Episode 118: Is Polygamy/Polygyny Really a Biblical Thing?

This is a real controversial topic within some fringe Torah groups and I was asked to address it from a Biblical/historical perspective. Last week, I talked about male and female-identified religion and the dangers—and this is a big draw for some men. So, we’re going to look at what the Bible does and does not say about it. Is it ever spoken of in a positive way? What is the fruit? What restrictions did Yeshua/Jesus put on marriage and what did Paul have to say about polygynists in leadership?

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Polygamy, multiple spouses, or more accurately polygyny, multiple wives, can be a hot topic among people new to reading the Hebrew Scriptures. And there is this unfortunate tendency with people who do not read deeply into the text—or into what the first century writings and particularly Yeshua/Jesus has to say about it—to somehow prop up multiple wives as some sort of Biblical ideal. So, today we are going to delve deeply into what Scripture does and does not say about multiple wives (because nothing is said about multiple husbands as it was illegal in the ancient world in almost all cultures). Is this portrayed positively, as some claim, or negatively? What were the historical-cultural reasons for polygyny in the ancient Near East and elsewhere? What do demographics and Genesis 2 and 3 teach us about original intent? What does Yeshua teach us about original intent? What do we see typified in polygynous families in the Bible? How does Leviticus talk about this phenomenon? Lots to cover today.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

Oddly enough, I am going to begin at the end—with the words of Yeshua and Paul. And then we will go back to the beginning. I am of the belief that our Messiah is the absolute and ultimate interpreter of the Hebrew Scriptures and that everyone else is just giving interesting opinions. So there. In Mark 10, which we covered not so long ago, Yeshua is talking about divorce and the “allowances” of Moses. And it’s truly difficult to understand Torah without also understanding the concept of allowances—it’s how a lot of people in the Hebrew Roots Movement get themselves into trouble when they focus so much on the Torah and not on some of Yeshua’s clarifications about it. When Yeshua is asked if a man should be able to divorce his wife, Yeshua doesn’t give them permission. They are asking what they are allowed to do and Yeshua takes them back to the beginning to show them what they are supposed to do. He tells them point blank that Moses, far from commanding divorce, made an allowance because of their hardness of heart. And there is a huge difference between the two. This is why a legalistic reading of the law will often lead us into unrighteousness, if we are only looking at it in order to see what we can get away with doing to other people. Which is exactly what men were doing during the first century. The House of Hillel Pharisees had a ruling that they enjoyed living by called “any-cause divorce” and instead of only being allowed to divorce their wives for gross indecency, as dictated in Torah, they had expanded that to include the burning of meals and just plain old getting older. In fact, they would even punish wives they could not afford to divorce (hence having to return their dowry because they hadn’t committed adultery, which forfeited it) by taking a second, younger wife. The Essenes had fits over them doing both this and marrying their nieces because that wasn’t specifically mentioned as being forbidden in Leviticus 18. You see what people do when they search the Scriptures for what they are allowed to do to other people?

But in Yeshua’s answer to their question, he smacks them down hard for polygyny—when we know the first century context and who His audience was and what they were doing: ⁵ And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. ⁶ But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ⁷ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife,  ⁸ and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. ⁹ What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” (ESV)

One wife. They are no longer two but one—not three, but one. The word for man is the generic Greek word meaning human. If it was just referring to men, as the Pharisees were when they asked the question, He could have responded with andri, which is where we get the name Andrew. But, Yeshua didn’t go there, He used the generic Greek for human. No human, neither male nor female, is to come between a married couple. To do so is adultery. And so, right here, Yeshua is very slyly calling the Pharisees onto the carpet for polygyny being a form of adultery. It simply was not that way in the beginning and that is always where Yeshua sends us in order to find out what God wants from us and especially in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. So often, He says something like, “You have heard it was said to those of old…” referring to the Torah commandments, but then He will jump in with, “but I say to you…” and sometimes He is flat out saying that the commandments are nice but they were made to contain or limit sin—not to define a righteous life. We all know that slavery is evil now, post-Cross, even though it took us a long time to get there—and even though most of that slavery might have been debt slaves, it wasn’t all that way and you could beat a slave to death and go unpunished just as long as they didn’t die within two days “because they are your property” (Ex 21:20-21) We know that forcibly taking war-brides is evil (Deut 21:10-14), because we live in a post-Cross world. Moses made allowances. Yeshua outright says so. And Yeshua calls us to a much higher standard of justice and righteousness than Moses ever could have.

What about the epistles? In I Timothy 3, overseers and deacons are both commanded to be the husband of only one wife and in Titus 1, elders are held to the exact same standard. So, obviously when Paul was setting up new congregations, he was banning polygynists from leadership. A huge reason is because they were commanded to have orderly households and, as we will see throughout Scripture, that is not the case when there is more than one wife in the home, and especially children of more than one wife. Polygynists aren’t really celebrated in Scripture—at least not for that. Their home lives are a mess and oftentimes they themselves are objectionable and portrayed badly for other reasons. Let’s just go through them:

Lamech, the great-great grandson of Cain, a murderer and the first person in Scripture to be described as having more than one wife. He was quite the piece of work, claiming that anyone who tried to kill him for killing the young man who had only wounded him, was going to get it bad—seventy-seven fold. Lamech depended on God’s protection of Cain in order to justify this. Lamech is the first person in Scripture who is really described as being just an all around bad dude. Very entitled in every aspect of his life that we know about and feeling as though the rules obviously didn’t apply to him and that he could kill people over slights without penalty.

Our second polygynist is debatable—it’s Abraham. And a lot of this material you can find more fleshed out in my book Context for Adults: Sexuality, Social Identity and Kinship Relations in the Bible. Hagar, being a concubine, wasn’t a full on wife. This is terrible but in the ancient world, women were seen as incubators. The man deposits his seed in the fertile soil of the wife and nine months later, voila! Mini-me for daddy. But the idea of a woman having an egg? And that the baby was genetically hers as well? That really wouldn’t have made sense to them. No, the baby was the father’s property as it grew from his seed and no matter how fond Abraham was of Sarah, and he must have loved her very much for sticking with her in a world where a woman needed to produce within two years or be discarded as damaged goods, he would have seen his kids as just mini versions of himself. Sarah and Hagar were just incubators in the birthing process. The Bible doesn’t teach science, so it speaks in those terms when we know what to look for. Which was why the whole “seed of the woman” thing in Genesis 3 didn’t make an ounce of sense to them. Women, they thought, didn’t have seed. Only men. Of course, we know differently. But Sarah was within her rights in the ancient Near Eastern world to present her husband with a surrogate “incubator” for his baby, and that’s why the child would be “hers” because it was only her husband’s child anyway, as far as they believed. Didn’t matter where it came out of. So, she had the legal right to force Hagar into this situation (which would have been a step up socially for her anyway) and Abraham wanted a son so it wasn’t like he was going to refuse her. Sarah needed a son just as badly as did Abraham, someone to care for her once Abraham died. So, was Abraham a polygynist? No, not really. He only ever had, in his eyes, one wife at a time plus an incubator on the side. And I know this sounds offensive and it is offensive but this is contextually how they would have looked at the situation. But, even though there weren’t two wives, Hagar was behaving as though she was a wife and we all know how horribly this worked out when she began acting as Sarah’s rival instead of as her slave. There is nothing even suggesting that Abraham was treating her as a second wife, however, carrying the heir to the clan was a big huge deal and it made Hagar somewhat of a celebrity in the group. Of course, we all know what happened, the family ended up splintered apart and Hagar and Ishmael were cast out and almost died. I mean, really Abraham? A water skin and some bread? So not cool there, dude. And the two families were at odds throughout the Scriptures. Not a good starting point.

Fortunately, all this drama skipped a generation and we were instead treated to the problem of having favorite children, which is also a recurring problem theme. But Jacob—he didn’t go into life wanting more than one wife but was tricked into it and it was a disaster. His brother, Esau, on the other hand, married multiple women on purpose—women who made his mother’s life a living hell. Jacob, of course, only wanted Rachel but her father played a game with ancient Near Eastern inheritance rights and probably tricked Jacob into marrying Leah so that he could be disinherited. You see, Laban doesn’t seem to have any sons when Jacob shows up, only the girls. Because of this, Laban might have been in the market for an endogamous adoption—the adoption of another clan member as a son/son-in-law. Marrying him to Rachel gave Laban a male heir—but later in the story we see Laban suddenly having sons. So, something had changed over the course of the 21 years Jacob remained with Laban where we see no sons and then all of a sudden he has sons old enough to be working with the flocks. There is a law on the books, and I talk about this in my book, where a stipulation of son-in-law inheritance rights would be invalidated if the son in law took a second wife. And we actually see Laban make reference to this during their very last meeting when he forbids Jacob to take any wives other than his daughters. So, if Laban had sons during that initial seven years of Jacob working for him, then if he could force Jacob into a polygynist situation, Jacob would not inherit—only Laban’s biological sons would inherit. So, Laban makes the switch, Jacob consummates the marriage, and then is forced by his love for Rachel to become a polygamist when all he initially wanted was Rachel. He loses the inheritance and Laban gets what he wants.

Of course, Bilhah and Zilpah were added not as wives but as concubines due to barenness (in the case of Rachel) and secondary infertility (in the case of Leah) and both wives were within their rights to demand more children. And, of course, Jacob doesn’t seem to complain about it. In Rabbinic legends, he liked Bilhah so much that after Rachel’s death, she became his preferred sleeping partner—which is why they claim Reuben slept with her, so Jacob couldn’t anymore. But the wording is very precise and Bilhah and Zilpah are not ever referred to as the wives of Jacob, when the wives are singled out and addressed, but just as women. And when Bilhah and Zilpah have children, they belong to Rachel and Leah. If they were wives, then the children would be credited to them. And yes, it is a step up from just being a slave but it is a far cry from the respect a wife would be due within the clan.

What is the immediate fruit of these unions, I mean, besides a whole mess of kids? Strife between the sisters as love turns to a bitter rivalry—Leah even accusing Rachel of stealing her husband. When Joseph goes making trouble for his brothers, he singles out the children of Bilhah and Zilpah, so evidently there is a hierarchy that even the kids are painfully aware of and you know how kids are. In addition, the children of Rachel are given a super-priority and favoritism over the others—even the firstborn. As a result, hatred grows amongst all of the brothers and Joseph is betrayed and sold into slavery in Egypt. Just as in the problems with Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, this is all directly attributable to multiple women being forced into a rivalry situation. Perhaps this is why Joseph only had one wife!

During the time of the Judges, we have Gideon, who had seventy sons and “many wives”—well, with that many kids, one would certainly hope for more than one wife. He also had a concubine who bore him a son, and that son, Abimelech, killed all of his brothers so that he could rule over the residents of Shechem himself. And we’re going to see this theme repeated again, with the sons of David. Sons of different mothers in the Bible tend not to be terribly loyal to one another. In the ancient Near Eastern world, the closest bond is not between husband and wife or father and son but between mother and son, followed by brother and sister. Which makes a lot of this make a whole lot more sense. Oftentimes, these guys were actually striving with one another for their mother’s honor. Rivalry is all about undermining your opponent and trying to come out on top. Like with Leah and Rachel and the dialogues whenever a new baby would or wouldn’t be born.

Let’s look at what the Bible says about that rivalry issue—Lev 18:18 “And you shall not take a woman as a rival wife to her sister, uncovering her nakedness while her sister is still alive.” And I Sam 1:6 “There was a certain man of Ramathaim-zophim of the hill country of Ephraim whose name was Elkanah the son of Jeroham, son of Elihu, son of Tohu, son of Zuph, an Ephrathite. ² He had two wives. The name of the one was Hannah, and the name of the other, Peninnah. And Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children. ³ Now this man used to go up year by year from his city to worship and to sacrifice to the Lord of hosts at Shiloh, where the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were priests of the Lord. ⁴ On the day when Elkanah sacrificed, he would give portions to Peninnah his wife and to all her sons and daughters. ⁵ But to Hannah he gave a double portion, because he loved her, though the Lord had closed her womb. ⁶ And her rival used to provoke her grievously to irritate her, because the Lord had closed her womb. ⁷ So it went on year by year. As often as she went up to the house of the Lord, she used to provoke her. Therefore, Hannah wept and would not eat. ⁸ And Elkanah, her husband, said to her, “Hannah, why do you weep? And why do you not eat? And why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?”

Can I just go and say, “Most clueless man of all time?” No, honey, you aren’t better than ten sons. Geez, what kind of an idiot are you? I have this other woman of yours tormenting me but hey, I am married to you which makes it all so thrilling and happy. As Bugs Bunny would say, “What a maroon!” But, look at Leviticus 18:18—Moses is flat out saying that multiple wives are rivals. Hey, just like multiple husbands would be. There’s a reason that’s always illegal in patriarchal cultures—because men are jealous just like women are, and it isn’t any less of a problem. Here’s the thing, if Moses is acknowledging that multiple wives are rivals, what should that communicate to us? The word rival is not a positive one—no one should have a rival in their own home. It is cruel and dehumanizing. A woman with a rival is a woman who can have no peace—just like a man would feel the same way. And the saddest example of this is between Rachel and Leah, sisters whose relationship should never have been broken by rivalry. Let’s look at this heartbreaking story in Gen 29 and 30:

³¹ When the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren. ³² And Leah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Reuben, for she said, “Because the Lord has looked upon my affliction; for now my husband will love me.” ³³ She conceived again and bore a son, and said, “Because the Lord has heard that I am hated, he has given me this son also.” And she called his name Simeon. ³⁴ Again she conceived and bore a son, and said, “Now this time my husband will be attached to me, because I have borne him three sons.” Therefore his name was called Levi. ³⁵ And she conceived again and bore a son, and said, “This time I will praise the Lord.” Therefore she called his name Judah. Then she ceased bearing.

Let’s stop right here. Geez, four sons and with every son she is like begging and hoping for her husband’s regard, but instead he prefers her sister. It says here that she is hated—which must have been what it felt like, to know how she had been used as part of a ruse and can you even begin to imagine her agony—and her rival, the other woman, was her own sister. Legendary materials say that they were twins, but at the very least Rachel was her younger sister. This situation is a nightmare for Leah who obviously gives up on Jacob loving her before the birth of Judah, and it isn’t a picnic for Rachel either, because although Rachel is a rival for Jacob’s actual affection, Leah has given birth to four sons—making Rachel nothing in the eyes of other women and insecure in her marriage.

30 When Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, she envied her sister. She said to Jacob, “Give me children, or I shall die!” ² Jacob’s anger was kindled against Rachel, and he said, “Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?” ³ Then she said, “Here is my servant Bilhah; go in to her, so that she may give birth on my behalf, that even I may have children through her.” ⁴ So she gave him her servant Bilhah as a wife, and Jacob went in to her. ⁵ And Bilhah conceived and bore Jacob a son. ⁶ Then Rachel said, “God has judged me, and has also heard my voice and given me a son.” Therefore she called his name Dan. ⁷ Rachel’s servant Bilhah conceived again and bore Jacob a second son. ⁸ Then Rachel said, “With mighty wrestlings I have wrestled with my sister and have prevailed.” So she called his name Naphtali.

Now, being a barren woman myself, I know what it is to feel like I am going to die without a child. I even told God that in January of 2000 after I lost our third baby. And I meant it. And Jacob here, is really not the most sympathetic figure in the Bible—on so many levels. Rachel, desperate as Sarah ever was, gives Jacob her young, probably about thirteen or fourteen years old, handmaid and when Bilhah gives birth, Rachel’s words really reveal the oppressive and adversarial nature of having to deal with other wives. “God has judged me”…and the unspoken thing is that the judgment would be with regard to this rivalry with her sister, she feels vindicated now. And with the birth of Napthali, she speaks of wrestling with her sister. This is a horrifying indictment on polygyny, if even the closest of women can have their loving relationship destroyed over it. This is not how either family or marriage should be, for anyone.

⁹ When Leah saw that she had ceased bearing children, she took her servant Zilpah and gave her to Jacob as a wife. ¹⁰ Then Leah’s servant Zilpah bore Jacob a son. ¹¹ And Leah said, “Good fortune has come!” so she called his name Gad. ¹² Leah’s servant Zilpah bore Jacob a second son. ¹³ And Leah said, “Happy am I! For women have called me happy.” So she called his name Asher. ¹⁴ In the days of wheat harvest Reuben went and found mandrakes in the field and brought them to his mother Leah. Then Rachel said to Leah, “Please give me some of your son’s mandrakes.” ¹⁵ But she said to her, “Is it a small matter that you have taken away my husband? Would you take away my son’s mandrakes also?” Rachel said, “Then he may lie with you tonight in exchange for your son’s mandrakes.” ¹⁶ When Jacob came from the field in the evening, Leah went out to meet him and said, “You must come in to me, for I have hired you with my son’s mandrakes.” So he lay with her that night. ¹⁷ And God listened to Leah, and she conceived and bore Jacob a fifth son. ¹⁸ Leah said, “God has given me my wages because I gave my servant to my husband.” So she called his name Issachar.

Geez. Come on! How humiliating to have to barter with your rival in order to sleep with your own husband. And none of this is Leah’s fault. She was a pawn in a ruthless patriarchal culture and her father used her in order to rob Jacob. This is just wrong. When we look at men and women in the beginning and the harmony and the one on one nature of the relationship, this is just tragic.

¹⁹ And Leah conceived again, and she bore Jacob a sixth son. ²⁰ Then Leah said, “God has endowed me with a good endowment; now my husband will honor me, because I have borne him six sons.” So she called his name Zebulun. ²¹ Afterward she bore a daughter and called her name Dinah.

But six sons and a daughter mean little to Jacob, who still does not regard her and seemingly never will.

²² Then God remembered Rachel, and God listened to her and opened her womb. ²³ She conceived and bore a son and said, “God has taken away my reproach.” ²⁴ And she called his name Joseph, saying, “May the Lord add to me another son!”

So, even having the births through Bilhah was not enough to cause Rachel not to feel this shame and rivalry. Look, when you have a rival, no amount of victory is enough. Rivals are there to be conquered and defeated, not to be fought with endlessly.

But surely, even though things were a mess for Sarah and Hagar, and Isaac and Ishmael, and Jacob and his clan, and Hannah and her family—surely things got better with the monarchy. I mean, David is like one of the stars of the Bible. Surely he could handle polygyny like a champ with no infighting. Actually, with him it was even worse. And he wasn’t tricked into it like Jacob was. David took multiple wives for various reasons—political alliances and lust being among them. And really, you have four overt reasons for polygyny in the Bible (other than being tricked, we aren’t going to count a unique situation):

• the need for heirs because people without heirs were in deep doo doo in the ancient world. Without a younger generation, you were vulnerable in every way. As you grew older, there was no one to protect you from the elements, care for the land and livestock, or defend you if you were attacked by marauders or your slaves rebelled. Even worse than all that was the idea of having your body go unburied and ending up as dust beneath the feet of others. This was seriously terrifying for ancient people and we have no indication from the Bible that they had any concept of eternal life at this early date. Even David didn’t. For ancient people, the only immortality was through being remembered, which is why Absalom built a memorial for himself. Obviously, none of these are any sort of concern in modern times.
• Political alliances—this was the main reason why kings gathered wives. To shore up political alliances with neighboring countries. These were princesses bred for this duty and the race was always on to produce the first heir, or maybe the favorite heir, so that they could be queen mother. Apart from the wealth, it was a kind of a miserable sort of life spent scheming and competing for affection. Saul, David and Solomon all took political wives. Solomon’s very first wife allied Israel with Egypt because she was the daughter of Pharaoh. Rehoboam, Solomon’s heir—his mother was an Ammonite.
• Lust—Bathsheba was the one wife of David whom we know was the victim of lust. The text in Hebrew and in historical context is clear that she was innocent and that David was the aggressor and that he even raped her—which is why she was likened to a little defenseless ewe lamb in Nathan’s parable. The problem with power is that it makes even good men drunk with it and likely, when he had her seized and brought over to his palace, she couldn’t conceive of getting out of there alive if she said no to him. He held all the cards. And since he murdered her husband to cover everything up, maybe she would be right to just be happy to get out of there alive. Power changed David, and not for the better. And Solomon with his thousand wives and concubines. There weren’t enough countries to be allied with to justify that many alliances and he sure didn’t need that many heirs.
• Patriarchal authority/honor—patriarchy breeds self-indulgence. It just does. A man feels more like a man if he has more of what makes a man feel like a man—and women are always at the top of that list. Even if it isn’t about lust, it is about possessions, authority and power over others and no one is easier to wield authority over in the ancient world than women. A man who could gather beautiful and well-positioned women around him would be granted a lot of honor for doing so and honor/reputation was everything in that world.

In the modern world, we see the latter two reasons for plural marriages. Plus one other—but that one other tends to get blended in with lust and patriarchy, and that is religion. Where I live, we have what are called “black Mormons” and they are Mormons who practice polygyny even though the church outlawed it so that Utah could become a state back in 1896. Polygyny is still very much a thing here, but don’t think of Sister Wives or Big Love. That’s fictional. Yes, reality shows like Sister Wives are largely fictional and I actually have a friend who knows that family personally. But let’s get back to the Biblical record—and this time we will talk about David’s family.

David had eight wives and of course we already discussed the tragedy with Bathsheba. The children that came from these eight marriages were treacherous with one another. Amnon, David’s firstborn, raped his half-sister Tamar. Tamar’s brother Absalom, when David refused to do anything about it, killed Amnon and was banished. When Absalom returned, the bitterness was still so terrible that he launched a coup against his father which resulted in his death. When David was close to death, his son Adonijah seized the throne and declared himself king—despite the throne being promised to Solomon. Solomon spared his life only to have him executed later because Adonijah was trying to secure a backdoor to the throne by trying to marry David’s last wife, who was still a virgin. By marrying one of David’s wives, he would have a claim to the throne. And so, all these children of different mothers—there was no affection there but only rivalry and we have seen it too many times for it not to be a serious pattern of the bad fruit that comes from plural marriages.

And I am not saying that people who do this are evil. I am saying that the fruit is bad. So many times, Yeshua would just point His audience back to the beginning. There is a reason why the male/female population is about 50/50 and it isn’t because Yahweh wants some men to have a ton of wives and the rest to have none. Would Yahweh really want some men to have absolutely no heirs? Well, that’s what ends up happening within these plural marriage communities. The only way to make it work is to have a lot of single men or to expel them from the community, which does often happen. Look at the FLDS community run by Warren Jeffs, and that’s not the only community out there.

This is never portrayed in Scripture as a righteous or beneficial way of life. The word rival gets used—and that isn’t a dig at women for being too sensitive. It’s just a fact. Yeshua called the men who do this adulterers. The early congregations barred these men from leadership. And so, why does this happen? When I read the materials put out by these groups or individuals that promote this, they make a big deal about saying this isn’t about sex. But what is it about? It certainly isn’t about there being no male or female in Christ, because there are definite dividing lines. Women are not granted the right to have more than one husband and the reasons given are ludicrous. “Oh,” people say, “You won’t know who the father is.” Why does that matter anymore? Get a DNA test. Easy peasy. But no, there is always a double standard. Now, in the ancient world, no man anywhere would tolerate rivals which is why adultery was considered to be a crime committed against another man, and not against a man’s wife. In other words, if say, my husband and I were alive three thousand years ago and he had relations with the neighbor’s wife, they wouldn’t be sinning against me but against her husband because I had no authority over his body—which brings me to another bit of Scripture often overlooked in all of this. Two, actually—in Mark 10:11, Yeshua shocked his audience by pointing out that, yes Virginia, a man really can commit adultery with his wife as the victim—he is committing adultery not just against another man but against his own wife. This seems obvious to us but it was anything but obvious within that patriarchal culture where women truly were treated as though they were less than fully human. Like I said before, walking incubators. But what’s that other verse I was talking about? Here we go—I Cor 7

Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.

Although this Scripture is misused to make women feel as though they are sex slaves and that if they don’t give in to their husband’s every whim, he’s going to stray, it couldn’t be further from the truth. And by the way, if you guys don’t want us to see you as weak—then don’t pull this stuff. We know that single guys are expected to be celibate, as are divorced and widowed men. They don’t all go out raping women and committing fornication just because their every desire isn’t being met so you husbands, seriously, put on your big girl panties (well, not literally) and understand that your wife isn’t a sex slave and sometimes she doesn’t want to or can’t and that’s okay. Her body doesn’t just belong to you. Your body also belongs to her and thus you have to hold back when she needs a break. You’ll live. And also—if you can let yourself go and get older and go without makeup and jewelry, so can we.

But this Scripture is what I call the “Leah” scripture. Oh if only Jacob’s body had only belonged to her! If only Jacob only had his own one wife! If only Leah could have called Jacob her own husband but she couldn’t because he was also her sister’s husband. If Leah had been properly given authority over Jacob’s body then all twelve tribes would have come from her and Rachel could have married someone else and Rachel and Leah could have loved one another as sisters—and they could have both just hated their snake of a father instead without the rivalry. Polygyny makes this impossible—and so does polyandry, plural husbands. And no thanks, one is enough!

Yahweh is the God of love, dignity, justice and righteousness. Polygyny is something men did in the ancient world, not something that was part of God’s original design. Adam and Eve, not Adam and Betty and Veronica. No one deserves to go through life with a rival. No man and no woman. We were each of us created to be loved and respected and cherished. We were each of us created to be enough for someone else. For one someone else. With no rivalries among children constantly jockeying for position. Moses made allowances for hardness of heart but we aren’t supposed to have hardened hearts.