WHAT IS A 'HUSBAND'?& WHO IS A HUSBAND BY @SUPERWISDOM

What is ‘husband’? Who is a Husband?

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We defined husband in its verbal form to mean to till, to cultivate and to tend.

Husband’ is a word derived from an Old English word - hūsbonda meaning master of a house but hūsbonda itself was derived from two Old Norse words - hūs which means house and bōndi which means occupier or tiller of the soil. When these two words are combined to form hūsbōndi, the root word from which ‘husband’ was derived, it means householder, housemaster, housekeeper, and manager of the house. Hmmm!

So, from where did we get the idea that a woman is the manager of the home? Could it be that management of the house was one of the roles that husbands have left unattended? Hmmm!

TO TILL: Means to work the land as by ploughing, harrowing, and manuring, in order to make it ready for cultivation. Normally, lands are hard and compacted due to compression so when you till the land, it is to loosen it up so that it can receive water and manure, and allow the roots of plants to penetrate easily. Tilling is so important that even God didn't cause rain to fall on earth because there was no man to till the ground (Gen 2:5)

TO CULTIVATE: Means to prepare to grow something, especially crops. It also means to refine or teach to be distinct in taste or judgment. So you can cultivate crops to grow them, or you can cultivate a habit to be better in it.

Another function of a husband which can be inferred from this is that he is to teach his wife to imbibe a new set of knowledge, wisdom, ethics, and value systems of the new family. It means that a man should marry only when he has some set of good value systems on which he wishes to raise a new set of individuals (children). If you have not acquired the right knowledge and wisdom, you have no business getting married. This is so important that a man and his household must be known for a set of good character or value systems. This is often referred to as the legacy of the family.

How many families have their values defined? As a young family, what values are enshrined in your family that you intend to pass to your children? As an older family, if I call your children and ask them what their family value is, will they readily give an answer or will they look lost?

If I call you and your spouse and ask you to tell me your family values, will you readily read them out or will you ransack your brain to tell me some good adjectives?

A husband should have some set of legacy before marriage and when he marries, the couple should build a list of values they want to pass to their children.

It is the role of a husband to spearhead this journey of cultivating family values for his household. The wife, who works in conjunction with her husband, helps inculcate the values into the children as she is closer to them from birth. But then, the husband must have defined those values for her.

When the husband has no good values or character to pass across, and if the wife has not learnt anything worthy of emulation from her family, which itself is the failure of another husband – her father – then the children will grow without any good character or values. And this cycle is repeated when these badly raised children become parents and it gets worse in the next cycle.

Have you noticed the sea of young people out there without any sense of godliness, decency, respect, honesty, integrity, dignity, morality, and no respect for human lives, etc? They love vanity, money without work, ... Who were the parents that raised them? With which family values were they raised? Who are the husbands of the home from which these children were raised? It clearly showed a lack of understanding of the roles of a husband.

TO TEND: To care for or look after something or someone. So, tend a garden as in Adam tending the garden of Eden. You have to tend a vegetable garden if you expect to harvest more vegetables than weeds.

Husbands must tend to their families so that the products of such families (the children) can be thoroughly brought up with the right values. The implication of this is that if the children are not well brought up, it is first a failure of the husband before we can blame the wife. I am one of those who usually blame mothers more for a badly raised child but this study changed my orientation.

There is nothing much a wife can do in raising good children if the husband doesn’t set the direction of the family towards such goals. For every badly behaved wife and badly raised child, there is a husband who lacks the ability to till, to cultivate, and to tend his family.

Let's stop here and we will collate all the meanings of husband in the next post.

Thanks for reading and please share your thoughts.

@ngoneyi

@cryptokannon