Christianity’s Polygamy Problem

The tradition says multiple spouses are bad. The Bible doesn’t.

If you grew up Christian and reading the Bible, you might’ve noticed a weird problem? Many stories feature heroes with many wives. And concubines.

It’s a book about a world where masters have sex with slaves, and stop off at prostitutes as desired. It’s all legal! But the clerics of Christianity say that God demands—monogamy?

Christians do sometimes point out facts.

“Well it’s right there in the Bible, so it must not be a sin,” sings Rich Mullins in 1991 in his song “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? 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.”

It’s right there in the Bible.

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 just 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!

I’m a huge fan of Rahab the Harlot, the madam of Joshua 6 whose name means “female genitals.” Considered a prophet in Jewish tradition, Rahab certainly 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.

Well, to any talk of polygamy in the Bible, one might think of Adam and Eve — not Adam and Eves. But even the first humans leave a messy non-monogamousrecord. When birthing Cain, Eve says (in Genesis 4:1): “I have procreated a man with Yahweh.”

It appears her first son had divine paternity, her later sons being human, and so, essentially, Eve had two husbands. Welcome to the Bible.

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.

And so we have Moses being a man with two wives — one Arab, it seems, and the other Black.

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 Jewish world of Palestine in the New Testament timeline appears to have been been fine with multiple wives, as Adiel Schremer details in his 2001 paper, “How Much Jewish Polygyny in Roman Palestine?”

How do Christians deal with the evidence of polygamy?

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

This is clearly false. The ‘law’ of the Bible manages extended families just like any other life circumstance. The Old Testament law enforces the rights of multiple wives (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).

The reality on the page before you is that multiple wives in the Bible are fine — even if the religion thinks otherwise.

The religions like to re-write the Bible into another text.

Scene after scene can get oddly revised on the fly. 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.

It all begins to look like Christians are in a mass hallucination?

They don’t usually like facts being pointed out to them. Rich Mullins would report: “So many people are distressed by ‘Jacob and 2 Women,’ and I respond, ‘then the Bible must be very distressing to you.’”

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.

Where did the anti-polygamy talk come from?

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.

And so we arrive back in reality.

“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.

If you read the Bible with polygamy in mind, it changes drastically.

Try 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 Jesus saying to human males: If you divorce one woman to marry another, you’re bad.

But Jesus could be prompting the man to marry both women.

For Jesus, the more love, the better?

Maybe God likes people to like each other?

Maybe learning to take care of people is a spiritual practice. 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. 🔶