During biblical times, Israelites and Jews practiced polygamy, often called "plural marriage" by Latter-day Saints Because this practice is foreign to most people in the twenty-first century, in this paper we will summarize what is known about Israelite and Jewish polygamy in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and postbiblical Jewish literature. A contextual understanding of how polygamy was thought of and practiced can help modern Bible readers gain additional perspective about these ancient people and their stories. We will then conclude with a brief comparison between Israelite and Jewish polygamy in antiquity and Latter-day Saint polygamy in the nineteenth century. Latter-day Saints have often used our own experience in the recent past to extrapolate what polygamy was like in biblical times, while simultaneously using biblical texts to give meaning to our own experience. However, while there are important places where these biblical and Restoration experiences of polygamy overlap, there are also very significant diferences regarding how we thought of and practiced it. Because simplistic and overly generalized comparisons have at times led to erroneous conclusions, we suggest the need for greater nuance and caution when comparing ancient and latter-day polygamy.

Polygamy in the Old Testament

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The Israelites of the Old Testament lived in a geographical and cultural setting known today as the ancient Near East, and the societies in that setting were very accepting of polygamy. The practice is widely assumed in ancient Near Eastern narratives, myths, and legal texts and is attested in genealogies and marriage contracts. The particulars of the practice could vary somewhat depending on where one lived in the ancient Near East, but we can observe some broad commonalities.

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When viewed against this background, polygamy as described in the Old Testament is decidedly unremarkable: the Israelites practiced it for the same reasons and in the same ways that their neighbors did. As was the case with neighboring regions, the Old Testament depicts the Israelites as allowing polygamy even if it was not the majority situation. As in other ancient Near Eastern texts, Israelite kings such as Solomon are depicted as marrying numerous wives for their personal pleasure and for politics (see 1 Kings 11:1-3), and nonroyals, such as Elkanah, are depicted as taking second wives when the first is barren (see 1 Samuel 1:2). Genesis 16 explains that Abraham's wife Sarah gave her slave Hagar to her husband Abraham as a second wife so that Hagar could bear the children that Sarah could not and then reports that Hagar's new status caused trouble between her and Sarah. These same situations are already anticipated and regulated in laws 146-47 of the Code of Hammurabi, a legal text from Babylon that was written around the same time Abraham lived.

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In sum, while there are a couple of situations in which the Israelites treated polygamy diferently than their neighbors, such as by suggesting a reasonable limit on the number of wives allowed for a king (see Deuteronomy 17:17, described above), the Israelites of the Old Testament practiced polygamy for langely the sane reasons and in largely the same ways as other peoples of the ancient Near East. Even the regulations of polygamy found in the law of Moses almost always followed common cultural precedents.

Polygamy around the Time of the New Testament

Polygamy continued to be practiced among Jews down into the New Testament era. Perhaps the most famous documented example from the New Testament period is King Herod, who was married ten times (although not all those wives were at the same time). Herod is hardly representative of everyday Jews, but unfortunately the marital situation of most people has not been preserved by history. One important exception comes from a cache of texts found at a site called Nahal Hever near the Dead Sea. These legal documents describe the situation of a Jewish woman named Babatha who lived in the early second century AD. After Babatha's husband died, she married a man named Judah who already had a wife named Miriam, and then after Judah also died, Babatha and Miriam had some legal disputes. Because this particular family lived in a remote, rural location, they provide an important example of polygamy among everyday Jews living close to the time of the New Testament.

Although archacological evidence for practiced polygamy during this period is rare, the subject is frequently addressed in nonbiblical Jewish literature dating to the centuries surrounding the New Testament era. These texts show a remarkable diversity of opinions regarding polygamy, from outright hostility to embarrasment to positive portrayal.

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In sum, while there is little surviving evidence of the actual practice of polygamy among Jews in the New Testament era, polygamy and polygamous relationships are often mentioned in contemporary literature. This literature suggests that for various reasons, most notably the cultural pressure from monogamous Greece and Rome, Jews of this era had mixed feelings about the practice.

Polygamy in the New Testament

In the New Testament itself, there are places where Jewish cultural conversations about polygamy may have informed the topics that the New Testament discusses. For example, 1 Timothy 3:2 instructs that a bishop should be "the husband of one wife." The exact intent of this phrase is debated, and it is often thought to refer to divorce or remarriage, especially given the Roman virtue of the univira, or wife of one husband in her lifetime. Whatever the phrase meant, it probably would have precluded polygamy as well. To Christians coming from a Greco-Roman background, this would have seemed obvious. Jewish followers of Jesus, by contrast, would have inherited the complex perspectives of polygamy that existed at that time, and may have seen such a restriction as novel.

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In sum, we simply do not know enough about the assumed background knowledge of Jesus's audience to know all the ways they may have understood his teachings on divorce. However, the reality of polygamy among Jews in the first century may have informed the reasons for asking Jesus about divorce as well as some of the ways Jesus's counsel may have been taken. Keeping that reality in mind can help us read the New Testament with greater sensitivity to diverse family situations that existed in Jesus's environment.

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Latter-day Saint Polygamy in Light of the Israelite and Jewish Experience

Following revelations given to Joseph Smith, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints practiced plural marriage for abour half a century, beginning in the 1840s in Nauvoo. The lsraelite and Jewish experience of polygamy shares both overlap and variance with the Latter-day Saint experience. Some examples of overlap include our mutual experience of persecution and ridicule from cultures with a monogamous standard, the utility of polygamy for integrating women from outside the community into family structures, and the increased opportunities for having children that came to polygamous husbands. Some examples of variance incude the Mosaic law against marrying two sisters (which Latter-day Saints did not follow), the requirement for Latter-day Saints to seek permission from Church authorities (no ancient text describes the need for this kind of permission), or the example set by some (but not all) biblical men of marrying again only after their first wife has been unable to conceive children (Latter-day Saint men often married a second wife even if he already had children).

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Joseph Smith's revelation on polygamy radically reframes the significance of the practice as found in the Bible. For Latter-day Saints, this opens up entirely new ways of understanding biblical polygamy. At the same time, we are caught in a rather striking contradiction: whle Doctrine and Covenants 132 declares that at least some examples of Old Testament polygamy were commanded by God, helped fulfill his purposes, were performed by the authority of priesthood keys, and helped bring its participants to eternal life, we find very few hints of any of that in the Old Testament itself. Almost everything we know about Israelite and Jewish polygamy from the literature of the ancient Near East, from the Bible, and from the extrabiblical Jewish literature suggests that Israclite and Jewish polygamy was a cultural practice that followed traditional procedures for dealing with temporal situations.

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In sum, while polygamy was primarily a religious principle for nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints, for most ancient Israclites and Jews the practice was not explicitly religious but cultural. Even in cases where scripture records that God commanded a man to take additional wives or accepted a man's decision to do so, these are presented in the Bible ascases of God using an existing practice for his own ends. While Latter-day Saints should be grateful for the new insights revealed in Doctrine and Covenants 132, we should also recognize that some doctrines were not clearly taught in ancient times but were "kept hid" until they could "be revealed...in this, the dispensation of the fulness of times" (Doctrine and Covenants 128:18). The historical and literary evidence from ancient Israel suggests that our modern understanding of eternal marriage is one of those doctrines that was not widely understood.

There are certainly connections between biblical and Restoration polygamy, and it is not inappropriate to compare them. However, given the differences between how polygamy was practiced, as well as the different frameworks and rationales invoked for it, we should be careful not to simplistically equate these experiences as one and the same. Keeping their respective contexts in perspective also allows us to better appreciate how the Lord is "acquainted with the situationof all nations...and has made ample provision for their redemption, according to their several circumstances."