Why Not Polygamy?

Over the years I have had quite a number of conversations with people on the topic of polygamy, polyamory, ‘ethical non-monogamy,’ and so on, and I’ve been part of communities with people who both looked positively and negatively at this matter.

I’ve read many articles on the history of it, the arguments for and against it on various levels, and perspectives both from those who identify as Christ-followers and those who do not. To be honest, there are compelling arguments on each side, yet there are also quite a number of logical holes from each side as well, and it’s something I was curious about over the years to know God’s heart and mind on the matter as revealed in Scripture. I am rarely, if ever, content with cliché answers, especially for complex issues of reality, and I found myself unsatisfied with the so-called “answers” I would hear on any side of this matter.

In order to understand this, however, we have to take a look at a storyline that does not overtly say anything against it, but it allows the reader to “read between the lines” and come to their own conclusions. There are many things God does not expressly address in Scripture, but He gives us space to work things out in the context of relationships and reality with prayer, reasoning, and meditation.

So let’s step back to the first family in Genesis, and the first recorded murder: Cain killed his brother, Abel. You can read the full details in Genesis 4. God banished Cain to the land of Nod, which means ‘land of wandering,’ saying he was cursed to be a restless wanderer on the earth and to work the soil without yielding crops. Cain complained to God that anyone who found him would kill him, and it says the Lord put a mark on Cain to be avenged sevenfold if anyone kills him.

Let’s stop here for a moment. First of all, if Adam and Eve were the first people on earth, and Cain and Abel were their first children, how could there be people whom Cain was afraid of beyond the land they were in? Most people tend to regurgitate stories they’ve heard without actually reading the details, but Genesis 1 records God creating mankind (male and female) before creating Adam and specifically breathing life into him and placing him in the Garden of Eden to the east, recorded in Genesis 2. This is all very significant, but it’s not the main point of this article. The point is that we see two lineages form right at the start of the story: the lineage of Cain, cursed by God, and later the lineage of Seth, blessed by God.

So from Adam and Eve we see both a lineage of God’s curse and a lineage of God’s blessing and promise of redemption. The number 7 represents wholeness or completeness in Scripture, as we have 7 days in the week based on God’s creativity and Sabbath rest. The 7th person from Adam down the blessed lineage of Seth was Enoch, who is recorded as the first Scribe in history, writing ‘The Book of Enoch,’ and Genesis records that Enoch “walked faithfully with the Lord and then was no more, for the Lord took him away.” By contrast, the 7th person from Adam down the cursed lineage of Cain was Lamech, the first recorded polygamist, and also a violent, prideful murderer. God marked Cain with a ‘sevenfold vengeance’, yet Lamech had a self-proclaimed ‘seventy-and-sevenfold’ vengeance upon his life.

Already we see distinct patterns emerging. Cain, out of fear for self-preservation, still received a level of mercy from God, and he built a fortified city to protect himself and his descendants, marking a departure from the Lord’s protection; often recognized as an act of rebellion. By a few more generations when it reached Lamech, he did not consult with the Lord, nor did he seek Him, but he took an oath of vengeance into his own hands, killing a young man, declaring his violence to the people to instill fear in them, and taking two wives for himself. Figuratively, and even literally, the 7th descendant of blessing, Enoch, multiplied upward toward Heaven in relationship with God; and by contrast, the 7th descendant of the curse, Lamech, multiplied outward toward human relationships without regard for God.

The pattern, however, stretches over a very long time of human history, slowly but surely weaving itself throughout the larger story in very tragic ways. Enoch, who was taken up to heaven, was the great-grandfather of Noah, whose name means ‘comfort.’ God told Noah that He regretted making mankind, for all the earth was full of violence and wickedness, so God planned to destroy it with a flood. This is interesting because the violence that began with Cain and had multiplied by Lamech was now so rampant in the earth that there was no distinction between the wickedness of people and the wickedness spread through the Nephilim, a fallen angel-human halfbreed that Genesis briefly mentions, but the Book of Enoch describes in greater detail. There are so many details we could go into on so many levels, but I’m trying to keep it focused. The ground was cursed, and the violence and wickedness caused widespread damage not only to the people but to the earth itself. When God flooded the earth, it was actually a renewal of his initially intended blessing for earth and mankind. The Lord, by sparing mankind through Noah and his family, gave a baptism and a comforting to the earth itself from the curse of vengeance.

After the flood, God gives them the same command as in Genesis 1: “Be fruitful and multiply.” God certainly has no issue with sex and procreation — it was His first commandment and blessing to humanity! However, as history continues and we get to Abraham, the father of faith, we see another dualistic lineage of cursing and blessing created: Ishmael, through a “permitted” yet unsanctified union with Hagar; and later Isaac, the promised child through Abraham’s wife, Sarah. In their long waiting for the fulfillment of the promise, Sarah gave Abraham permission to have sex with Hagar (it could be said it was ethically non-monogamous), yet God viewed it as an act of unbelief in His promise to Abraham, and it created painful consequences. Ultimately, Abraham is recorded with 3 women in total. And the promised son of blessing, Isaac, later had Jacob, who was a deceiver and manipulator. Jacob had to work many long and hard years, and he was deceived by others just as he had also deceived others. Jacob wrestled with God for the blessing, and God injured his hip and changed his name to Israel, from which the tribes and kingdom of Israel would come. Jacob/Israel, however, had 4 partners, and we see competitive animosity between his various children: Joseph, whom God had chosen for the blessing, was hated by the others, and they sold him into slavery in Egypt.

Do you see how it went from 2 wives with Lamech in the cursed lineage, to 3 women with Abraham (although it was not 3 simultaneously), and then to 4 women (2 wives, 2 concubines) with Jacob/Israel? So the 12 tribes of Israel are the offspring of polygamy. The ancient nation of Israel was a polygamist nation by definition of its incipience. Its 12 foundational tribes were the various children of 4 different partners of the nation’s father. Out of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob/Israel, Isaac is the only man recorded to have only one wife — which is significant as the promised child of blessing, who was an archetype of the promised son of God, Jesus, who would save people from their sins and become a spiritual husband to the singular body of believers.

So as the storyline continues, the famine that occurred in the land caused people to go to Egypt, where Joseph eventually was elevated by God’s plan and wisdom to feed his family and their lineage. The Israelites became slaves in Egypt for 450 years until Moses came to deliver them from the oppression of Pharaoh’s reign. Over these years, however, Scripture makes it clear that the Israelites had become like the Egyptian people around them, copying their customs, and having no distinction as God’s people. Polygamy, idolatry, child sacrifice, and more were commonplace and accepted among the tribes of Israel. Even when Moses led them out into the desert, it shows them continually “going astray in their hearts” against the Lord in many ways for 40 years, and that generation does not enter the Promised Land, a land of cultivation and blessing. When the people “sat down to eat and got up to play” (speaking about sexual immorality), it says God struck down 24,000 people for yoking themselves to the Baal of Peor [Numbers 25:1-6]. This wasn’t merely sexual activity, but it was sacrificial meals to false gods of fertility and ritualistic sexual acts of perversion that caused a plague to break out — nowadays, we’d probably label it as some kind of STD outbreak.

We continue on in the historical timeline until the tribes of Israel, a loose theocracy, demand of God a human king, which the prophet Samuel warned was an act of rebellion against God. Yet God gave them Saul, who was not a good king, and then anointed David to become king. Now David, even though he’s recorded as a man after God’s heart, was ultimately still influenced by the “norms of culture” in regard to polygamist practices: Scripture records David had at least 8 wives, and his heart was led astray in lust and murder concerning Bathsheba and Uriah. Violence, lust, and vengeance is what he acted on in this scenario, just like the first recorded polygamist, Lamech. David, however, was sorrowful and repentant when the prophet Nathan confronted him for his sins. Even though he fasted and prayed, God punished him by killing the child conceived by this adultery. The second child born to Bathsheba and David was Solomon, and he lived to be the next king after David. However, in David’s family there was great dysfunction between the various children of his polygamist unions: incest, rape, murder, violence, hatred, rebellion, usurpation, and more. The results are not painted in a good light.

If we follow Solomon, however, we see a man who asked for wisdom from the Lord, and God gave it to him, and he became so wealthy that he would have been a multi-trillionaire by today’s standards. Incomprehensible wealth, and the kingdom of Israel experienced the longest period of peace under Solomon’s rule. However, he notoriously had 700 wives and 300 concubines, in direct violation of Deuteronomy 17:17, “A king must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray.” What we see is that Solomon’s heart was, indeed, led away from the Lord through the idolatry and foreign practices of his many partners, and the kingdom of Israel split after Solomon into the northern kingdom of Israel/Ephraim, and the southern kingdom of Judah (and through the tribe of Judah came Jesus as the Messiah).

Polygamy, which started with Lamech taking 2 wives and pridefully declaring his self-proclaimed vengeance and violent murder, later spread throughout the earth, and continued throughout thousands of years of history, at every stage being affiliated with suffering, curses, rebellion, animosity, murder, and wrongful vengeance, as well as idolatry and even divine judgement in some cases. It grew from 2 women with Lamech to 3 women with Abraham to 4 women with Jacob/Israel to 8 women with David to 1,000 women with Solomon, and then the Kingdom of Israel was permanently divided until Jesus the Messiah would come to restore what was broken.

Even though the Bible records ample amounts of evidence concerning polygamy and polyamory and even ethical non-monogamy, and even though there are no outright commandments against it, except in Deuteronomy 17:17 in regard to Israel’s kings, there is a thread throughout the story that reveals a slow multiplying of its reality in real relational dynamics, and it shows the dire consequences with unflinching honesty — and the consequences are not good. At the least, it always leads to division; at the worst, it leads to great suffering amongst the collective society, perhaps not always immediately, but eventually.

When Scripture says Jesus is the “second Adam” and the “Bridegroom,” it is bringing us both backward and forward to God’s original design of perfect union first with Himself: a union that is faithful and undivided. We as humans are all polyamorous in the sense that God created us for the capacity and ability to have many loving relationships; but sexually and spiritually, God created us for a committed, covenant relationship that ultimately reflects the undivided devotion of Christ as the ‘faithful and true’ Bridegroom to mankind as the unfaithful Bride, whom He cleanses and renews so that we might be faithful as He is faithful — which begins with the Lord as our First Love, then overflows in pure and loving relationships with other people.

God gives us a lot of grace and mercy, no matter what situation we find ourselves in, yet He always lays out paths of blessing if we are willing to search them out and walk down them humbly with Him. Regardless of where you find yourself on this matter, I hope you know that God loves you more than any human could ever love you, and He desires to live in union with you in a way that is even deeper and more profound than marriage or the best sexual connection imaginable. After all, He created sex in all of its mystery and nuance, and He is the one who blessed it to be a wonderful gift to humanity. I encourage you to seek His heart on this matter, not out of shame or religious obligations, but out of genuine curiosity to know the loving heart of the God who created us to be monogamously united with Him as the very Spirit of Love.

I’ll add that, from the Christian viewpoint, marriage is held as the highest ideal and aim for the primary fact that it is to be an earthly reflection of the heavenly truth of Christ being the faithful husband to His people. It’s a spiritual mystery, just as the oneness of marital covenant is a spiritual mystery. And in a non-sexual way, we were created to be polyamorous in a pure way with others, seeking a unity between us that comes by this Spirit of Love found in Christ Jesus, that mankind may experience a new kind of humanity that is redeemed from the curse of our own ways and regenerated into the blessing of new life and harmony.