The Western Concept of "Family" is Unknown in the Ancient Biblical Literature
The English word “family” has a very specific, and very narrow meaning in modern English.
If someone asks you, for example, “How’s your family?”, it is generally understood two ways, depending on whether or not you are married and have your own children.
It either means you and your spouse, along with any children you have, or it means you and your parents, and any siblings that you have.
However, such a concept of “family” only started in 15th Century in Europe, more than 1400 years after the Bible was written.
As we can see from the historical uses of the English word “family,” its original meaning went far beyond what is today referred to as “the nuclear family” consisting of only parents and their children.
Before the “Industrial Age” and the “Age of Enlightenment” and the “Protestant Reformation” in Europe, the term “family” was more broadly understood in terms of location and “estates”, and included more than just those with a biological relationship, but also included slaves and other humans who were part of that “estate”, or “household” but not necessarily biologically related to each other.
Therefore, when you see the English word “family” used to translate certain passages in the New Testament which was written in Koine Greek, you need to understand that the choice of the translators to use “family” is 100% subjective, as there is no underlying Greek word that means “family” in the modern sense.
This is easily seen by doing searches in the English Bibles today, where the older English language translations seldom used “family” at all, but the more modern English translations use it quite a bit.
For example, in the old “King James Version” (KJV), it is only used once.
