POLYGAMY

Once upon a time, the Bible relates on several occasions, there lived a man whose wife was infertile—“barren,” in the traditional and infelicitous and pejorative translation. What was he to do, what were they to do in this situation, given the importance of having offspring, especially sons? In some cases, God intervened, as with Samson’s father, Manoah, and his unnamed mother; Samuel’s mother, Hannah; John the Baptist’s parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth; and others. But the couple could also be proactive, as with Abram (later called Abraham) and Sarai (later called Sarah).

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had not borne children for him. She had an Egyptian slave, whose name was Hagar. Sarai said to Abram, “Because Yahweh has prevented me from bearing children, go into my slave; perhaps I may be built up by her.” Abram listened to Sarai. So Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar her Egyptian slave… and she gave her to Abram her husband as a wife. So Abram went into Hagar and she became pregnant.

At this point, the happy extended family ruptured: when Hagar treated Sarai with contempt, Sarai forced her to leave, without objection from Abram.37 But Hagar was divinely protected, and in due time she gave birth to Ishmael.

God had repeatedly promised Abram that he would father a multitude of offspring, more numerous than the stars in the sky or the particles of soil in the ground. But Sarai was postmenopausal, some ninety years old, and Abram was a hundred. (That is why she gave Hagar to her husband, so that she could be a mother through her slave.) But God’s promise was not to be fulfilled through Ishmael. One hot summer day, Abraham (as he is now called) was sitting, as modern Bedouin still do, at the entrance of his tent, which was pitched near a large terebinth, one of those stately trees that dot southern Judah. Three men on foot approached him, and Abraham welcomed them with typical nomadic hospitality: a full meal of freshly baked flatbread, meat from a calf slaughtered for the occasion, and milk and yogurt. During the meal, which must have taken some time to prepare, one of the visitors asked Abraham, “Where is Sarah, your wife?” and he replied that she was inside the tent, where, the narrator tells us, she was listening to the conversation. One of the visitors then said, “I will return to you next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son.” Abraham by now must have realized what we readers have already been told, that one of his visitors was Yahweh himself, dropping in for dinner as deities sometimes do.

The divine promise was kept, and Sarah became pregnant and gave birth to a son, named Isaac. Let me digress here about Isaac’s name, returning to issues of euphemism and innuendo. The root meaning of Isaac’s name is “laughter,” reiterated in the narratives about the promise of his conception and of his birth. When Sarah overheard the divine promise, she

laughed to herself, saying: “After I am worn out, shall I have pleasure? And my lord is old!” And Yahweh said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, and say, ‘Shall I really bear a child, even though I am old?’ Is anything too wonderful for Yahweh?”… But Sarah lied, and said, “I did not laugh,” because she was afraid. But he said, “Yes, you did laugh.”

Then, when Isaac was born, Sarah exclaimed, “God has brought laughter for me, because whoever hears of this will laugh with me.”

The same word is used in two other stories about Isaac. Many years later, Isaac found himself an alien, a stranger in a foreign land, just like his father, Abraham, twice before. This time, Isaac is in Philistine territory between Gaza and Beer-sheba, with his beautiful wife, Rebekah. When the locals asked him about his wife, like Abraham he said,

“She is my sister,” because he was afraid to say, “She is my wife,” [thinking,] “the men of the place might kill me on account of Rebekah, because she is beautiful.”

Then,

after he had been there for some time, Abimelech, the king of the Philistines, looked out a window and saw Isaac making his wife Rebekah laugh. So Abimelech summoned Isaac, and said: “She is your wife!”41

Here “laugh” must have a sexual connotation, as modern translations implicitly recognize when they have Isaac “sporting with,” “fondling,” or “caressing” Rebekah;42 only one comes close to both the literal and the suggestive meanings, when it has Abimelech seeing “Isaac and his wife Rebekah laughing together.”43 In any case, the sense is clear: whatever exactly Isaac and Rebekah were doing was sexual, not how a brother and sister normally act.44

The same sense occurs in a story set early in Isaac’s life. After Isaac had been weaned, Abraham threw a big party to celebrate the survival of this boy beyond infancy, with its considerable risks. During the party,

Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, making her son Isaac laugh. And she said to Abraham, “Expel this slave woman and her son—for this slave woman’s son will not inherit with my son Isaac.”45

What was Ishmael doing? The intent of the narrator is to suggest something awful: Ishmael was “playing with” Isaac: that—as well as not wanting Isaac’s inheritance to be diminished—is why Sarah had Abraham send Ishmael and Hagar away. There is a hint of homosexual incest here, an example of scurrilous attribution of unacceptable sexual behavior to others—in the Bible, non-Israelites.

Back now to polygamy. In the Jacob narrative there are more examples of a childless wife giving her slave to her husband in order to provide her husband with children through her—a kind of ancient equivalent of surrogate mothering. Rachel gives her slave Bilhah to Jacob, and only then, like Sarah, is she able to have children; likewise, Rachel’s sister Leah, Jacob’s first wife, gives her slave Zilpah to Jacob for a similar reason.46

As these narratives illustrate, polygamy—or more properly polygyny, the practice of a man having more than one wife—was acceptable in ancient Israel. In addition to Sarah and Hagar, Abraham had another wife, Keturah, who also bore him six sons, in the favored multiples of six found throughout the ancestral narratives.47 Jacob had four wives; Jacob’s brother Esau had five;48 Gideon had many (together they produced seventy sons for him49); and Elkanah, the father of the prophet Samuel, had two.50 Polygyny continued to be practiced well into the biblical period, and it is attested among Jews as late as the second century CE.51 In the original version of the book of Esther, its heroine’s inclusion in the Persian king’s harem is presented matter-of-factly.

Opponents of same-sex marriage often assert that from the beginning marriage has been between one man and one woman. Well, yes and no: in the beginning, according to Genesis, there was only the original couple in the Garden of Eden, no one else with whom either could have any sort of relationship;52 but Genesis never reports a marriage ceremony. Not long after Eden, however, the biblical writers tell us, men began to have more than one wife, beginning with Cain’s descendant Lamech, who had two wives, Adah and Zillah.53 So, with the authority of the Bible behind them, early Mormons argued for “plural marriage,” and some Mormon fundamentalist sects continue to practice polygyny. They were and are right: if the Bible provides authoritative models, then a man should be allowed to have more than one wife, as did Abraham, Jacob, David, and other biblical heroes, with no hint of divine disapproval.

Polygyny had a payoff: it increased the number of offspring, who were valuable in their own right as sources of labor. It also was a status symbol, showing that a man or his family had the assets to come up with bride-prices for and to support several wives. Moreover, polygyny is presumed in biblical law. Here is an example:

If a man has two wives, one loved and the other hated, and if both the loved one and the hated one have borne him sons, the firstborn being the son of the hated one, then on the day when he gives his sons their inheritance of his property, he should not make the son of the loved one the firstborn instead of the son of the hated one, who is the firstborn. He must recognize as firstborn the son of the hated one, giving him a double portion of all that he has; since he is the first of his power, the right of the firstborn is his.54

In the context of the Bible as a whole, it is hard not to see this as an indirect critique of how Abraham treated Hagar. But it is not a critique of polygyny as such.

What the law does suggest is that wives of the same husband had a different status. Anthropologists call these “primary” and “secondary” wives. One of the terms biblical writers use for the latter is often translated as “concubine,” but in the Bible it does not have its usual meaning in English, of a mistress; it denotes a secondary wife, either a free woman or a slave.

There are several dozen references to such secondary wives in biblical texts from all periods, showing that the practice was widespread. One recurring example is the royal harem, which consisted of both primary and secondary wives. Such harems are reported for several of the kings of Israel, from the beginning to the end of the monarchy. David had eight or more wives, in addition to “concubines,”55 and Solomon reportedly had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines,56 making him the greatest lover of all (which might explain why he is credited with writing the Song of Solomon). Solomon’s multiple marriages are condemned, not because of their number but because many of his wives were non-Israelites and caused him to worship their gods.57

Many marriages of the kings of Israel and Judah are best described as politically motivated. As has been true of rulers from antiquity to the modern era, marriage between a king and the daughter of a neighboring monarch or tribal leader, or between their children, strengthened the ties between the kings and their realms. In the Bible, David, Solomon, Ahab, and several of the Herods are among those of whom such marriages are reported; realpolitik trumped the principle of endogamy. Having a harem also demonstrated a king’s power, prestige, and wealth.

In royal families, sex and politics were connected in another way. A successor or usurper to the throne of a ruling monarch showed his own power and correspondingly his predecessor’s lack of it by taking possession of the predecessor’s harem. After Saul’s death, Abner, his general, slept with one of Saul’s wives, perhaps in a move to gain power for himself.58 Other wives of Saul became part of the harem of David, his successor.59 Then, during the short-lived revolt of David’s son Absalom against his father, he publicly took possession of—“went into”—his father’s harem, demonstrating that he had replaced David as ruler.60

Another example of how sex and power were connected occurs at the end of David’s life. The old king apparently had bad circulation, for “although they covered him with garments, he could not get warm.” So his officials held the first beauty contest in recorded history. Searching throughout all Israel, they found a virgin, Abishag the Shunammite, to lie with him. And so she did—she became the king’s attendant, but “the king did not know her.”61 So David was not just moribund, but also impotent, and not just sexually, but also politically, and the court intrigue concerning succession immediately began. That resulted in Solomon, David’s son by Bathsheba, becoming king, even though important factions in the court backed his older brother Adonijah (whose mother was Haggith). After David died, Adonijah asked Bathsheba to ask Solomon to give him Abishag, David’s last sleeping companion. Solomon knew that this was a challenge to his rule, even if Bathsheba did not, and he immediately ordered that Adonijah, his half brother, be executed.62

We find expropriation of royal harems as a demonstration of power in other contexts too. When the Assyrian king Sennacherib invaded Judah at the end of the eighth century BCE, and forced its ruler, Hezekiah, to surrender, part of the extensive tribute Hezekiah paid were his own daughters and his palace women.63 The delivery of the defeated king’s harem to his conqueror showed the victor’s power.

This treatment of women in royal harems is a stark example of how women in the ancient Near East could be depersonalized. The same transfer of wives is also attributed to God; speaking in the name of the LORD, the prophet Jeremiah proclaims that as punishment for the Israelites’ disobedience to divine commands,

I will give their wives to others, and their fields to dispossessors.64

Even for the deity, women were property to be transferred as circumstances warranted.

The New Testament adds little to this picture. We find one actual wedding, that at Cana,65 and many references to marriage in parable and metaphor, but no indication of how these marriages were contracted. Nonbiblical evidence suggests that arranged marriages continued to be the norm. And the status of the wife is the same—she is “saved through childbearing,”66 and is to be subordinate to her husband, in a divinely established gender imbalance:

Wives should be subordinate to their husbands…. For the husband is the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the church…. Just as the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church.67

The Western idea of romantic love is not entirely absent in the Bible, however. As in English, the Hebrew word for “love” can have a wide spectrum of meaning—from amorous desire to the most profound selfless affection, from the erotic to the exalted. “Love” can mean infatuation, even sexual obsession, as when we are told that Amnon loved Tamar before he raped her.68 Jacob also loved Rachel, who was “beautiful in form and in appearance,” long before they were married.69 In the only explicit narrative mention of a woman loving a man, Michal loved David, apparently from a distance.70 In these cases, “love” must mean physical attraction. And Solomon loved many foreign women—that is, they became part of his extensive harem, available for his pleasure.71

Nor do I mean to suggest that arranged marriages are intrinsically inferior to the modern Western model of falling in love. In both ancient and present-day societies where arranged marriages have been the norm, profound love has often been as much a part of those relationships as it has been in the West with its insistence on the romantic ideal. According to biblical writers, a loving marriage was enjoyed by couples such as Isaac and Rebekah;72 Samuel’s parents, Elkanah and Hannah;73 and the prophet Ezekiel and his wife—“the delight of his eyes.”74