Depictions of polygamy and concubinage in Scripture don’t overturn that fact. Instead, they reveal the ugliness and heartbreak that accompany sexual activity outside God’s established boundaries. Far from commending polygamy, narratives of polygamous patriarchs and kings in Israel reveal the spiritual and familial devastation inextricably linked to this sin.

ABSTRACT: Among Israel’s patriarchs and kings, polygamy and concubinage seem almost a matter of course. More than that, some Old Testament passages appear not only to describe these practices but to sanction them. But when read carefully, accounts of polygamy in the lives of Abraham, Jacob, David, and others cast a shadow on this departure from God’s design and definition. The spiritual and familial devastation on display in Scripture’s accounts of polygamy invites us to see the beauty of monogamous marriage, climaxing in the union of Christ and his bride.

Modern skeptics sometimes point to such examples as instances of the Bible endorsing polygamy, or at the very least of Scripture’s uncritical complicity in the polygamous cultural practices of the ancient Near East. But is this truly the case?

Given these apologetic challenges, and given the breakneck pace at which Western society is endeavoring to normalize polyamorous relationships, Christians need to understand how Scripture advances the normativity of monogamy and how that squares with the many polygamous saints found in the pages of the Old Testament.

How Scripture Makes Ethical Claims

Scripture nowhere presents polygamy and concubinage as part of God’s design for creation or as morally licit. While modern skeptics may suggest that Scripture uncritically embraces the polygamous and polyamorous practices of ancient cultures, the actual teachings of Scripture suggest otherwise. Far from being complicit in the sexual deviance of ancient cultures — deviance that harmed and oppressed women and children — both the Old and New Testaments rigidly uphold monogamy as normative.

At the heart of this discussion is how we derive ethical principles from Scripture. Yes, Scripture records acts of polygamy and concubinage among Old Testament saints. But description is not prescription. Recording an action — even an action of an otherwise upstanding “hero” of the biblical narrative — is not in itself a commendation of that action. Few characters in Scripture emerge as heroically as the apostles, but no one suggests the Gospel writers want us to imitate Peter’s denial of Jesus.

The Bible doesn’t offer an ethical code through isolated stories of individual exemplars. Instead, it provides a comprehensive story that establishes God’s purposes for humanity in creation, how humanity has rebelled against those norms, and how Christ restores humanity and, by his Spirit, reanimates the redeemed to obey God’s law. This whole-Bible approach to ethical reasoning not only tells us what God wants of us but also provides the lens through which we can interpret whether we should understand the actions of saints recorded in Scripture as either virtuous or villainous.

Jesus himself models this type of whole-Bible ethical reasoning with regard to sex and marriage in Mark 10:2–9.

Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Well-intentioned, faithful Christians differ on exactly what Jesus teaches about legitimate conditions of divorce and remarriage. What’s important for us to see right now, however, is not what Jesus is arguing but how he argues. The Pharisees want to debate Mosaic case law. Jesus, however, bypasses Deuteronomy and quotes instead from the creation narrative in Genesis 2:24 — emphasizing the normative role the creation narrative plays in establishing ethics and in interpreting later Scripture. Jesus doesn’t ignore Mosaic laws; he is happy to comment on them (Mark 10:5). But he does so by reading them in light of the entire biblical story line. He models a whole-Bible approach to ethical reasoning.

Monogamy in the Biblical Story Line

In Genesis 1, God weaves complementary pairs into the fabric of the created order: heaven and earth, sea and dry lands, light and darkness. Even the sequence of the creation days offers a complementary pair: in days 1–3 God forms heaven and earth, and in days 4–6 he fills them. The complementarity of creation culminates in the creation of God’s image-bearers as a complementary pair: a man and a woman.

As Jesus teaches in Mark 10, the account of God creating Eve and giving her to Adam establishes what is normative for human sexuality and marriage. At the heart of the definition of marriage is the monogamous relationship between a man and a woman. As Moses writes, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).

This marriage pattern established at creation — one man and one woman in a monogamous commitment — is both commanded and commended throughout the rest of Scripture. The seventh commandment forbids adultery — that is, sexual activity outside the bounds of marriage (Exodus 20:14). Deuteronomy forbids Israel’s future king, the ideal Israelite and new Adam (cf. Psalm 8), from multiplying wives (Deuteronomy 17:17). The Song of Solomon poetically unfurls the glory of marriage and sex in a way that lauds complementarian monogamy.

The New Testament follows the same pattern. Jesus, as we have seen, affirms the goodness of God’s design for monogamy in Mark 10. Similarly, the church’s elders, whose lives should serve as examples of faithfulness for all Christians (1 Peter 5:3), must be one-woman men (1 Timothy 3:2).

Finally, in Ephesians 5, Paul shows the logic behind God’s design for marriage. God didn’t institute complementarity and monogamy into the created order arbitrarily. Instead, these features reflect heavenly realities — namely, Christ’s relationship with his people. As Christ has only one bride, so marriage on earth testifies to that truth.

Four Portraits of Polygamy

If the Bible’s teachings for monogamy are so clear, why then are so many of God’s Old Testament saints polygamists? The reason Scripture records so many instances of polygamy and concubinage is not to endorse these actions, but to condemn them and show just how destructive such sexual perversity proved to be. Consider the outcomes of four of Scripture’s most notable polygamous relationships.

Lamech

Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch. When he built a city, he called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch. To Enoch was born Irad, and Irad fathered Mehujael, and Mehujael fathered Methushael, and Methushael fathered Lamech. And Lamech took two wives. The name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah. . . .

Lamech said to his wives:

“Adah and Zillah, hear my voice;
you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say:
I have killed a man for wounding me,
a young man for striking me.
If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold,
then Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold.” (Genesis 4:17–19, 23–24)

The first polygamist in Scripture is Lamech, a son in the line of Cain. Lamech is not an exemplary character. Instead, Moses portrays him as the archetypal bad guy of the prediluvian world. In the line of the seed of the serpent, Lamech is the epitome of human wickedness, a man whose bloodlust and violence are exponentially worse than Cain’s.

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