[Link to audio version]
I’ve frequently wondered what sort of religion a group of people would come up with if they were forced to do it based solely on the Bible without any prior knowledge of modern Christianity or any of its related subcultures. It would almost certainly be unrecognizable to today’s white American evangelicals. One benefit of having a long book full of complexities and contradictions is that one can find a passage from the Bible to support almost any viewpoint. But while evangelicals today drone on and on about “Biblical family values” and present the “one man, one woman” model of marriage as the clear Biblical example, that’s far from accurate.
One needs to make it only a couple pages into the Bible to find the first mention of marriage. In Genesis 1, God simply speaks man and woman into existence just like everything else in the universe. But the next chapter provides a more detailed (and seemingly independent) account of how God created Adam and Eve. After God had made Adam out of “the dust of the ground,” God paraded all of the animals before him, tasking Adam with naming them and selecting one to be his “helper.”1 Presumably, one of the things this helper would assist Adam with was procreation, given the population at the time. After no suitable partner was found among the animals, God caused Adam to fall into a deep sleep, removed one of his ribs, and used that to make Eve, apparently after a bit of chromosomal manipulation.
Adam’s response upon meeting her was less than enthusiastic: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” And as the writer goes on to explain, “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” Although this passage places no explicit limits on the number of women with whom a man can “become one flesh”2 (or the other way around), it is frequently used by evangelical Christians to support their fervent belief that marriage is to be between “one man and one woman,” thus barring both same-sex and plural marriages.
But while this is the first mention of marriage in the Bible, it’s certainly not the only one. Polygynous marriages (the specific subset of polygamy involving one man with multiple wives) are common in the Old Testament, even among those men upheld within today’s Christian church as noble patriarchs, and there’s no evidence in the text that this was discouraged. In fact, polygynous marriages are expressly permitted in Exodus 21:10, so long as the husband continues to provide for his existing wives.
Despite what today’s American evangelicals would have you believe, monogamous marriage is more of an exception than the norm in the Bible as a whole. It doesn’t take long for humans to depart from this supposedly sacred model. Adam and Eve have two sons, Cain and Abel. In a fit of rage over God’s preference for Abel’s sacrifice over his, Cain murders his younger brother who, according to the literal interpretation of Genesis that I was taught as a child, represented fully a quarter of the human population. Cain finds a wife—where she came from and exactly how the two of them were related are common questions for young evangelicals—and they have a child. Genesis 4 documents a brief genealogy from Cain to Lamech (different from the slightly longer one in Genesis 5, in which Lamech is a descendent of Adam and Eve’s third son, Seth). But either way, it’s Lamech, a member of the seventh or ninth generation of humans depending on the account, who is the first man recorded to have multiple wives. Shockingly, both of them, Adah and Zillah, are named; many women in the Old Testament are not, when their existence is acknowledged at all.3
Lamech’s son, Noah, was one of the few people that God deemed worthy of saving when he decided to destroy every living thing he had created with a global flood. Noah (reportedly 600 years old at the time) and his three sons built an ark onto which they loaded mating pairs of every kind of animal, as well as their own wives, who are both unnamed and unnumbered. After the flood waters receded and Noah and his family disembarked to copulate and repopulate the earth, there’s a long list of men and their respective sons, most of whom are reported to have lived several hundred years, before we get to the next significant character, Abram.4
Abram, whose name God would later change to Abraham, would go on to become the patriarch of three major world religions: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Abram is married to Sarai, who is described as beautiful but childless, which was a problem because God had promised Abram that his descendants would become “a great nation” blessed by God.5
Abram and Sarai aren’t strictly monogamous. When they travel together, Abram tells Sarai to lie and say she is his sister rather than his wife so that other men don’t kill him in order to take his highly desirable woman. On one of these occasions, during a trip to Egypt, the plan worked and Abram was spared. Sarai, for her part, was presented to Pharaoh and subsequently “taken into his palace.” The author leaves the rest to the reader’s imagination.6
Whatever happened in the palace, Pharaoh seemed to enjoy himself, and he rewarded Abram with sheep, cattle, donkeys, camels, and enslaved people for the use of his wife. There’s no mention of any reward for Sarai. You might correctly guess that God was angered by this whole ordeal, but you’d probably be wrong about the target of that anger. Rather than punishing Abram for pimping out his wife and lying about their relationship, God “inflicted serious diseases on Pharaoh and his household.”7
Abram and Sarai, still childless at 86 and 76 years old, respectively, were growing doubtful that Abram’s descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky. Sarai, who blamed herself entirely for the couple’s lack of children, suggested opening up the marriage even further. She had enslaved a person named Hagar, and she encouraged Abram to “go, sleep with my slave. Perhaps I can build a family through her.”8 Things got awkward (and abusive) between Sarai and Hagar when Hagar got pregnant, and Hagar fled the household. But she ran into an angel who instructed her to go back and submit to her abusive mistress, who had been the one to suggest this arrangement in the first place. The angel promised Hagar that her son would be a powerful man and that her descendants would be too numerous to count.9
But Hagar’s son, Ishmael, wasn’t the missing link between Abram and the great nation he’d been promised. In fact, Ishmael would go on to be the point of divergence between Judaism and Islam, recognized in Islam as a prophet and an ancestor of Muhammed. God appeared again to Abram, changing his name to Abraham and Sarai’s to Sarah, promising the two of them a son that they were to name Isaac, and making a covenant to multiply and bless Isaac’s descendants. Just one thing in return: Abraham, every male in his household (enslaved people included), and all of Isaac’s descendants in perpetuity would have to be circumcised.10
Abraham obliged without a fuss (although I imagine the other men were a bit more begrudging), and the tradition of circumcising male infants on the eighth day of life remains an integral part of the Jewish faith to this day. God kept his end of the deal. Sarah got pregnant and gave birth to a son named Isaac, whom Abraham dutifully circumcised. Tensions rose again between Sarah and Hagar, so Abraham coldly sent Hagar and his teenage son off into the heat of the desert with nothing more than a loaf of bread and a bottle of water.11
After Sarah’s death, Abraham decided that it was time to find Isaac a wife. He tasked a servant with returning to his homeland and finding an appropriate wife for Isaac there, as the local Canaanite women were not suitable options. The servant asked God to reveal Isaac’s future wife to him by having her offer water to him and his camels. And wouldn’t you know it, an attractive young woman—and a virgin, no less—named Rebekah did exactly that. After obtaining permission from Rebekah’s father and brother, the servant returned home and presented Rebekah to Isaac who “brought her into the tent of Sarah his mother and took Rebekah, and she became his wife, and he loved her. So Isaac was comforted after his mother's death.”12 Abraham, now 140 years old, comforted himself after Sarah’s death by marrying Keturah, who bore him six sons (and statistically, probably at least a couple daughters that the author didn’t deem worth mentioning) prior to his death at 175 years of age.13
Isaac pulls the same “she’s my sister” shit with the Philistine king Abimelech that his father had, demonstrating his willingness to sacrifice his wife’s bodily autonomy for his own safety. After struggling for 20 years with infertility, Isaac and Rebekah were blessed with twin sons, Jacob and Esau. Jacob and his mother would eventually conspire to take both the blessing and the physical inheritance that rightfully should have gone to Esau as the eldest son, if only by a hair. Esau would go on to marry two women, Judith and Basemath, and then a third, Mahalath. The latter was a Canaanite woman that he married just to troll his dad. (In Genesis 36, Esau’s wives are listed as Adah, Oholibamah, and Basemath; it’s unclear if Adah and Oholibamah are different names for Judith and Mahalath, additional women Isaac married later, or simply a counterpoint to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.)14
Once again, the responsibility for building a nation of people that would outnumber the stars had fallen on a single childless man. Jacob needed a wife. As instructed by Isaac, Jacob travels to his uncle Laban’s house to select as a wife one of his two first cousins, Leah and Rachel. Jacob moves in with Laban, falls desperately in love with Rachel, and agrees to work for Laban for seven years in exchange for the right to marry her. After this period passed, Laban hosted a feast at which he presented his daughter to Jacob who “went in to her.” But in the morning, Jacob was surprised to wake up next to Leah, not Rachel. Apparently it was customary to marry off one’s daughters in the order of their births, and Laban had taken the liberty of making that last-minute switch unilaterally. And apparently it wasn’t customary to have a lot of face-to-face interaction on one’s wedding night.15
Still desperately in love with Rachel, Jacob agrees to work for Laban for seven more years, and eventually finds himself married to both sisters. There is some clear (and understandable, to be fair) favoritism, and Leah tries desperately to win her husband’s love. She has four sons while Rachel remains childless, each time hoping this will cause Jacob to love her, but to no avail. Rachel, tormented by her own infertility, offers Jacob an enslaved person named Bilhah, suggesting that he “sleep with her so that she can bear children for me and I too can build a family through her.” Jacob obliges without protest, and has two sons with Bilhah, to Rachel’s delight.16
Not to be outdone, Leah offers Jacob one of her enslaved people, Zilpah, whom he impregnates at least twice before fathering with Leah two more sons and a daughter, Dinah, who is given a name only because of her role in an upcoming rape scene.17 Rachel eventually has a son of her own, Joseph, who would go on to be Jacob’s favorite child. She later dies while giving birth to her second son, Ben-oni, whose name Jacob changed to Benjamin immediately after Rachel’s death.18
There are many other Biblical examples of men with multiple wives. Gideon, a prominent military leader, “had 70 sons of his own, for he had many wives.”19 King David had six sons with six wives, as well as an undocumented number of concubines20 before he moved to Jerusalem and “took more concubines and wives,”21 at least some of whom God claims to have given to him.22
David’s son and successor, Solomon, famously had “seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines.” Unfortunately, though, “his wives led him astray. As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods…He followed Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molek the detestable god of the Ammonites. So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord; he did not follow the Lord completely, as David his father had done.”23 To be clear, the “evil” here was that Solomon had violated a law specific to Israel’s kings: “He shall not acquire many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away.”24 The problem wasn’t that Solomon had multiple wives; it was that he allowed them to lead him astray and turned his attention to other gods.
Proverbs 5, a poem said to have been written by Solomon, is frequently cited as support for monogamous marriage. The (male) reader is encouraged to “drink water from [his] own cistern,” and let his “waters” be his alone. He is told, “rejoice in the wife of your youth…may her breasts satisfy you always, my you ever be captivated by her love. Why be captivated, my son, by an alduteress? Why embrace the bosom of another man’s wife?” The irony of using a passage purportedly penned by a man famous for the size of his harem to promote strict monogamy somehow missed me until now. And from the context, it’s clear that the author is referring strictly to adultery, meaning sexual acts with another man’s wife, while placing no restriction on the number of wives by whose breasts one may be satisfied.
But that’s the Old Testament.
Because Christianity spun off from Judaism instead of starting from scratch, the Bible contains scriptures from two religions, and the separation between Judaism and Christianity isn’t nearly as clear as the intentionally blank page between Malachi and Matthew. Christians have debated for centuries which of the Old Testament laws supposedly delivered by God to Moses still apply today. Evangelicals insist that the Ten Commandments are still in force (although the vast majority can’t list them and certainly very few are aware that there are three sets of Ten Commandments recorded in the Bible, one of which is very different—compare Exodus 20 and Exodus 34). They frequently go so far as to want the Ten Commandments—the Exodus 20 ones, specifically—displayed in public schools, court houses, and state capitol buildings. But few of them are eager to give up their medium-rare steaks and cotton/poly blend t-shirts, or to go about their busy lives taking care to avoid chairs previously occupied by menstruating women. The “no tattoos” law, for its part, is hotly debated.
The “but that was the Old Testament” loophole is frequently used to distance Christians from the family structures that were prevalent among the patriarchs they uphold as holy men. And it’s true that polygynous marriages aren’t nearly as common in the New Testament because the culture had evolved. But despite clarifying or further restricting rules about several other topics related to sex and marriage, neither Jesus nor any of the New Testament writers prohibits polygyny. There are verses that describe how wives and husbands should relate to each other (more on these later), but none that explicitly say how many husbands or wives one may have. Genesis 2:24 (“That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.”) is referenced four times in the New Testament, misquoting it each time by adding a “two” that isn’t in the original text.25 The closest the Bible ever comes to expressly limiting a man to a single wife is three verses that require men in leadership positions within the church to be “the husband of one wife,” while not placing any restrictions on men not in leadership positions.26
Many evangelicals would be shocked to learn that Jesus himself soundly rejects what evangelicals refer to as “Biblical family values.” There’s no account of him marrying or having children. And he explicitly denounces his own family, stating that it isn’t his biological family that matters to him, but his followers:
Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.” “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”27
This wasn’t just a choice he was making for himself to further his ministry or because he knew the fate that awaited him, but rather a radical rejection of traditional family structures that he demanded of anyone that would follow him. When a potential follower asks to bury his father before following Jesus, he replies, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”28 And when another wanted to say goodbye to their family, Jesus’s response was, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”29 He asks his disciples, “Do you think I came to bring peace on earth?” immediately answering his own question: “No, I tell you, but division. From now on…they will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother.”30
Jesus even went so far as to say that in order to follow him, one must hate their family: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.”31 Following Jesus was a full-time gig. No distractions were allowed, and there was to be no looking back.
When his disciples, after hearing the additional restrictions Jesus placed on divorce, mused that it seemed like it might be better not to marry in the first place, Jesus replied, “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given…The one who can accept this should accept it.”32
Or, to paraphrase: yeah, if you can avoid marriage (and sex), that’s probably for the best.
His followers took this radical departure from the culture of their time seriously. Acts 2 records how, soon after Jesus ascended into heaven, the early Christians shifted their focus from what had been their traditional family unit to a communal lifestyle, selling their possessions, pooling their resources, meeting “together in the temple courts,” and sharing meals together in their homes.
Because there wasn’t much time. The Christian church has been in pending apocalypse mode from the very beginning. Early Christians believed the second coming of Christ was imminent, as do many Christians today, despite 2,000 years of evidence to the contrary. In fairness, Jesus had told them directly that he would return while at least some of them were still alive.33 And perhaps because of this, there wasn’t a lot of emphasis on family, at least according to the unmarried and celibate apostle Paul, who wrote that “because of the present crisis, I think that it is good for a man to remain as he is. Are you pledged to a woman? Do not seek to be released. Are you free from such a commitment? Do not look for a wife.”34
But while Paul held that it would be best for Christians to remain celibate in order to dedicate their lives fully to the Lord’s work, he acknowledged that most of them would end up falling into sexual sin, reluctantly concluding “as a concession” that it would be best for them to marry, if for no other reason than to have a sanctioned sexual outlet. While he denies both partners bodily autonomy, he at least does it equally, giving each spouse ownership of the other’s body, and assigning regular sex as a duty to help each other avoid the temptation to stray.
But evangelicals today certainly aren’t encouraging lifelong celibacy. Despite the teachings of Jesus and Paul that a single life in service to God is the ideal, you won’t hear that preached from today’s pulpits. Marrying young and having children is the clear expectation in evangelical churches, especially for women. Single women, after reaching a certain age, are often made to feel as if they aren’t fulfilling a duty to marry and procreate.
I was recently trying to remember if the pressure to marry young was explicitly stated, or just a natural outcome of purity culture, and then I read Joshua Harris’s Not Even a Hint, in which he says to his young readers, “Here’s my advice: Get married.” He goes on to note, “The world is increasingly delaying and avoiding marriage—we should do the opposite. No one should be ashamed to want to marry young and enjoy the wife (or husband) of their youth. Marriage is great. Sex in marriage is terrific! We’re not just called to guard the marriage bed; I think more Christian singles should be running toward it!”35
Purity culture’s prohibition against premarital sex is a powerful motivator for people to marry young. But in addition to this individual purity, it promotes purity on a macro level as well. The goal isn’t only to keep Nathan and Lauren from fooling around. The underlying mission, you may have guessed based on the theme of this book, is to uphold the existing power hierarchy. For the church, more people means more power (and more votes). And “Biblical family values” have roots most people aren’t aware of.
As a non-profit with over $100 million of revenue in 2020, Focus on the Family is a powerful force in promoting and politically lobbying for exactly the causes one would expect: abstinence-only sex education, traditional gender roles, creationism, prayer in schools, and crisis pregnancy centers. Also as expected, they oppose abortion, extra-marital sex, feminism, divorce, a thing they call “transgenderism,” and the rights of LGBTQIA+ people to marry, parent, or adopt children.36
But it’s likely that fewer readers are aware—I certainly wasn’t—that prior to founding Focus on the Family, Dr. James Dobson worked as an assistant to California eugenicist Paul Popenoe, who founded the Human Betterment Foundation. Popenoe was a strong advocate for the forced sterilization of those he called the “mental unfit” in asylums, as well as others that he classified as “waste humanity.”37 He wrote a paper in 1934 titled “The German Sterilization Law,” in which he praised Adolf Hitler’s eugenics policies and lamented that Hitler himself wasn’t married.38
When Popenoe opened the American Institute of Family Relations (AIFR) in 1930, he introduced marriage counseling to the United States, modeling it after German marriage counseling programs designed to promote racial purity. Historian Dr. Audrey Clare Farley writes that Popenoe’s goal was “to improve marital harmony and remove what he thought to be obstacles to white reproduction, such as rape, masturbation, pornography, female frigidity, and feminist yearnings.” Popenoe would go on to counsel “white couples on the importance of strict gender-norms and same-race marriage, training psychologists, clergymen (many Baptist and Mormon), and youth group leaders—his new allies in the racial betterment project—to do the same.” He also became a prominent columnist in Ladies’ Home Journal, writing about the success stories from his counseling programs, in much the same way Dobson would later do with Focus on the Family and the dozens of wildly popular books he wrote about parenting and family life.39
As public support for eugenics was waning and forced sterilization was falling out of favor, Popenoe shifted gears to the somewhat more palatable “positive eugenics,” a strategy that sought to ensure that the white race stayed dominant by growing it, rather than by the genocide of those deemed “unfit.” Despite the fact that Popenoe was an atheist, evangelical leaders latched onto his ideas and began encouraging their audiences of white, cis-gender, heterosexual, married Christian couples to conform to strict gender roles with the husband working outside the home and the wife performing her wifely duties in the home, so as to allow her to care for all the little white Christian children they were to have.40
The 1980s saw the rise of the Quiverfull movement, made famous by the Duggar family from the television show 19 Kids and Counting. (I’ll return to the Duggar family in a later chapter.) Couples in this movement, the name of which is derived from Psalm 127’s likening of children to projectiles, eschew birth control, electing instead to “let God decide” how many children to bless them with. The Lord giveth, and he can be—in some instances—abundantly generous.
Dobson and Popenoe were close enough that Popenoe wrote the foreword for Dobson’s record-breaking book Dare to Discipline, and Dobson quotes Popenoe at length in his book What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women.41 Echoes of the beliefs they shared remain evident in Focus on the Family’s work today. While a bit more tactful about it than Popenoe, Dobson also promotes white racial purity; in a 1989 Los Angeles Times article, a Focus on the Family spokesperson summarized Dobson’s views on interracial marriage:
It is difficult to forge a successful relationship even under the best of circumstances. In interracial marriages there are even greater strains on the relationships. Typically, couples can undergo rejection by family members and (there are) the strains of cultural differences. All these place added stress on the children and the marriage…For those reasons, Dr. Dobson would not recommend interracial marriage—not because of racial discrimination—but because it often leads to marital problems.42
Lest one think these thoughts may have evolved over the last three decades, the Focus on the Family website still emphasizes, using barely coded language, the unique challenges that interracial couples face due to their “different cultural backgrounds,” as if everyone with a particular skin tone comes from a single culture.43
Followers of Dobson, whether they realize it or not, are encouraged to add to the power wielded by white evangelicalism, either by outbreeding everyone else, or by establishing government-sponsored adoption services that serve only married, heterosexual Christian couples. Encouraging people to marry early promotes this goal in several ways. First, people who marry young are more likely to marry someone that shares their beliefs, as they lack significant exposure to the outside world. Thus, they are more likely to maintain the purity of the group doctrinally, racially, culturally, and politically.
Additionally, by emphasizing to Nathan and Lauren, whose sex hormones are raging, how amazing sex is, while also prohibiting it before marriage, a youth pastor increases the likelihood that Nathan and Lauren will marry each other before they meet Jamal or Malika. Telling Lauren that her God-ordained role is as a wife and mother makes it more likely that she will have children early, and have more of them than if she had lived on her own for a few years and started a career. Enforcing heterosexuality, or at least the performance of it, also serves to increase the number of potential procreators.
In The Act of Marriage, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, who also quote Popenoe in their book, present parenthood as a duty for Christian couples. They provide several reasons “why Christian couples should, if at all possible, have children.” They cite Genesis 1:28 (or more accurately, they meant to but cited Genesis 1:26 instead), when God told Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply”—a command that God never gives to anyone in the Bible when there were more than eight or so people on the earth. Readers are told that because “a husband and wife have the ability to create an eternal person,” “when a Christian couple decide not to have children, they exclude a potential child from the potential blessing of eternal life.” Of course, they would also be excluding a potential child from potential eternal torment in hell, which seems rather humane, really.
They cite Psalm 127:5a, wherein the psalmist compares children to arrows in a warrior’s quiver: “Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.” As they often do, they leave off the latter half of this verse: “They will not be put to shame when they contend with their opponents in court.” Stopping short of “19 kids and counting,” they write that “someone has suggested that according to Jewish tradition, a ‘quiver’ of arrows numbered five. If that is true, could it suggest that the blessing God is speaking of here included at least five children?” Five is certainly enough to outbreed everybody except maybe the Catholics. They assign parenthood the status of “natural,” but allow that God, in his infinite mercy, will forgive couples he has made infertile for not adding to the flock. But those that “selfishly refuse to have children” are doomed to a “lifetime void and lack of fulfillment.”
They note that “the Bible says nothing about the number of children one should have in a given lifetime,” but they do “believe He is opposed to excluding a family altogether.” They “feel every Christian should plan on having children, if at all possible,” and that how many should be based on “the number they think they can adequately care for and train for a dedicated life of service to God.” Wouldn’t want you to overdo it to the point where you can’t adequately indoctrinate them and keep them in the fold.
I’m not arguing that the people in the pews are consciously engaging in what feels eerily similar to Popenoe’s positive eugenics. My point is that the “Biblical family values” that white evangelicals espouse and attempt to enforce not only on their own congregants, but on society as a whole, have roots that seem to draw less from the Bible than they do from the desire to maintain racial, doctrinal, and political purity while growing the number of people in the pews. Beginning in the 1970s, white evangelicals sanctified the “biblical family values” that are standing in the way of progress today as gospel. “Biblical family values” means oppressing anyone that doesn’t fit the mold.
The “one man, one woman” vision of life-long, child-producing, heterosexual, monogamous marriages between two cis-gender individuals that stick to their assigned roles doesn’t work for everyone. For those in the LGBTQIA+ community, the reasons are obvious. But some people simply don’t want children. Some enjoy being single. Some aren’t meant for monogamy. And many, myself included, are lured into marrying far too young with the promise of guilt-free sex, and then kept trapped in physically, sexually, emotionally, or financially abusive relationships at enormous cost.
[Turn the page to Chapter 6: Creating Complementarianism]
[Link to go back to the beginning and start with Chapter 1: Original Sin]
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1 Corinthians 7:26-27 (NIV)
Harris, Joshua. Not Even a Hint. United States, Multnomah Publishers, 2003, p. 112.
Dobson, James C.. What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women. United States, Tyndale House Publishers, 2010, p. 130-133.