Why Weren’t the Israelites Explicitly Forbidden to Practice Polygamy?

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Why Weren’t the Israelites Explicitly Forbidden to Practice Polygamy?

June 20, 2024

Questions about how to reconcile the biblical model of marriage with polygamy in the Old Testament, why the Israelites weren’t explicitly forbidden to practice polygamy, and how we can gain wisdom from Solomon about marriage when he had 700 wives and 300 concubines.

* How can we reconcile the biblical model of marriage (one man, one woman, one flesh, one lifetime) with the deviations from this model in the Old Testament, especially involving polygamy?

* What are your thoughts on why the Israelites were not explicitly forbidden to practice polygamy?

* How is it that we gain so much knowledge and wisdom from Solomon regarding marriage and relationships when he had 700 wives and 300 concubines?

Transcript

Welcome to Stand to Reason's hashtag STRask Podcast with Amy Hall and Greg Kockel. Hi, Amy. Hello, Greg.

Alright, you ready for the questions? We'll see. Alright, let's start with a question from In. How can we reconcile the biblical model of marriage, one man, and one woman becoming one flesh for one? One lifetime with the deviations from this model in the Old Testament, especially involving polygamy, for example, Jacob, David, Solomon, key moral figures of the Bible? Well, I don't know what there is to reconcile.

We have norms that are offered in Scripture the way God designed things, and then we have people who violate them. You know, this happens all the time, even noble people from the Old Testament. David was a man after God's own heart.

The text says, but at the same time, he was a murderer, and he was an adulterer, and he tried to cover all that up until finally he was exposed by the prophet Nathan and repented in what sackcloth and ashes essentially, and Psalm 51 is his expression of repentance and also Psalm 32. I think that's the right one. In any event, he's a human being with feet made of clay.

The law says that the kings especially should not multiply wives to themselves. I can't say exactly where that is, but as part of the Mosaic Law, and the reason is, is when the motivation for doing that is not just to have lots of wives. The motivation is political, and so kings would marry daughters of other kings in order to establish alliances.

The problem is when you marry the daughter of another king from a different culture, her gods go with her. So she comes into the home, and then she brings all of her pagan religion with her, and this created a huge problem for Solomon because he had lots and lots of wives, and he made a special alliance with, I guess, with Egypt, and he married a princess from Egypt or whatever. But the thing is, he did not end well.

For all of his wisdom that he had, he did not end well. And it was his idolatry and disobedience at the end of his reign that was the spiritual stimulation for the Civil War that followed his death and the split of the nation into two in the northern kingdom, Israel, and the other in the southern kingdom, Judah. So these were people who just didn't do what God desired.

And sometimes there's provision made for that, or there is like, I don't know what the best thing to say is like God overlooks those things. And the evidence for that is in Matthew 19 where Jesus is talking about the standard for marriage. And when he gives the standard, then the Jews ask, well, why is it that the law makes a provision for divorce? And Jesus said, it's because of the hardness of your heart.

Now, the takeaway there is there are things in the law that do not reflect what the perfect environment that God wants. But are there are provisions made because of human beings, sin, and they're an attempt to make the best out of a bad situation. So there are protective elements that are there.

And so we find a number of places in scripture where that's the case. It's not, it's the way things are set up are meant sometimes to certainly to improve the situation, but not to make it perfect. And I think this is important for us when we look back on the law to understand that, because it's very easy now, what 3000 years later, with them much more with an entirely different modern mindset to take the values from this time and import them into a world that was very, very different than our world.

And one that God was working to kind of clean up, so to speak, and make less violent than it was. So what we're dealing with in the Old Testament, even the Old Testament saints are very broken people, very fallible people. Look at Abraham, the archetype of our faith.

And he let his wife go away, be taken away, and he claims she was his sister, and then she ended up almost marrying another king, and he was just doing it for self protection. So, you know, he, there's lots of mistakes that Godly people in the Old Testament, and famous people of faith, and noble people of virtue, et cetera, God's leaders, they faltered badly. So we can see in the books of Moses, the ideal of God, we can see that the, and this is what Jesus cites in Matthew 19, we can see that he created one man, one woman to be together for one lifetime.

We see the ideal, but then the law is not necessarily the ideal, and this is how it is in this country. Also, we don't, we don't have laws about every single ideal that we have. But there are certain things that you do legislate in certain things that you don't, depending on the culture, depending on where we are, what's capable of being enforced, all of these things.

So it was clear, the idea was clear. They just didn't have a law against it. So this, this actually leads into the second question here from Andre.

What are your thoughts on why the Israelites were not explicitly forbidden to practice polygamy? I guess I'm pausing because there's an empty void there that I'm trying for. I don't know why they weren't, and we do have the creation order, and it is set up a certain way, and they have that to draw on if they want to use what Moses provides about the creation order as a guideline. I think for most people, polygamy was impracticable, and so it wasn't that big of a problem.

I think the rich and the famous, so to speak, were the ones that were more capable of having multiple wives and sustaining them. I'm speculating now here. And so I don't know that it was such a big issue, except for in those cases, and that's why Abraham was a wealthy man.

He had a large family, had a lot of servants, and he could muster an army, which he did, and to fight a particular battle. So in David, of course, in Solomon, they were kings, and those that ascended to kingship status had tremendous amount of power, and there's going to be this temptation then to protect the crown, so to speak, by establishing military alliances that will strengthen your position. And therefore the temptation is to marry the daughter of other kings, and the liability that are bringing that religion kind of into your own household.

And I think that's the reason that the kings were explicitly told not to multiply wives to themselves. I've struggled with this a little bit myself, just thinking about, gee, God overlooked a lot of stuff back then in a way that when you read the New Testament, poor Nia or sexual sin, which covers a number of different things, is so aggressively condemned. And I think part of it has to do with its association with paganism, because so much of the sexual behavior, I'm sorry, so much of paganism revolved around sexual behaviors that were sympathetic magic, they were meant to stimulate the gods to reproduce crops.

And so that's the way he had the high places and things like that. So the New Testament is very, very strong in its condemnation there, but it doesn't seem to be as aggressive in the Old Testament, and it does seem like people were flying a lot by their seat at their pants morally in those early times. It didn't seem like a big deal to go into another woman to go to a prostitute or something like that.

We have occasions where even Judah, for example, I think it's Judah, has a foray with a prostitute and one of the sons of Jacob, you know, and that turns into a big mess. And that's before the law, just to remind people, yeah. Yeah, that's true.

But I guess my broader point is there was a lot of laxity, it seemed like, regarding that, but it caused a lot of trouble too. So I don't know why, I mean, I guess my speculation would be that there's not much time given to that in the law, because it wasn't that big of a concern, except for the rulers. And there they have the ability to do it, and also the compromise that would result would have a significant impact on the nation, which it did.

And certainly everyone could see that the rulers were called not to do that, and they would see that that is a greater way to go. They would see that that was there, even if they didn't have that law. Hopefully.

But here, here are a couple things to keep in mind. First of all, they didn't, for hundreds of years, they didn't have the law. You know, Abraham is called, and what God focuses on first is revealing himself to Abraham and his faithfulness and his character.

And that's, and then you have all the way up until, you know, the 12 tribes of Israel already exist before you get to Moses, giving the law. So there's a huge amount of time in there where they had no law. Oh, half a millennium from the time of Joseph Abraham to the time of Moses and the Exodus is roughly 500 years.

So God has done things in stages. So again, first he's getting their trust as God, then he gives them laws to govern them, but he makes those laws in a way that they're able to govern because part of the problem, this is what we were just talking about. If you change culture too quickly, you get people rebelling against it, not following it at all.

So there's kind of, you're dealing with sinful people. And remember all the people, not everyone in the nation of Israel was following God. It's not like in the church, everyone has been redeemed and changed into new creatures.

That wasn't the case with just a nation where it's developed through just generation. Like you have children, they're part of the covenant. There's not necessarily a heart change.

You're dealing with fallen people and trying to develop a nation and give them laws. And God does that over time while revealing his ideal at the same time. So the ideal is still available to everyone who can see it.

But the laws that are actually governing the country that are enforceable are not necessarily the ideal. And one thing I do want to point out is that even, I mean, think about how God works even through our sin. Because think about, with Jacob, he has, I don't know, four wives, ultimately two wives, two concubines, for the 12 tribes of Israel.

God uses even the sin to do something good for them. And so everything is redeemed, even though they're not doing what God would want them to do. So all of this is going on.

God is moving everyone towards monogamy until we get to Jesus' time. And we see that Jesus assumes monogamy because he says, if you divorce your wife and you marry another, you committed adultery. Well, if you divorce or marry another, you can't even have two wives in succession.

You certainly can't have two wives at the same time. Right. So he is assuming monogamy by the time we get there.

And so you just have to put all of these things together and understand that God didn't, with fallen people, utopia is impossible. So God is working with fallen people, some of whom are following him, some of whom are not following him. And he's governing them.

And all of these things are working together. But we still can see what he actually wants from us. And even those that are following him are kind of stumbling along the way, you know.

Because we're fallen. So this actually leads to the third question here. This one comes from Blake.

How is it we gain so much knowledge and wisdom from Solomon in regards to marriage and relationships when he had 700 wives and 300 concubines. This goes against everything we hold true to the design of a godly marriage. So how can we learn from Solomon when he was so, he failed so much in this area? Well, when, yeah, it's another hard one to answer.

And I guess my impulse is to say a thing is true whether a godly man, if a thing is true, it doesn't matter whether a godly man or an ungodly man speaks it is still true. Okay. And Solomon had lots and lots of wisdom.

That doesn't mean he always followed his wisdom. Okay. And when you read the Proverbs, I read the Proverbs regularly.

I just finished the first 10 chapters. That's a little bit tedious because most of the first 10 chapters are talking about how great wisdom is before it gets into the words of wisdom in chapter 10 and following. Okay.

But it just goes to show that one third of the whole book is meant to encourage people to seek wisdom and not folly. And also the whole big chunk of that is not to go after the adulterous woman. So there's a bunch of stuff about sex also in the first 10 chapters or nine chapters, I should say there.

And one wonders, and this is just speculation. Did Solomon write this before or after all of these concubines and wives and stuff? Now, and he talks about that a bit in Ecclesiastes. And he mentions, look at, I've had everything you can have.

And if you think sex is going to rescue you in some way, I had more than you could possibly imagine and more women that you can imagine. And still, it's all vanity. It doesn't do the job, basically.

So he learned from those mistakes. There's no question about that. That's what he learned somewhat.

It's all vanity, but he also was, as I mentioned, he did well. And this was very destructive to the land and to the people. Now, that's what really laid the foundation for the Civil War that separated the nations into Israel and Judah.

So it isn't enigma. And maybe you have something more to say about it. It is enigmatic what happened to Solomon because God gave him great wisdom.

But just because you have good wisdom doesn't mean that you follow your own advice. And when people who have a lot of wisdom and a lot of insight then falter and give in to their own appetites, after the first couple of times it becomes a lot more easy. And then it becomes a way of life.

And then that life gets destroyed by the sin. So it happens. It happens to all kinds of people.

It's a pattern that we have to guard against. Just like God told Cain is sin is crouching at your door and you must master it. It is interesting that we have his proverbs.

We have his wisdom. But then we have Ecclesiastes, as you mentioned, where he's talking about how when you fail at this, or if you're not seeking the right thing, if you're seeking all these other things to give you joy and pleasure, then you will, it's worthless. It's just it's vanity.

I'm trying to think of the right way to say this. So we get the benefit both of his wisdom and his failures. But I just think this reminds us that we are all fallen and we all need to watch ourselves and our sin.

And there is a huge consequence to sin. Like I said, Greg, I wonder how early he wrote the wisdom before he went bad or before the things happened that happened. He was writing the motif was from a father to a son.

So he's been around for a while. He has children. He has sons and he is passing that on.

What was this? The son who followed him was, I think, Raya Bohm. I get to mix up. There's Jeroboam and Raya Bohm.

And that's when the kingdom split and each became king of their respective countries. There is really Judah. But in any event, it didn't pass it on to him, you know, because he was an idiot.

He listened to his young advisors, not his older advisors. And Solomon really was, well, he was a builder, right? And he expanded his kingdom. Everything is gorgeous.

But that took a lot of taxation, a lot of labor and stuff like that. And people said, okay, we're done. We're finished.

Give us a break. And his son, then, who took over after Solomon did not do that. He just made it worse.

And that's what set up the rebellion. Well, I think when we look at Solomon, we can get both an encouragement and a warning. And the encouragement is, look how God passed on wisdom through this man who was obviously frail and fallen.

That's an encouragement to all of us, that God can use us even when we aren't perfect, even when we don't live up to what we're teaching or what we aspire to be and do. So that is an encouragement. The warning is how sin affects your ability to see truth.

So why didn't Solomon have wisdom about monogamy that Jesus had later on? Well, could it be because of the blind spot of his own sin that he didn't write about that? Or that he went against the law and multiplied wives? So we just have to be really careful that we don't create and coddle and nurture these blind spots that we have, that we kill our sin because especially as people who are arguing for the truth, sin will hide our ability to see the truth, to speak the truth. I mean, think about this. Not only does it, let's say you're able to see it.

Well, now if you feel like a hypocrite, you're not likely to say it. So it affects so much of our ability to see, to argue for, to plead with others. And I'm not saying if you have a sin, you can never say something's wrong.

I think you should, but I just think people tend to not do that if that's a sin they suffer from. So again, an encouragement and a warning and thankfully he's not the only writer of the Bible. So we get a full picture of all of the things that God wants us to know.

Well, thank you in and Andre and Blake. We appreciate hearing from you. Make sure you send us your question on X with the hashtag STRask or just go to our website.

That's at str.org and look for our hashtag STRask podcast page. We hope you will send us your questions soon. We look forward to hearing from you.

This is Amy Hall and Greg Cocle for Stand to Reason.

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