My wife and I have recently gotten sucked into the HBO series “Big Love.” This show - which we consider excellent, despite its flaws - has gotten us both wondering about the whole polygamy thing. To us, it seems that there are several obvious reasons why it’s NOT a good idea (one spouse is tough enough - who would want more to deal with!), but, obviously, there are quite a few people who disagree.
So - what is the scriptural or practical basis for polygamy? What are the scriptural or practical reasons for prohibiting it? What is its standing in other countries and cultures?
I recently heard on NPR that polygamy cases are rarely brought to court in the US because it would require one of the wives to register the complaint and/or testify against their husband - why is this so? If it’s illegal, can’t there be a better way to prosecute it?
Well, it should be obvious from a cursory reading of the Bible that polygyny was practiced in Biblical times. Abraham, Jacob, Elkannah (Samuel’s father), David, Solomon and others are recorded as having more than one wife at a time.
In all probability, it was never practiced extensively, even in Biblical times. As you mentioned, maintaining multiple wives and families is an expense, and most people would probably not be able to maintain it.
In post-biblical times, polygyny was still legal under Jewish legal codes, but not practiced extensively. Of all the rabbis mentioned in the Talmud, none are mentioned as having more than one wife at a time.
Among Ashkenazic Jews, polygyny was outlawed by Rabbeinu Gershom about a thousand years ago. Sephardic Jews never accepted the ban, and hence polygyny remained a legal practice for Sephardic Jews. However, Jews living in areas of the world where polygyny is illegal are bound to the laws of the land and cannot marry more than one wife (at a time). In effect, only Jews living in areas where polygyny is still practiced (as in many Muslim countries) can still engage in polygynous marriages.
The State of Israel today will not allow a Jew to marry a second wife while still married to the first one. However, they will “grandfather” a polygynous marriage contracted outside of Israel for someone who immigrates to Israel. Thus, a Jew coming from Morrocco, for example, with his two wives may remain married to them when he moves to Israel, but may not add a third wife while he is married to the other two.
Scriptural basis: The Old Testament permits polygamy. It wasn’t banned amongst European Jews until about 1000 years ago, a rabbi named Rabbeinu Gershom decreed that the practice should end, mainly because it looked bad in the eyes of the Christians. (Amongst Middle Eastern Jews, the ban never took effect, and it remained permitted until the modern state of Israel brought about a homogenization of the two communities’ marriage practices.)
Practically, one was expected to not marry more than one woman unless he was certain he could treat them equally, and both well. Ordinary folks were expected to never marry more than four wives, as a man’s dividing his sexual attentions equally more than that is inherently unfair to the women. A king was allowed to marry up to 18; rules of fairness to others are somewhat relaxed when it comes to kings, who are by nature of their position given higher personal priority.
The practical basis of polygamy was purely economic, based on bride prices, dowries, and how many women and their children a man was in a position to support. In a world in which sheer physical survival was often in question, it was the best (or I would say, the least bad) system available.
Mormanism is the only religion I know of that was orginally interpreted as actively promoting polygamy rather than simply accomodating it. IMHO, it was conciously intended to create a patriarchal society controlled by “elders”- the men rich and high status enough to have multiple wives.
Royal polygamy is another matter entirely, with the ruler maintaining a harem either as a status symbol or to create alliances through marriage, the brides in question being tokens of loyalty and/or envoys to the court.
From my readings, the benefits of polygamy go well beyond the economic especially in modern fundamentalist Mormon families. The reality of having many mothers certainly provides greater cement for the family. Many kids today lack a solid family structure. With multipe wives, the family structure is actually magnified. For the wives themselves, as long as the accept the concept of polygamy, they have lifelong companions and share an intimacy that is in itself binding. Food for thought.
I only have the one wife, if you’re wondering.
I met a woman in Africa, surrounded by children, who told me “I wish my husband would take another wife!”
Somewhat surprised, I asked why.
“He’s the kind of man that money always runs through his hands, but none sticks. His three other wives left him because of that, and now I have to take care of all of their children, plus my own … I could use the help”.
It should be clear that in Big Love, the characters are essentially what you’d call “Mormon fundamentalists,” who derive their scriptural basis from the writings of Joseph Smith (specifically Doctrine and Covenants, section 132) and the later Mormon prophets. They believe that polygamy was not “really” ended when Mormonism abandoned the practice in the 1890-1920 period, but that God intended a small subset of Mormons to continue the practice. Needless to say, the modern Mormon church strongly takes issue with this.
This is pure hypothesizing on my part - I am not a lawyer in any jurisdiction. However, to my way of thinking, it would be extremely difficult to prosecute polygamy unless someone is foolish enough (and yes, I know some are! ) to actually get multiple marriage licenses. I don’t think members of that fundamentalist mormon sect that is still into polygyny actually get multiple marriage licenses - from the viewpoint of their beliefs the husband has multiple wives, but from a legal point of view he is simply being rather open about practicing adultery, which isn’t illegal.
I’m currently reading Under The Banner of Heaven and from what I have gleaned so far, you are right that most men do not actually legally marry the wives numbered 2 through whatever. A lot of the legal issue, however, is in the plural wives going on Welfare, claiming to be single mothers. There seems to be a lot of Welfare fraud and tax fraud going on among Fundamentalist Mormons. Also, there is the issue that many of the second plus wives are very young, under the age of consent at least.
I got the impression that the rationale behind the multiple wives was so that Fundamentalist Mormons could have lots and lots of children, thus populating the earth with more Fundamentalist Mormons (at least in theory).
I should reiterate, though, that I am not finished with the book, plus I do realize that it is not necessarily the final word on Mormonism. Fascinating stuff, though.
They did in fact prosecute and convict FLDS memberTom Green, in 2001. He married and divorced his wives in sequence, and the women and children collected welfare as single mothers. He was later convicted of child rape , for impregnating one of his wives at the age of 13.
There’s polygomy, and then there’s the FLDS church.
No, it’s illegal. It was recognized that the defense of “I’m not LEGALLY married to any of these other wives!” would be used by everybody (except the traditional folks that were prosecuted as bigamists – the ones who deceived both wives [or all of them, if there were more than two] into thinking they were the sole legal wife … but that doesn’t really apply to Mormon-style polygyny, where all the wives know what’s up), since technically you can’t legally marry more than one woman. If they admitted that the polygamists were just open adulterers from a legal standpoint, they’d have a hard time prosecuting Mormon polygamists (and achieving the ultimate goal of suppressing the practice of polygamy) without being accused of selective prosecution for not prosecuting “normal” adulterers too.
So the anti-polygamy laws were crafted to make plain ol’ “bigamous cohabitation” illegal – “bigamous cohabitation” being essentially the situation we’re discussing, where a man and multiple women act like they’re husband and wives (i.e., have sex and probably children together).
I’d produce a cite for the actual laws – in the western states where this kind of thing is common, at least, such as Utah, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, etc. – but I’m almost dead with exhaustion at the moment. Hopefully somebody else will do so while I’m asleep, thus freeing me of all responsibility.
Also, sugar and spice, Tom Green was not a member of the FLDS church (Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). As far as I know, he was his own brand of Mormon fundamentalist. The FLDS were the cult based in Colorado City and who looted the local school district’s funds and fled to Texas, and whose prophet Warren Jeffs was recently placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list and who was caught.
Not that there’s much of a difference – they’re both pretty evil, assuming you consider child abuse and sexual coercion evil.
As noted, scriptural bases of polygyny differ a little bit between the Tanakh/Old Testament and the Book of Mormon.
There is no scriptural prohibition of polygyny in the Christian scriptures. Rather, there is the presumption of monogamy taken from the traditions of the society of the Roman world in the first and second century. The Greeks had only had limited and sporadic polygyny throughout their history and the Romans were monogamous (although concubinage was practiced by the wealthy). As Christianity flourished in the Roman world, it adopted that as the default standard. Since even in polygynous societies, it was likely that monogamy (based on a simple lack of women, if nothing else) was far more common than polygyny, many of the scriptural references from the Tanakh/Old Testament imply monogamy, although the cultural realities recognized that wealthy men did, actually, marry more than one woman.
(It took a certain amount of wealth to support multiple wives-with-children and every man that had more than one wife reduced the number of women available for another man to marry.)
From a practical standpoint, it would seem that polygyny would best survive in a society where men suffered a much higher early death rate so that women could find the protection of family (particularly where all social care was family based). On the other hand, I have never looked into actual death rates in different societies and it seems odd that warfare would actually raise the young male morbidity higher than childbirth and kitchen fires would affect that of young women.
This was what I was looking for - if we acknowledge that polygyny was practised freely in Biblical times, when did it become “not allowed?” From the rest of the post quoted above, it seems that the basis for ending it was in Greek and Roman practices, not necessarily for any “religious” reason.
I am not looking for a justification of polygyny - I’m quite happy with only one spouse! - I’m just wondering where/how it was transformed into something that was considered desirable (if one could afford it) to something that causes a visceral “yuck!” reaction in so many Western cultures.
I’ve never watched the show, but my understanding is that the wives live in separate houses, and the husband visits each one on a rotating schedule. This is also the way it’s done in many Arab and African cultures. Islam is clear that a man must provide exactly equally for each wife, so if one gets a new car, so do the others. A Doper shared in another thread the story of a Muslim man who solved this “problem” by purchasing a three flat and installing one wife in each apartment, identically furnished with identical items.
So would this be illegal? The women have no more of a relationship with each other than any wife and mistress, although their children may or may not play together the way my own children spend extended time at their friends’ houses. It’s not a commune style group marriage, but separate households and relationships.
I’m not sure that it ever “transformed.” My vague recollection is that nearly all European societies were monogamous while nearly all Middle Eastern societies were polygynous. (The one exception being that I do not recall polygyny in ancient Egypt.) Even the Greek experience with polygyny (to the extent of my recall) was that it occurred around the time that they were mixing it up with the Persians who might have introduced the custom to those Asian Greeks whom they conquered, briefly.
Again, recall that even in most polygyny accepting societies, most marriages are going to be monogamous unless the society is very short on males (or willing to put up with a lot of angry and frustrated males). Passages such as Genesis 2:24 speak as though monogamy is understood to be the norm, even though by Genesis 4:19, Lamech is noted as taking two wives. (I do not think that this was necessarily a subtle dig at polygyny, even though Lamech was a descendant of Cain, given that Jacob also took two wives.)
chorpler , thank you for the correction. I had remembered the case from when it broke a few years ago, and found the links in a rush (was enjoying free wifi at the airport). The story of those teenage brides was memorable and, at least for me, somewhat heartbreaking.
) to actually get multiple marriage licenses. I don’t think members of that fundamentalist mormon sect that is still into polygyny actually get multiple marriage licenses - from the viewpoint of their beliefs the husband has multiple wives, but from a legal point of view he is simply being rather open about practicing adultery, which isn’t illegal.