No, Mosaic Law Does Not Sanction Polygamy (Exodus 21:10)
In Genesis 2:24, God’s design for marriage was made clear: “The man said, ‘This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’ For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.”
One man (Adam) and one woman (Eve) were united together as one flesh, setting the blueprint for every marriage to follow. Even after telling them to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28)—a command which could have been accomplished much faster with multiple spouses—God did not give Adam multiple wives nor did He give Eve multiple husbands.
The one-flesh marital union of a single man and a single woman was also reiterated by the Apostle Paul in the New Testament: “…each man is to have his own wife, and each woman is to have her own husband” (1 Cor. 7:3). The reciprocal nature of the “his-own-her-own” paradigm in this command can only be accomplished by a marriage that is confined to two people: only one man with only one woman.
Unfortunately, these clear-cut considerations haven’t stopped many from contending that the Bible somehow sanctions a “marriage relationship” consisting of one man with many women (or vice versa). Sometimes, defenders of polygamy will cite God’s blessings upon certain individuals in the Old Testament, such as upon the kingdom of Israel under the rule of Solomon. Of course, they conveniently leave out the fact that Solomon’s seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines “turned his heart away after other gods” (1 Kin. 11:3-4). That’s not exactly a glowing review of polygamy. Solomon even confessed just as much later in life: “I provided for myself male and female singers and the pleasures of men—many concubines. … Thus I considered all my activities which my hands had done and the labor which I had exerted, and behold all was vanity and striving after wind and there was no profit under the sun” (Ecc. 2:8b, 11).
That same failure was true of men like Abram, who produced Ishmael with his wife’s maid, Hagar (cf. Gen. 16:4). Just like Adam, who had heard directly from God and yet failed the test of leadership by following his wife’s plan, Abram’s failure led to disaster: there was relational conflict between his wife and the maid (cf. Gen. 16:5-6), there was distress in his own life (cf. Gen. 21:11), and there have been international ramifications throughout history on account of that single act of unbelief (cf. Gen. 16:12). Once again, that’s not quite the rave review of polygamy that people think is somehow backed by Scripture.
In short, anyone who looks to those kinds of narratives to justify the perversion of polygamy will find no basis for their belief. Those accounts say much about divine patience and nothing about divine approval.
But what about direct commandments from God? Is there anywhere within the Law of Moses that actually sanctions the idea of polygamy? If found, that would be pretty substantial evidence in favor of the idea. After all, “the Law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good” (Rom. 7:12). That would perhaps imply that polygamy could also be “holy and righteous and good.” Sadly, many have been led to believe that there is, in fact, a basis for polygamy found in Mosaic Law. Two passages in particular are usually used as a defense of this. But a closer examination of each will show otherwise.
Two Wives in Deuteronomy 21:15?
One of the main passages mishandled by polygamists is Deuteronomy 21:15-16, which says (in the NASB95),
“If a man has two wives, the one loved and the other unloved, and both the loved and the unloved have borne him sons, if the firstborn son belongs to the unloved, then it shall be in the day he wills what he has to his sons, he cannot make the son of the loved the firstborn before the son of the unloved, who is the firstborn. But he shall acknowledge the firstborn, the son of the unloved, by giving him a double portion of all that he has, for he is the beginning of his strength; to him belongs the rights of the first.”
Since this passage begins with “If a man has two wives…” the reader of Scripture might immediately be given the impression that everything that follows is conditioned upon a relationship in which a man is presently married to two women. On that basis, the command is understood to teach that the firstborn son must still get the inheritance he is due even if his mother is the lesser-loved woman of the polygamous relationship. It’s thought that this command was intended to streamline any squabbles in the polygamous home by making it clear who gets what inheritance from the father. Finally, because this is casuistic law (case law), beginning with an “if” clause, the impression is that polygamous relationships are acceptable according to Mosaic Law as long as they follow the regulations that were given.
But there’s a problem.
Rather than being translated in English as, “If a man has two wives,” the verb in Deuteronomy 21:15 should be rendered as, “If a man has had two wives.” The former rendering implies a present-tense situation of multiple wives, whereas the latter lends itself to understanding a second marriage after the first has ended. Thus, the interpretation goes astray from the beginning because the translation goes astray from the beginning.
John MacArthur explains the passage:
“In the original, the words literally say, ‘has had two wives,’ referring to events that have already taken place, evidently intimating that one wife is dead and another has taken her place. Moses, then, is not legislating on a polygamous case where a man has two wives at the same time, but on that of a man who has married twice in succession. The man may prefer the second wife and be exhorted by her to give his inheritance to one of her sons. The issue involves the principle of the inheritance of the firstborn (the right of the primogeniture).”[1]
Another commentary gives similar detail:
“In the original and all other translations, the words are rendered ‘have had,’ referring to events that have already taken place; and that the ‘had’ has, by some mistake, been omitted in our version, seems highly probable from the other verbs being in the past tense—‘hers that was hated,’ not ‘hers that is hated’; evidently intimating that she (the first wife) was dead at the time referred to… …There was an obvious necessity for legislation in these circumstances; for the first wife, who was hated, was dead, and the second wife, the favorite, was alive; and with the feelings of a stepmother, she would urge her husband to make her own son the heir. This case has no bearing upon polygamy, which there is no evidence that the Mosaic code legalized.”[2]
Thus, the regulations that follow the situation are indeed as most people understand them to be: Moses gave this law to protect the firstborn son from being robbed of his inheritance just because his mother was not loved by as much as another wife. However, the relationship does not refer to simultaneous wives, but to subsequent wives. The polygamist reading of Deuteronomy 21:15 is nothing more than an immoral misinterpretation based on a grammatical fumble. And as mentioned already, the one-man-one-woman paradigm created by God would safeguard the student of Scripture from coming to such a conclusion even in the face of an unhelpful English translation.
Another Woman in Exodus 21:10?
The second major passage thought to allow for polygamy is found in Exodus 21:7-11. Following right on the heels of the Ten Commandments (cf. Exod. 20:1-17), this ordinance describes a situation involving a female slave. Far from having anything to do with the kind of colonial slavery practiced in more modern eras (which is expressly prohibited by Exodus 21:16), the kind of slavery discussed in Mosaic Law would have been due to war, crime, or debt. In the case of this particular ordinance, the slavery was debt-based: an Israelite man who was in such poverty that he could no longer provide the basic necessities for his daughter might be willing to sell her to another man for the purposes of marriage—a far better alternative than death by starvation.
The ordinance in Exodus 21:7-11 (NASB95) reads as follows:
“If a man sells his daughter as a female slave, she is not to go free as the male slaves do. If she is displeasing in the eyes of her master who designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He does not have authority to sell her to a foreign people because of his unfairness to her. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her according to the custom of daughters. If he takes to himself another woman, he may not reduce her food, her clothing, or her conjugal rights. If he will not do these three things for her, then she shall go out for nothing, without payment of money.”
To break it down, what this is saying is that if the master takes a female slave with the intent to marry her, but then decides he does not want to go through with the marriage, this ordinance gives him three options:
“If she is displeasing in the eyes of her master who designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He does not have authority to sell her to a foreign people because of his unfairness to her.”
With this first option, the master can let her be bought back out of slavery by another family, as long as it’s an Israelite family (which could include even her own family if they’re in a better financial situation to do so).
“If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her according to the custom of daughters.”
With this second option, the master can give her hand in marriage to his son, and then “deal with her according to the custom of daughters,” treating her as a family member.
“If he takes to himself another woman, he may not reduce her food, her clothing, or her conjugal rights.”
With this third option, interpreters have been led to believe that the master can get an additional wife as long as he makes sure to continue providing his first wife (the female slave) with just as much food, clothing, and sexual intimacy as he had been. Thus, it’s thought that polygamy is inherently sanctioned by this option.
In a sense, I sympathize with how this third option can be misunderstood. A cursory glance at it might seem indicate something like a polygamist sentiment. And, in fact, some commentators do capitulate their interpretation to the wording used in this translation. Yet, a commitment to the God-ordained marital relationship in Genesis should, once again, cause the student of Scripture to dig deeper than just a cursory glance at the passage.
Upon digging deeper, we find that this passage also suffers from some translation problems.
The first problem comes from the phrase “takes to himself another woman.” The word “another” might seem to imply that in the third option, the master has taken a second wife. That is to say, the phrase is thought to mean “takes to himself an additional woman.” And it’s true, the Hebrew word used here, acher, does mean “additional” in some cases. For example, after Noah waited in the ark for forty days, and the dove he sent out returned to him, he waited another (Hebrew acher) seven days (Gen. 8:10).
But the word most certainly doesn’t always mean that. It can also mean “alternative.” In fact, the nearest use of this same word is found in Exodus 22:5, in which a law is given about an ox who grazes in “another man’s field.” In that ordinance, the issue is not about the ox grazing in a second field, but in a different (alternative) field than the one it’s supposed to. Perhaps most notably, the Hebrew word acher in Numbers 14:24 is translated as “different,” when referring to the spiritual state of the faithful spy Caleb in contrast with the other Israelites.
All that to say, it’s fine for the word in this passage to be translated as “another,” but the interpreter should understand it to mean “an alternative woman,” not “an additional woman.”
That said, why is the passage so often mistaken as referring to an additional wife rather than an alternative wife? It’s because of a second translational problem in the passage: “…he may not reduce her food, her clothing, or her conjugal rights.” By translating this final provision as “conjugal rights” (sexual intimacy), it makes it inconceivable that the passage could be about anything other than multiple wives. Thus, the (bizarre) idea behind the polygamist interpretation is this: if a man takes a second wife, he must make sure to provide the first wife with the food, clothing, and sexual gratification she desires. Aside from that being a strange stipulation (for a variety of reasons!), the bigger problem is that the final term shouldn’t be translated as “conjugal rights” at all!
That’s right—not at all.
Discussing this, noted commentator Dr. Thomas Constable says,
“‘Conjugal rights’ (v. 10) here refers to her living quarters and other support provisions, not sexual intercourse. This passage is not discussing marriage as such (after physical consummation)—as the NIV and AV imply.”[3]
This final term comes from the Hebrew word `onah, which is translated as some form of marital, conjugal, or sexual activity by nearly every modern translation. But get this: the word is used only here in the entire Old Testament (what literary scholars would call a hapax legomenon), and being of unknown origin, this means that the translators had no other passage nor an etymological basis by which to ascertain the actual meaning of the term!
So where did the idea come from that this term refers to “conjugal rights?” Sadly, from rabbinic tradition.[4] That’s right—simply because of a long-held belief repeated over time, the term was assigned the meaning of conjugal rights (despite some scholars today recognizing that this “has no philological support.”)[5]
It shouldn’t need to be said, but that’s not exactly a good way to translate the Word of God. Instead, as one expositor notes,
“There is no suggestion of a second marriage with ‘marital rights’ in Exodus 21:10. The word translated as ‘marital rights’ should be rendered oil or ointments.”[6]
That’s exactly right. The phrase in Exodus 21:10 should be translated as, “If he takes to himself another woman, he may not reduce her food, her clothing, or her oil.”[7]
In the Ancient Near East, the three provisions associated with basic necessities for life were food, covering, and oil, constituting a “maintenance trio.”[8] Since oils and ointments were used for a variety of everyday needs, especially medicinal (cf. Luke 10:34), in today’s vernacular, we might refer to this triad of rations as “food, shelter, and medical care.” So, Moses was teaching that if a man took a slave woman with the intention of marrying her, but later changed his mind, this ordinance protected the woman’s basic needs in life; the master was not allowed to decrease her basic necessities just because she was going to be a “common slave” rather than his wife.
Far from being a bizarre endorsement of polygamy, Mosaic Law in this passage was protecting women—even slave women—from being treated like garbage at the whim of a fickle master.
Now, you may be thinking, “That sounds all well and good, but where in the world does this translation of the Hebrew term `onah come from?” Though it is a unique term without a directly known lexical origin, it can be inferred based on a survey of ancient documents from other cultures that show exactly this same triad of basic life provisions:
First Dynasty of Babylon schoolbook: “…give a child to a wet-nurse to be suckled, and give the wet-nurse food and drink, oil for anointing, and clothing for three years.”[9]
Code of Hammurabi, Law 104: “If a merchant gave a trading agent barley, wool, oil, or any property to sell, the trading agent will regularly return silver (or: will record and return silver) to the merchant; the trading agent will receive a sealed document of the silver that he gives the merchant.”[10]
Code of Hammurabi, Law 178: “If the father of a priestess or a temple-woman or a devotee has presented her with a dowry and written out a document for her but has not written on that document that she may dispose of her property in the way she thinks best or that he has empowered her to do what she likes, after he has passed to his destiny her brothers shall take the field or the orchard and make her comfortable by giving her food, oil and garments according to the size of her share.”[11]
Code of Hammurabi, Law 237: “If a man has hired a boatman or a boat and has stowed it with grain, wool, oil, dates or some other cargo, but that boatman has been careless and has sunk the boat and completely lost what was in it, the boatman shall make repayment for the boat that he sank and for whatever was in it that he lost.”[12]
Egyptian wisdom literature: “When you prosper and found your house, and love your wife with ardor, fill her belly, clothe her back, ointment soothes her body. Gladden her heart as long as you live.”[13]
That last reference, Maxim #21 from The Instructions of Ptahhotep, would have likely been familiar to Moses, since he was “educated in all the learning of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22). Thus, the threefold necessary provisions of food, clothing, and oil were well known throughout cultures in the centuries prior to the Exodus from Egypt.
Perhaps most significantly, two passages in the Old Testament also corroborate this understanding:
In Hosea 2:5, the nation of Israel is compared to an adulteress who goes to another man for her daily provisions: “‘I will go after my lovers, who give me bread and water, wool and linen, oil and drink.’” Notice that food (“bread and water”), clothing (“wool and linen”), and oil are listed as the things the nation of Israel (depicted as a woman) sought out from someone other than Yahweh.
In Ecclesiastes 9:7-8, Solomon speaks of enjoying life to the glory of God, and notice, once again, what that kind of life includes on a daily basis: “Go then, eat your bread in happiness and drink your wine with a cheerful heart; for God has already approved your works. Let your clothes be white all the time, and let not oil be lacking on your head.” Here we have the threefold daily provisions of life described as food (“bread…wine”), clothes, and oil.
When all this data is taken together, the proper rendering of `onah clearly refers to a type of daily, life-sustaining provision, as in an oil or ointment—not “conjugal rights.”
Multiple Reasons to Reject Multiple Wives
To summarize:
Deuteronomy 21:15 should read, “If a man has had two wives, the one loved and the other unloved, and both the loved and the unloved have borne him sons, if the firstborn son belongs to the unloved…”
Exodus 21:10 should read, “If he takes to himself an alternative woman, he may not reduce her food, her clothing, or her oil.”
When examining Old Testament Law, those are the two main passages in which polygamists have tried to house their beliefs.[14] Having exposed the truth behind these verses, we can confidently say, “No, Mosaic Law does not sanction polygamy.” On the contrary, God’s Law is holy, righteous, and good.
Of the multiple reasons to reject multiple wives, the most compelling is found in the Gospel itself. The Lord Jesus Christ came as a man to live a perfect life, die a substitutionary death, and rise victoriously from the grave, providing forgiveness and righteousness to guilty sinners. But He did so only for those today who call on His name by faith alone—in other words, He did it solely for the Church. On that basis, a husband is commanded to love his wife “just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). Christ only has one bride. Therefore, so must each husband.
If you know a polygamist, tell him the truth about God’s Law, and then tell him the solution to his sexual sin found in God’s Gospel.
References:
[1] John MacArthur, The MacArthur Bible Commentary (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2005), 224.
[2] https://biblehub.com/commentaries/jfb/deuteronomy/21.htm
[3] https://soniclight.com/tcon/notes/html/exodus/exodus.htm
[4] https://outorah.org/p/6077
[5] https://www.thetorah.com/article/onah-a-husbands-conjugal-duties
[6] https://versebyversecommentary.com/articles/problem-passages/polygamy
[7] T. Desmond Alexander keenly notes in his commentary, “The Hebrew term translated ‘marital rights’ occurs only here in the Old Testament and may possibly denote ‘oil/ointment’ rather than ‘marital rights.’ Although the NIV translation assumes that the slave girl is married in verses 10-11, this may not be case.” See: T. Desmond Alexander, Exodus (Teach the Text Commentary Series) (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2016).
[8] Christopher J. H. Wright, The Story of God Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2021), 399. Wright recognizes that oil was viewed as “an essential commodity in Israelite life.” See also: Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000-323 BC, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 57. Regarding the Ancient Near East in the Dynastic Period, Van De Mieroop says that workers "...were rewarded for their work with rations: standard amounts of barley, accounted for on a monthly basis, and of oil and wool, accounted for annually."
[9] C.H.W. Johns, Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts, and Letters (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1904), 153.
[10] https://ehammurabi.org/law/104
[11] https://ehammurabi.org/law/178
[12] https://ehammurabi.org/law/237
[13] Antonio Loprieno, ed., Ancient Egyptian Literature: History and Forms (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), 257.
[14] On occassion, some might also cite Leviticus 18:18 as a defense of polygamy, asserting that the prohibition against marrying multiple sisters is an implied permission to marry multiple non-sisters. This passage, however, is a prohibition against a common source of polygamy, not an implied permission of other forms of polygamy. The polygamist use of this passage is as logically fallacious as claiming that Leviticus 18:21 implies permission to sacrifice children to Baal, Chemosh, or any false god as long as it's not Molech. As John MacArthur notes on Leviticus 18:18, “Commonly in Egyptian, Chaldean, and Canaanite culture, sisters were taken as wives in polygamous unions. God forbids such, as all polygamy is forbidden by the original law of marriage (see Gen. 2;24, 25).” See: John MacArthur, The MacArthur Bible Commentary (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2005), 156.