Why would God choose to use polygamy as the context for so many key Old Testament figures? The answer should be obvious: God loves to use crooked sticks to draw straight lines. A major theme in salvation history is God using broken and sinful people, despite themselves, to bring about his redemptive purposes.

If you’re a parent, you’ve likely read the biblical accounts of the patriarchs to your children. If they were paying attention, perhaps they asked you an awkward question that you didn’t know how to answer: “Mom, Dad, was God okay with Abraham and Jacob having more than one wife?” How do we understand polygamy in the Bible?

Polygamy, believe it or not, has seen a resurgence of discussion among many professing Christians, with some even arguing that it is not only biblically permissible, but good. While most cultures today still view polygamy as abhorrent, when pressed, Christians may struggle to develop a thoroughly biblical argument against it. Some so-called pastors argue that Scripture’s lack of explicit condemnation, especially in the Old Testament, leaves room for its legitimacy in Christian marriage. But as we’ll see, Scripture is clear: polygamy has no place in God’s creation ordinance of marriage or in the body of Christ.

Marriage from the Beginning: One Man and One Woman

The Bible establishes one definition of marriage in Genesis 2 and then repeats and affirms that definition with Jesus and Paul in the New Testament: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24).

If that weren’t clear enough, Jesus makes the exclusivity of one man and one woman even more obvious in his statement, “the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh” (Matt. 19:5–6, my emphasis). Paul also highlights that the number of participants in marriage is two in 1 Corinthians 6 and Ephesians 5.

Both Old and New Testaments establish that God’s creation of marriage was designed for one man and one woman. This is the best expression of the exclusivity of Christ and his bride, the church. Jesus is not in a polygamous marriage with many individual Christians, he has one bride, the church.

In these kinds of discussions, we must remember a key hermeneutical principle when interpreting Scripture: Let the clear parts of Scripture interpret the less clear parts. The clearest testimony we have in Scripture is that marriage was designed by God to be between one man and one woman. We must never depart from this foundation. Then, from that foundation, we can start to ask the more difficult questions surrounding polygamy in the Bible.

Polygamy in the Bible: Marriage in a Fallen World

We live in a fallen world that is broken and corrupted by sin. Nothing operates the way God originally intended, and that includes marriage. In Matthew 19, Jesus makes it clear that Moses gave allowances for divorce not because divorce was ever God’s original intent, but because of the people’s hardness of heart. God needed to provide regulations around this fallen reality.

You will not find one positive example of polygamy in the Bible.

This accommodation also applies to polygamy in the Old Testament. Polygamy was a common practice in the ancient world, and, practically speaking, to remain unmarried or widowed at that time would leave women and children in vulnerable and potentially dangerous predicaments. So it is true that the Old Testament does not explicitly condemn polygamy or require capital punishment for it in the same way it does for other deviations from God’s design for marriage and sexuality.

The Old Testament law regulated this practice, just as it regulated divorce. Exodus 21:10–11 and Deuteronomy 21:15–17 speak directly about husbands who take more than one wife. These passages do not say that husbands should take more than one wife, but if they do, the law is concerned with making sure that all wives and their children are treated fairly. Rather than simply telling the husband to cast that second wife and her children out in destitution, God instead tells the husband to give his second wife all her marital rights. In some cases, the second wife might be more loved than the first, and therefore the husband might be tempted to give preferential treatment to the loved wife and her children. But the law forbids this, requiring that if the unloved wife bears the firstborn son, that son still retains all the rights of the firstborn.

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