"For from the beginning it was the will of God that, as soon as more families arose, the man would leave his father and mother and would choose a wife as his helpmeet not from within but from outside the parental family, from another family. The wonderful expansion of the human race, the infinite variety among people, and the inexhaustible richness of relationships between households and families, generations and peoples, are all due to this divine will. Every marriage blends various psychological gifts and distinct physical strengths, becoming thereby a new source of a particular fullness of life....After the flood the descendants of Noah, who at that point still constituted one people and were still bound together by one language and by the same vocabulary, settled in the land of Shinar, which lay in southern Babylonia. But then later, as punishment for building the tower, their language was confused, and the small human race was split up into groups, tribes, or nations and dispersed from Babylonia across the entire earth. From then on, every nation went its own way and underwent its own development. All of them took along from their common dwelling place a treasury of traditions and ideas, morals and customs, abilities and capacities, which have been partially preserved in the culture of the nations. But they nevertheless moved away from each other, and gradually became more isolated from each other, eventually becoming frequent enemies of one another. A significant portion of human history involved warfare among tribes, races, and nations. Therefore the life of marriage and family naturally developed among the various peoples in quite different ways. One cannot put all the people from different regions of the earth and in various periods of history on one line and treat them all in the same way. There were peoples whose family life displayed a relative purity and chastity, and there were others among whom it was perverted in a terrible manner. Even among the same people favorable and unfavorable circumstances appeared together, just as now and then by virtue of special circumstances a people can experience moral improvement, so too it happens not infrequently that a people that has achieved a high level of flourishing and welfare nonetheless through prosperity and abundance has deteriorated and declined in terms of religion and morality, in terms of home life and family life. The eye of the historian must always be unprejudiced and fully open for assessing this extraordinary great diversity of life."
Herman Bavinck, The Christian Family, Chapter 3
Also: "Society corresponds most closely to the family; even apart from sin, society would have developed from the family, and the relationships within which society is manifested are expansions and indications of the fundamental forms found in the family. Authority and obedience, independence and subordination, equality and inequality, correspondence and variation, unity of nature and diversity of gifts and callings -- all these have been present in the family from the very beginning, and in no sense came into existence as a result of sin." Bavinck, The Christian Family
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