When I preached through the book of Genesis at my church a few years ago, one nagging issue I wrestled with was the Old Testament’s seeming tolerance of polygamy. There are numerous stories of polygamous marriages presented without condemnation or even comment (such as Gen 29:16- 30, for example).
Obviously, God’s original design for marriage is one man and one woman in a one-flesh union for life. And for modern Christians, the practice of polygamy has thankfully become absolutely unthinkable. But it can be troubling for Christians to see polygamy inexplicably appear in scripture, even amongst our heroes, as though God were OK with it.
Troubling Questions
I’ve seen this graphic circulated by atheists, feminists, and others who seek to undermine the Bible’s credibility. It’s a “gotcha” meme. It tries to visually assert that God is inconsistent because he allows the kinds of marriages depicted in the meme, so God (and bible believing Christians) must be a bigot for opposing homosexuality.
Clear Truth Media
Modern versions of this question linger in places like seminary ethics classes. I remember one discussion about what to do if a polygamous man in a tribal culture converted to Christianity. He’s a Christian now but he’s married to multiple women. Should he stay married to one and divorce the rest? Should he remain married to them all but not sleep with them? Should he stay married to them all and even continue having children with them all? What if divorcing them would leave them all destitute?
I won’t answer these vexing questions here, but I bring them up to demonstrate the fact that there will always be complicated ethical questions about marriage and sexuality in a fallen world. They are unavoidable.
It’s beyond my purposes here to address all of these examples, but there is a basic logic for why God permitted and regulated some of these arrangements, even though they deviated from his original design. There’s an answer to these questions, though the answers may take us to uncomfortable places. Keep going and I’ll show you what I mean.
For enemies of the faith, the Bible’s apparent tolerance for polygamy has been weaponized to attack biblical morality, as though Christianity approves of treating women like property. These attacks can be unsettling for Christians who can’t fathom God approving of something like this and it shakes their faith. So what are we to make of this?
Unfortunately, the Bible doesn’t give us a direct explanation for this, but reasonable conclusions can be drawn from the Bible itself and a recognition about cultural conditions in the ancient world that are different from our own. My concern in this essay is to present a plausible thesis for why God might have tolerated polygamy in OT times, even though it’s not what he designed for marriage. I’m also interested in helping readers appreciate the grace of God who is capable of working with and through people in incredibly complicated moral conundrums.
To state it differently, I present this argument as a possible explanation based on the biblical and cultural data. I personally believe it to be true and compelling.
Polygamy in the ancient world
Polygamy was not common in the ancient world, for mathematical reasons alone. When it did occur, it was typically a way for a ruler to establish dominance by multiplying many descendants by marrying several women. In other words, typically, marrying multiple women was something done by wealthy or powerful men to signify and assert power.
The first instance of polygamy was with Lamech. He took two wives in Genesis 4:19, which is presented as evidence of the increase of evil and a departure from God’s original design. But God didn’t condemn the practice directly and unambiguously in that story. Why?
The answer may surprise you. We need to grasp two important concepts to understand why God may have allowed it. First, ancient people depended on their households to survive. Second, polygamy gave women the opportunity to belong to and build up a household.
Ancient marriages were far less sentimental than modern marriages, and women were often faced with very unappealing options. If they did not get married, they would never bear children, and would likely outlive their own fathers, which would leave them destitute. Thus, a polygamous marriage may seem preferable, because she would at least have a husband to protect and provide for her, and she could potentially bear sons who would grow up to do the same. Lifelong singleness was not merely a matter of loneliness, it was an absolute crisis. Without a husband or a son, she was extremely vulnerable.
Therefore, given the harsh realities of the fallen world in ancient times, God permitted polygamy as a necessary means to protect women who would otherwise have been destitute. It could further function as a flawed means of accomplishing God’s purpose of populating the earth (Gen 1:28).
It’s hard for us to see this as compassionate. We live in modern times, where industrialization and cultural conditions now render polygamy unnecessary. It’s a relic of a forgotten world we can’t relate to. Now, polygamy is seen as the result of someone’s twisted and bizarre sexual fetish. And certainly, in the ancient world, it did occasion much cruelty and abuse. It was an ugly practice and is not what God designed marriage to be.
I am not arguing that polygamy itself was a good thing. It was a terrible practice and led to the cruel subjugation of women. However, I am arguing that the concept of polygamy was God’s merciful accommodation to the survival needs of women in a fallen world.
The Scarcity of the Ancient World
In the ancient world, food was scarce. Their food supply came from the work of their own hands, yet crops could fail and animals could die. Putting food on the table was a constant concern. More people meant more mouths to feed, but also more human resources working together to provide more food and more protection.
The creation mandate (Gen 1:28) included the command for humanity to continue to increase in number and spread out across the world, because God created it with all the necessary potential to feed all the people that would be born into it. The earth has over 8 billion people living on it right now, and the earth has all the resources needed to feed them all as the people cultivate them.
But it was never going to be easy. There was no medicine or healthcare. Sickness and disease were an ever-present threat. People were vulnerable to any number of natural calamities. And, of course, people would violently take from others the fruit of their labors. “Violence” is a recurring theme in the early chapters of Genesis (Gen 6:11-13), because people violently oppress one another to take their resources.
In those days, the household was the primary way to provide for people’s needs and protect them from danger. People survived by belonging to and building up their households. People who did not belong to a household were much more vulnerable, especially women. Why?
The Vulnerabilities of Women
Women are not as physically strong as men. They were not as able physically to perform the demanding work of tilling the soil, raising crops, and managing livestock. Men typically performed this work. Men also protected women who were more vulnerable to attack from violent men. Everyone valued the woman’s ability to have children, because children grew up to become productive household workers. A woman’s ability to bring new life into the household was highly prized, because children benefitted the entire household. Sons would join their fathers in working a trade to provide for the household and protect those in it. Daughters would join their mothers in building up the household from within, managing the household affairs and helping to nurture the younger ones to prepare them to contribute to the household.
The father and mother held the household together. When a son got married, he often began his new household from within his father’s household, because there was strength in numbers. When a daughter got married, she typically left her household to join the household of her new husband. Incidentally, the modern day practice of the father ceremonially “giving away” the bride faintly preserves this ancient practice.
However, when the father “gave away” his daughter to be married, he was losing a productive worker for his own household, so his daughter’s marriage caused an economic loss for her family and an economic gain for the groom’s family. Therefore, the groom would pay a “bride price” to compensate the bride’s family for their economic loss.
The Dangerous Duties of Men
So, how does polygamy fit into this picture?
Simply put, women outnumbered men in the ancient world, because men performed more dangerous duties and thus died in greater numbers. The ever-present threats of wars, accidents, or natural disasters in the world threatened the men who were tasked with protecting and providing for their households. Many men died young, leaving vulnerable widows and orphans behind. The net deficit of men meant a net surplus of women needing households.
Consequently, for some women, the best way for her to survive was to enter into a polygamous marriage. If her husband died, her best option was to remarry and build up a household with her new husband. Paul addressed this in 1 Tim 5:14 when he said, “So I would have younger widows marry, bear children, manage their households, and give the adversary no occasion for slander.” If her husband died beyond the age of remarriage for her, she needed to rely on the households of her grown children. First Timothy 4:4 says, “if a widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn to show godliness to their own household and to make some return to their parents, for this is pleasing in the sight of God.“
In other words, since the household was necessary for survival, Paul taught Timothy how to handle various situations like this in a church. The Bible emphasizes looking after widows and orphans (James 1:27) precisely because they would have a much harder time surviving without a household. God commands his people to show hospitality to sojourners for the same reason – they are traveling away from the provision and protection of their households (Rom 12:13, Heb 13:2, 1 Pet 4:9).
Given the primacy of the household for survival in the ancient world, polygamy was often practiced as an unfortunate necessity to ensure that women could survive by becoming productive members of households. And since women were more numerous than men, wealthier men could take a second wife and build up his household with her and her children.
You might ask, why wouldn’t someone take her in as a “live in” member of the household without her being a wife? That would have been possible, but it would be of far greater benefit to the household for her to have children who could build up the house. We see this logic in OT levirate marriage commands:
“If brothers dwell together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead man shall not be married outside the family to a stranger. Her husband’s brother shall go in to her and take her as his wife and perform the duty of a husband’s brother to her. And the first son whom she bears shall succeed to the name of his dead brother, that his name may not be blotted out of Israel” (Deut 25:5-6).
This law would, in effect, require a potentially polygamous marriage to her dead husband’s brother. The emotional challenges this would have caused were overridden by the greater economic concerns of ensuring her own survival, giving her an opportunity to bear a son and heir in her husband’s name, and keep her from being sent away to a stranger in some other tribe. No doubt, these were difficult situations that we can’t imagine in our times, but God made allowances for such difficult circumstances to secure a future for this woman through the children she would bear.
Children Were the Retirement Plan for the Household
Children were the 401K plan of the ancient household. Initially, the parents “paid in” a lot of effort and investment for little economic benefit. But as the children grew up, the parents would start to collect dividends on their investment. Over time, the children would contribute more and more to the work of the household. Eventually, the daughters will get married, and if they married well, their household would be handsomely compensated for their loss of her productive labor. And when the sons got married, they would pay out a bride price for his new wife. The bride price of the new wife repeated the “pay in” process, because soon enough her children would grow up to work for the household.
As the father and mother reached their golden years, they passed down more and more of the family responsibilities to the younger generation. Typically, the eldest son became the new patriarch of the family. His youth and strength would be expended for the benefit of the whole family, including his aged parents. The eldest son and his wife were responsible for the care of the whole household. If a man had multiple wives, the children and grandchildren of each wife would take care of their respective mothers. Again this is strange to us, but it did solve a practical problem of making sure every member of every household was accounted for and protected.
This is another reason why the stories of barren women in the Bible are presented as great trials for them. Not only were these women desperate in their longing for the joys of childbearing and motherhood, but also for the fact that bearing children was a significant contribution to the economic viability of the household. In this regard, we can learn this lesson from the ancients. They always regarded children as a blessing. Not merely on sentimental grounds, but as an economic asset as they grew and contributed to the household economy. Children truly represented the hope of a better future. The bottom line is this: even though it was not His good design for marriage from the beginning, God did permit polygamy in the ancient world to mercifully protect the most vulnerable people.
We see a similar concept at work in Jesus’ discussion about divorce. Divorce was not part of God’s original design for marriage, but God did permit it and regulate it as a sad accommodation to human hard-heartedness. Jesus said, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (Matt 19:8). In other words, God allowed something evil to continue because our hearts are hard, even though it was not his design from the beginning. In the same way, God allowed the evil practice of polygamy to continue because the world is fallen and this was the best case scenario for vulnerable women and children. So instead of forbidding it, God allowed it and regulated it until his plan of redemption would render the practice obsolete and unthinkable, as it now is.
Conclusion
In the modern world, most household labor has been monetized and outsourced to other entities. This is a mixture of good and bad. Without question, the household itself is a necessary part of the Christian faith. And thankfully, polygamy is no longer necessary for women to survive. In the modern world, we benefit greatly from a Western society that is built on Christian principles of hard work, personal responsibility, and taking care of those who are vulnerable. Even though polygamy was permitted in the OT, the fact that it is nearly unheard of now can be attributed to the outworking of biblical principles in Western society.
Thanks be to God.
(Other aspects of household theology is further developed, with pastoral applications for modern life, in my book, God’s Good Design: A Biblical, Theological, and Practical Guide to Human Sexuality).
