Le Nozze Di Figaro

Just a few years after Americans won their war of independence from the British, Mozart created his beloved comedic opera, The Marriage of Figaro. The original Italian name appears in the subject line; the Italian noun “nozze” means marriage. Could “nozze” be etymologically related to the word for marriage in the Lord’s language, Hebrew, “nossei”? Almost certainly.

We see the word “nossei” being used for marriage here:

And now, you shall not give your daughters to their sons, neither shall you marry their daughters to your sons… (Ezra 9:12)

One of the fascinating things about Hebrew is that it is the only language in which a homonym’s multiple meanings are closely related. For instance, in English, the homonym “bank” can mean a river bank and a place to keep your money. There is no logical connection between the two meanings. However, in Hebrew, the homonym “nossei” has another meaning which is very closely related to its first meaning “marry”.

The second meaning is to carry, as in to carry something heavy. We see it here:

This is the service of the Gershonite families to serve and to carry. They shall carry the curtains… (Numbers 4:24-25)

We now know axiomatically that carry and marry are very closely related (and not because they rhyme!). But what does it mean?

What it means is that we now have the tools with which to solve one of the biggest mysteries of modern life. Why in this advanced day and age do almost no marriages occur as a result of the bride proposing to the groom? After more than six decades of radical feminism, close to zero women drop to one knee and proclaim, “Please accept this Rolex watch and make me the happiest gal in Oregon by becoming my husband.”

Today women fly large passenger jets, and they climb to the tower tops of decaying wind turbines. They can do whatever they like. But they can’t propose marriage to men? What prohibits them from doing so?

The way that God created men and women, that’s what. Should you be a trifle uncomfortable with such a God-centric view, it’s okay if you say that it is nature itself which decreed that women proposing marriage to men will hardly ever work. (See “Proposal Fails” on YouTube and Reddit and you will discover, as I did, that the overwhelming majority of disastrous ‘proposal fails’ involve women proposing to men. It simply usually doesn’t work. But why not?

To explain this, let’s revisit the marry-carry connection. Let’s also acknowledge that in today’s damaged society, the economic and financial circumstances in which men and women marry and raise families are far from ideal. If they could but swing it, most women would love to be caring for their families and orchestrating their homes rather than enduring morning and evening rush hours.

To do so they would have to be married to men who regard supporting their wives and children as a huge honor. Such men, for they would have to be real men, build up their wives and delight in their children. However, let us recognize, they would be men carrying a very big weight. From the time they are little children, girls enjoy sitting and talking with one another while boys are building, climbing, fighting, or otherwise ‘doing’. Part of the weight that men carry is that they are judged by their accomplishments, by their ‘doings’.

This is the very reason that many single men offer as an explanation for why they do not marry. Marrying means carrying. Primary responsibility for the safety of a woman in the face of brutal predators lies with her husband. Primary responsibility for financial stability rests with the husband. Few wives want it to be different.

You can’t comfortably invite someone else to assume a weighty load. You can of course politely request as a humble supplicant. A woman might gently ask a nearby male passenger for help in hoisting a suitcase onto the overhead rack. But that is not the tone that is built into a marriage proposal. If the lady passenger requests her fellow traveler to carry her luggage, she cannot do so in a tone that suggests that she is bestowing an honor.

It follows that a man can easily ask a woman to marry him; he joyfully wishes to assume the weight of having a wonderful wife. However, the other way around can fill the man with sheer terror. And more than one male recipient of his lady’s marriage proposal has fled the scene, vanishing over the horizon, leaving behind an utterly humiliated woman.

Just as ancient Jewish wisdom suggests, for the man, marrying is carrying.

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