…One Man and One (?) Woman

Edgar Gregersen

In 1540, Philip the Magnanimous, Landgrave of Hesse married Margarete von der Saale with the blessing of Martin Luther. On the face of it, nothing particularly extraordinary. But exceptional it was. Philip was still married to his first wife, the Duchess Christina of Saxony. So here we find Luther, the great Protestant reformer, tolerating a bigamous marriage, which had to be kept secret because of popular disapproval.

Bigamy, the minimum form of polygamy (having two or more spouses at the same time) is one of the evils the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) sponsored by President Bush and conservative Christians is intended to protect us from––as though custom were not enough––so that (as some champions of monogamy proclaim) ‘God’s plan: one man and one woman’ will not be thwarted.

Apparently Luther didn’t think it was God’s plan. And others, such as the pre-Reformation Anabaptists and 19th Century Mormons, would have agreed. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons in 1830, may have had as many as 50 wives (he publicly acknowledged only the first, however). His murder in 1844 was in large part prompted by moral outrage over his plural marriages. In 1890, mainstream Mormons gave up polygamy, permitting Utah, where they had settled, to join the Union (though they continue to believe it will be practised in the hereafter).

But some breakaway Mormon groups in the 21st still agree monogamy is not God’s plan. Warren Jeffs for one, prophet of a religious group in Utah and Arizona called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is said to have about 40 wives. Having been on the F.B.I. 10-most wanted list for four months, he was recently arrested on the charge of arranging marriages with under-age girls. However, the underlying motivation for his arrest seems to be a general attack on the practise of polygamy in the southwestern United States, which has not been dealt with directly in the courts.

Why the condemnation of polygamy? The Bible nowhere insists on monogamy and indeed biblical justification for polygamy––actually, only marriage of a man to more than one woman, polygyny–– is not difficult to find. The first plural marriage is reported there as occurring just six generations after Adam, with Lamech and his wives Adah and Zillah (Genesis 4:19). Esau had three wives (Genesis 36) and the story of his brother Jacob and his two wives Leah and Rachel (Genesis 29) involves the most famous biblical love story. More troubling perhaps for the Christian and general Western case against polygamy is the example of King Solomon, said to be the wisest man on earth, who had 700 wives and 300 concubines! (I Kings 11)

The Bible not only names names, but gives rules about who can enter into plural marriages. In Leviticus 18:17-18, for example, a man is forbidden to be married to a woman and her sister at the same time (the case of Leah and Rachel, who were sisters, represents a custom before the giving of the Law to Moses). Nor may a man be married to a woman and her daughter. But a man–– married or not–– is commanded to marry the childless widow of a dead brother (Deuteronomy 25:5), a custom known as the levirate. The Bible even considers the problems of inheritance ‘if a man have two wives, one beloved and the other hated’ (Deuteronomy 21:1

Some modern commentators assume that the commandment against adultery is the basis for monogamy. This clearly is not the case. David is sinful not because he has several wives, but because he commits adultery with Bathsheba, and even plans to get her husband Uriah killed in battle..

In the New Testament, Jesus never discusses the subject of multiple wives (though he seems to condemn multiple husbands for women when he confronts the woman of Samaria, said to have five husbands—John 4:17-18). In one epistle Paul advises that a bishop should have one wife only. He says the same thing about deacons and elders (I Timothy 3:12, Titus 1:6). This suggests that monogamy was not obligatory for other men.

So, given all the biblical justification for polygamy, why do Christian and Westerners in general observe monogamy? The answer: they are simply continuing an ancient PAGAN lifestyle.

Of all the major groups in the Roman Empire at the beginning of the Christian era, only the Jews practised polygamy. Monogamy had in fact had a fairly long history in the Mediterranean world. The fifth century B.C. traveler Herodotus described the Ancient Egyptians as monogamous like the Greeks. Under the emperor Diocletian, bigamy was made a punishable crime. About a hundred years later, the church father Augustine, reared in the monogamous Roman world, found it necessary to justify why the good men in the Bible often had more than one wife (he insisted it was not out of lust but the need for population growth).

When pagans converted to Christianity, they simply continued with their traditional marriage customs. There was, after all, no commandment: Thou shalt have multiple wives. Monogamy was part of that social structure. Eventually, it was assumed to be divinely sanctioned––a development reported by anthropologists in other contexts.

Why then do modern Jews practise monogamy? In point of fact, not all do. Sephardic Jews living in predominantly Muslim countries have sometimes observed polygamy in recent times, particularly because of the levirate command. But in Europe among the Ashkenazi—largely owing to Christian intolerance on this point--the Grand Rabbi of the Western World, Gershom ben Juda, issued a decree in A.D. 1030 prohibiting polygamy among all Jews under his jurisdiction, the prohibition to last 1000 years. Israel follows the Ashkenazi rule here. Interestingly, some Sephardic Jews have recently petitioned the government to permit polygamy as part of their cultural heritage.

Acknowledge the pagan underpinnings of Western monogamy, and one has to concede––no matter how obnoxious one might find it–– that it is Warren Jeffs and his ilk who are following the biblical model, for which they are hounded as criminals. And when this is done, the slogan ‘God’s plan: one man, one woman’, may be found less compelling.