Yes, it is good to be married.
Cited passages
Yahweh God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him.” Out of the ground Yahweh God formed every animal of the field, and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. Whatever the man called every living creature became its name. The man gave names to all livestock, and to the birds of the sky, and to every animal of the field; but for man there was not found a helper comparable to him. Yahweh God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. As the man slept, he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Yahweh God made a woman from the rib which he had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. The man said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She will be called ‘woman,’ because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man will leave his father and his mother, and will join with his wife, and they will be one flesh.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
Genesis 2:18-24 frames marriage as God's own remedy for a deficiency in creation: 'It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.' Pair-bonding is presented as an intrinsic good answering humanity's built-in need for companionship, sealed by the etiological 'therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.' 1 Corinthians 7:1 and 7:7, by contrast, have Paul declare 'it is good for a man not to touch a woman' and wish 'that all were as I myself' — that is, unmarried. The evaluative polarity appears reversed.
The harmonizing case, made carefully by Fee, Thiselton, and Blomberg, has several genuinely strong components. First, a text-critical/rhetorical point: many scholars read 'it is good for a man not to touch a woman' (7:1b) as a Corinthian slogan that Paul quotes in order to qualify, much as he quotes and corrects other Corinthian maxims (cf. 'all things are lawful,' 6:12; 10:23). On that reading the ascetic statement is not even Paul's own thesis but a position he immediately tempers in 7:2-5 by affirming conjugal rights. Second, and decisively for context, Paul's preference for singleness is explicitly eschatological: he grounds it in 'the present distress' (7:26) and in the conviction that 'the appointed time has grown short' (7:29), so that the form of this world is passing away (7:31). His counsel is pragmatic advice for living in the shadow of an imminent parousia, not a metaphysical downgrading of marriage. Third, Paul flatly denies that marrying is wrong: 'if you marry, you do not sin' (7:28), and 'it is better to marry than to burn' (7:9), and he treats celibacy as a charisma not given to all (7:7). On all these grounds the bald antithesis 'marriage good / marriage bad' overstates Paul, and the contradiction softens substantially when 1 Corinthians 7 is read in context.
What the contextual reading does not fully dissolve is the shift in evaluative default. Genesis presents marriage as the created norm and an unqualified good, with no eschatological caveat; the human is incomplete alone, and marriage completes the design. Paul, even read charitably, reverses the default: singleness is the preferred state, marriage the concession granted to those who lack self-control or are already bound. Dale Martin shows that Paul's valorization of celibacy introduced into the marriage-affirming Jewish tradition a new framework in which sexual renunciation is the higher path — a framework that, as Peter Brown documents, fed directly into the developing Christian asceticism that Chrysostom and others would later systematize. Second Temple Judaism, by contrast, was overwhelmingly marriage-positive, treating procreation as a commandment rooted in Genesis 1:28; Paul's stance is a notable departure. So while Paul does not condemn marriage and the sharpest form of the contradiction is overstated, the canonical texts genuinely evaluate marriage from opposite default settings — Genesis as intrinsic good, Paul as eschatological concession.
Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonized in context; a real shift in evaluative framing remains.
Sources for this reading