Beau M. Vonira has been advancing the thesis the family is not organized around blood relations, insisting instead that lineage and inheritance in the Bible is “always ethical/judicial, that is, by adoption.”
His position that wants to pretend that adoptions, being exceptions to the blood basis of families, prove that blood is meaningless to define families is beyond comprehensible. If not for blood bonds, there would be no families and thus there could be no adoption into families. Families have to exist by blood before adoption, as a gracious exception, can even be considered, just as the Israelites had to descend from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob by blood before the Gentiles could be adopted.
Mr. Vonira’s continues to pursue the “exception as the rule” fallacy. For example, having your prophet marry a whore is an exception. Having your prophet strip and run around naked is an exception. Surely everyone can see that exceptions are not the basis upon which we can overthrow the rule.
We gladly concede that exceptions exist. Sons can be disinherited. Adoption does occur. But to suggest that such exceptions overthrow the rule so that lineage and inheritance are normatively not by ties of blood and kin is to agree, in principle, with those today who are insisting that a Franken-family is just as much a family as a blood family.
