, as a father.

Third, a man teaches and disciplines his children.

• “Do you have children? Discipline them, and make them obedient from their youth” (Sirach 7:23)

• “He who teaches his son will make his enemies envious, and will glory in him in the presence of friends” (Sirach 30:3)

• “Give him no authority in his youth and do not ignore his errors” (Sirach 30:11)

• “A daughter keeps her father secretly wakeful, and worry over her robs him of sleep” (Sirach 42:9)

• “Give a daughter in marriage; you will have finished a great task. But give her to a man of understanding” (Sirach 7:25)

• “Keep strict watch over a headstrong daughter…” (Sirach 42:11)

This is a man intimately involved in the day-to-day life of his children. Teaching and disciplining youth—proverbially difficult and complex tasks—are not for the occasionally engaged father. In addition to positive formation, he must notice and address any waywardness. No wonder the man is losing sleep. Any attentive parent of a teenager can relate to this. Marrying off a daughter to a good man is the completion of “a great task,” clearly a years-long task he has not been exercising by proxy.

Surely, a man’s task of forming his children in wisdom, alongside growing in wisdom with his wife, is the deeper reason for his work in provisioning the home. By an astounding natural plan, this more mundane work can occasion the presence so important to the work of teaching and disciplining.

Arguably, the clearest indication of a man’s profound and extensive role in his home is the conviction that “a man will be known through his children” (Sirach 11:28). This only makes sense if actively raising his children is at the very center of what he does. Near the end of Sirach in what the Greek text calls the “Hymn in Honor of Our Ancestors” we read, “Their descendants stand by the covenants” (44:10). Men are praised for the character of their children, and their particular joy and glory is in the fidelity of their children and children’s children.

Of course a father’s relationship with his children neither bypasses nor surpasses that with his wife: “Children and the building of a city establish a man’s name, but a blameless wife is accounted better than both” (Sirach 40:19). Such a wife is a gift of the Lord, but surely not one bestowed at random. If Ben Sira has it that “she will be granted among the blessings of the man who fears the Lord” (26:3), it is reasonably inferred that the “man who fears the Lord” is precisely the one who knows how to cultivate his relationship with his wife in the shared work of their home, especially in forming their children in wisdom.

Precisely how men and women can forge a robust household, integrating what they do in the home with what they do outside it, will require careful consideration, especially today. Economic constraints, as well as the power of now long-entrenched practices and cultural expectations of men and women, pose significant challenges.

The starting point, which calls for intentionality, perseverance, and prudence, is the ordinary, shared activities of men and women in the home. What we need now is a clear vision for and engagement in man’s place in the home, which is key for his rightly integrated life, a prophylactic to over-commitment, and the foundation for his duties beyond the home. Wisdom literature provides the principles of such an understanding and practice. Teachers, pastors, and anyone concerned with strengthening families and addressing the epidemic of unhappiness in all age groups do well to promote rediscovery and renewal of a man’s place in the home, something that can and should be ordinary.

Home is the primordial communion of men and women, because there we discover and enact a divine plan for making people wise and virtuous—the young, the old, the in-between, and ourselves—through daily practices chalked out by human nature.

(Note: This essay was published originally on the “What We Need Now” Substack in slightly different form and is republished here with kind permission.)