Sins of the flesh

[ilikeverin]

Sorry af but in all the genealogical research my wife has done the situation you talk about was extremely rare. Families have always helped out, at least we agree on that. But broken families were rare with a few exceptions and many times when you find a broken family it was when one spouse died.

The situation is one that likely differed across times, places, and families.  afleitch is right in that often family records lie about what the family situation was like, but your wife has probably also used official records, which as every genealogist knows are a lot more accurate than "recollections" (though not always... my great-grandfather's two ex-wives (!!!) in Arkansas in the early 1900s (!!!!!!!!!) never revealed their first marriages in their subsequent census records).  Still, your family tree is only an anecdote, and afleitch has statistics, though probably on European families, rather than Americans, which were different in a lot of ways...

Oh dear, there really doesn't seem to be any answer to this, is there?

[ilikeverin]

I disagree, jmfcst, on #3.  I can understand how you get your interpretation (to you, "one" means "man" in that context), but I also find Ernest's interpretation ("one" is a pronominal replacement for the noun phrase "husband" in that context) just as plausible.  Maybe using different words would make more sense.  In a part of a sentence like "...for you have had five purple orangutans, and the one you have now...", "one" clearly means "purple orangutan"; it's pointing backwards to the previous noun phrase.  That would, in a sense, force the interpretation that Ernest has, invalidating #1.

I'm not trying to cast judgment on which interpretation is correct; that's impossible without seeing the source material and knowing the language (some languages would be less ambiguous, I think), or at least looking at some other translations.

[ilikeverin]

Sigh.  Rather than needlessly teaching you Reading Comprehension 102, which is that Sometimes Things Have Multiple Interpretations, I instead looked up other translations (something which I don't think either of you have a problem with).  Indeed, whenever the verses are ever disambiguated, the text evokes the jmfcst interpretation, not the Ernest interpretation:

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So, instead of debating a point based off a passage that reads fairly ambiguously, you guys could've just looked at an alternative translation, and solved the issue right away

(of course, there is always the risk that the translator of that one is either a fail, or the "translation" is actually just some guy reading one of the old translations of the Bible and "translating" it into modern English... though that's not too likely)