Christianity’s Polygamy Problem
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: Relationships, Christianity, Religion, Psychology, Marriage

Christians do sometimes disagree.

“Well it’s right there in the Bible, so it must not be a sin,” sings Rich Mullins in 1991 in “Jacob and 2 Women.”

Or Martin Luther writes in 1524, in a private letter: “I confess that I cannot forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict the Scripture.”

But publicly, the clerics kept a unified front — for monogamy.

That didn’t mean they liked it?

A history might be written of the Christians who might’ve been open to a polygamous life. William Blake, the poet, was said to have “wished to add a concubine to his establishment in the Old Testament manner, but gave up the project because it made Mrs. Blake cry."

But mostly they’d be restrained by convention — and punished if they’re not.

So are the heroes of the Bible un-Christian?

The great Abraham has a wife, Sarah, and two slave-wives, Hagar and Keturah. The hero Jacob, in the famous story, wants to marry Rachel, but her father tricks him and he finds himself married to her sister Leah.

Had this been a Christian story, Jacob might have to make do with Leah. But it’s the Bible, so he marries them both. Plus Jacob has two slave-wives, Bilah and Zilpah. A busy guy?

In Judges 8:30, the hero Gideon has “many wives.” Saul has a concubine (2 Sam 21:8). The great David has “wives and concubines” in 2 Samuel 19:5, and his son Solomon is a legend of polygamy, with 700 wives and 300 concubines (cf. 1 Ki 11:3).

Standing back in sheer amazement, you might even wonder, when reading the Bible, if the heroes are guys with lots of sexual energy.

Does God like very sexual people? Because heroines are the same way.

Like Tamar of Genesis 38, who has sex with three guys in a row. What a role model!

Though personally I’m a huge fan of Rahab the Harlot, the madam of Joshua 6 who has an unusual ability to know things. Perhaps her sexual experience has endowed her with this grace?

I think of Delilah, Jael, Bathsheba, the Queen of Sheba, Esther, and the girl in the Song of Songs, as I see God loving a lady who’s ready for action. And it’s rather hard to make an argument for a monogamous mindset.

You’d have Adam and Eve to work with, I suppose. When there’s one man and woman—they seem to be monogamous.

God is also polygamous, of course.

In biblical spirituality, deities ‘marry’ nations. We see this in the regular word for a deity, ‘Baal’—it’s just the word for ‘husband’. YHWH gets married to Israel and then to her ‘sister’ Judah.

It’s a plotline developed throughout Ezekiel 23, as the wife Israel committing ‘adultery’ (with other deities) wears on God. In Jeremiah 3, He agonizes about it, and finally divorces her.

Then Jesus, as a ‘bridegroom’, comes along in the New Testament, and seems to want to marry—everyone?

And the world of the Bible is polygamous. There was no rabbinic ban, as Adiel Schremer details in his 2001 paper, “How Much Jewish Polygyny in Roman Palestine?” as he concludes the Palestine of the New Testament period “may be designated as a polygynous society.”

So where did the anti-polygamy talk come from?

It’s a cultural ideology whose origins might make one queasy. I sit reading about the long effort to use the Bible to advance monogamy, as keeps lurching into the ugly. “The higher primates are in many, if not all cases, monogamous,” goes an effort in 1900.

Let me translate? They know that polygamy is practiced in regions of the world where there aren’t many white people, like Africa and the Middle East. In saying that monogamy marks the ‘higher primate’, they’re offering white Christianity as the religion of evolved or more developed humans.

How do Bible readers deal with the polygamous evidence?

As an Evangelical the line I’d sometimes hear is: God allows it, but doesn’t approve of it.

I’m not sure how that argument works. The heroes care about their wives very much. There might be a primary or favored wife, but that is just part of polygamy, probably. The ‘law’ is working to manage situations involving extended families (cf. Gen 30:26; Exo 21:10–11; Deut 17:17, 21:11–17, 24:5; Lev 18:18; 2 Sam 5:13; 1 Ki 11:3).

And there’s more multiple wives than the tradition wants to admit. Scholars have had to work on the fact of Moses having two wives. The traditions only like to remember Zipporah the Midianite, but there was an unnamed second wife, noted in Numbers 12:1 to be Cushite.

For all the effort by tradition to combine them and achieve a monogamous hero, a Midianite wife is not the same as a Cushite wife.

It all begins to look like the faithful in a mass hallucination?

Rich Mullins would say: “So many people are distressed by ‘Jacob and 2 Women,’ and I respond, ‘then the Bible must be very distressing to you.’”

Helen R. Jacobus, a scholar studying the Bible’s narratives of sex with slaves, writes of attending a lecture in which a cleric says: “Abraham’s marriage to Sarah was monogamous, and then, as an aside, he added, jokingly, ‘apart from the handmaiden.’”

Perhaps, in the minds of such speakers, the ‘handmaiden’ is easy to dismiss—for being a female without much social status, or perhaps because she is a darker-skinned Egyptian.

But God always cares for Hagar and Keturah, and takes care of them even when Abraham does not.

The Christian tradition reaches for any reference to support its monogamous agenda.

In 1 Timothy 3:2, the apostle Paul is talking about the ideal leader of the church: “Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife . . .”

Aha, the traditional Christian reader says. ‘Wife’ is singular, not plural!

But this is a system which sees the Christian people as the ‘bride of Christ’, a figure of a woman. To be faithful to the ‘wife’ — is to be faithful to her.

“Anyone who seeks a firm rejection of polygamy in the Bible is probably doomed to frustration,” writes William Tucker.

In his 2014 book, Marriage and Civilization, he makes a case for monogamy having been a beneficial idea, indeed, in his view, making us ‘human’.

Perhaps there’s a good case for that, and to be monogamous is a good idea.

But to be a monogamous liar doesn’t sound good. And the Christian idea that God hates multiple spouses was simply that. There were also palpable racist origins, as anti-polygamy theology kept many out of the faith.

Christian missionary efforts, over time, have often been focused on stamping out polygamy—instead of, say, that ‘gospel’ thing?

So let’s be clear? The Bible assumes polygamy.

Although, that insight might lead to a chain of others, sadly. Why did a religion set itself against its own text?

And why does the system the clerics seem to favor look less like the Bible and more like the prevailing policies of ancient Rome? In the process of writing his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault realized the sexual codes of ancient Rome and Christian tradition were about the same.

As he concludes in 1980, “the so-called Christian morality is nothing more than a piece of pagan ethics inserted into Christianity.” (The case is elaborated in David Wheeler-Reed’s 2019 book Regulating Sex in the Roman Empire.)

And really, when we step back and look at ‘traditional morality’, we might see a moralizing agenda being brought to the Bible.

Try reading the Bible as a polygamous mentality, and it changes rather startlingly. Like Jesus’ speech in Mark 10:10–12.

Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her.

The typical Christian reader hears the deity saying to human males: If you divorce one woman to marry another, you’re bad.

But if rules about marriage are the subject, and divorcing one woman to marry another the problem being discussed, then Jesus’ would be prompting the man to marry both women.

For Jesus, the more love, the better?

Maybe God likes people to like each other, and take care of each other.

That seems like a possible meaning of Jesus saying “love one another” in John 13:34. He doesn’t seem to narrow it to numbers of spouses.

But, between you and me, Jesus isn’t as ‘Christian’ as you’d think. 🔶