The Bible tells us that Yahweh-Elohim created the first man, Adam, and gave him one wife, Eve (Havah). Though Hebrew tradition mentions an earlier wife, Lillith, who rebelled against Adam’s headship and murdered their children, to become a demon and consort of Satan (the “Mother of Heaven” in pagan traditions), and although another tradition mentions a third wife, Sarah (not to be confused with the wife of Abraham), the Bible as we have it speaks only of one companion.

Accordingly, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant theologians and scriptorians have argued that in spite of the “permissive” practice of polygyny early in the Bible because of the supposed “hardness of the hearts” of the first patriarchs and Israelites, that Adam and Eve, who existed in a perfect state of bliss, are the ultimate reference Christians should have in marriage - namely, monogamy. Thus ideal marriage - according to the perfect model of Adam and Eve in Paradise - is monogamy.

In answer to this proposition, J. Guilford writes:

I want to refute one of the most common religious fallacies against polygamy, namely that monogamy is the family arrangement preferred by Elohim (God), because Elohim (God) gave only one wife to Adam.

I have to say about it:

• 1. If it has any basis, it would be the typical fundamentalist fallacy of a cult.

• 2. It is based on another fundamentalist assumption, namely that Elohim (God) wants ALL men to have the same situation or status (in this case, all Catholic priests are living in sin), namely, the one of Adam.

• 3. It also presupposes that, by giving a wife to Adam, Elohim (God) wanted to preach monogamy, rather than monogenism, in which case, He would not have forced Adam’s children to live in incest. He would have, in that case, created, at least, two monogamous couples.

• 4. It presupposes that, unlike with all other human characteristics, Elohim (God) WAS OBLIGED to differentiate men from all primates by creating a race of two or more women for every man, in case He wanted to admit polygamy.

Let us see this in detail.

• 1. The atrocious fundamentalist fallacy. Every person with a little common sense knows in practice, what is known in mathematics (and in economy) as “The second best theorem”. To forget it, is the typical basis of every fundamentalist sect or cult. In other words, what is valid in ideal circumstances does not need to hold (and almost never holds) in non-ideal circumstances.

  If Elohim (God) had considered monogamy ideal in Paradise (and in point 2 and 3, I will show, there is no reason to believe it), it DOES NOT MEAN AT ALL that He would have still considered it ideal, once men were out of Paradise.

  If we would go on with this logic (and it is curious, we ONLY reason this way in respect to monogamy), we would destroy this world: no remarriage of widows or widowers, no private property, no police, no army, no hospitals, no doctors, no keys or locks for houses, no government, no taxes, no money, no burials, of course, we should go all naked,……we would make up a kind of naïve-stupid world, WHICH WOULD NOT WORK AT ALL……because we are not in Paradise anymore. Of course, incest should be permitted, because it is the way Elohim (God) wanted for Adam’s children…..

  In respect to clothing, we get a clue, that Elohim (God) finds obvious that, once out of Paradise, men had to behave in a different way than in Paradise: “They got dressed up, because they started to get ashamed”. So, once you lost the primitive purity and innocence, you could not behave the same way as before. WHAT WAS RIGHT BEFORE - be naked - WAS WRONG AFTERWARDS.

  In respect to private property, we all know, that it is wrong, when we are in quasi-Paradise circumstances. In a family, where the degree of love and communion is very high, private property is ridiculous. You do not have it in respect to your wife and children, when the family works perfectly. When marriage and parents-children lose this high degree of communion, private property appears among them. First Christians, we read in the Bible, “had everything in common”. If you try to enforce it now among today’s Christians/Messianics, you get communism, which is the worst of all dictatorships. Here we see most clearly that ENFORCING IN SUBOPTIMAL CIRCUMSTANCES WHAT IS THE IDEAL IN OPTIMAL CIRCUMSTANCES IS A TYRANNY, which does not please Elohim (God) at all.

  In convents, there is no private property, as Yah'shua (Jesus) told to the rich young man in the Gospel: “If you want to be perfect, give all your possessions to the poor”. If you cannot be perfect, you have to go by the property rules.

  If Elohim (God) had considered monogamy the ideal in Paradise (I will show that it is a presupposition contrary to commonsense), it was so in a world, where circumstances which make polygamy an ideal for some people today, did not exist:

  • 1. He would have created a woman for every man, being she his perfect match (as in Paradise).

  • 2. No widows, who could not remarry in monogamy, because there are not enough men (as St. Paul recommends, when they burn of passion).

  • 3. No oversexed men, who could not live in monogamy without burning in passion.

  • 4. No single mothers.

  • 5. No forced spinsters (the same number of men and women).

  • 6. No sterile women.

  • 7. No danger of prostitution.

  • 8. No death.

  So, please, stop saying fundamentalist nonsense.

• 2. Did Elohim (God) want all men in Mao uniform? (all married the same way)

  We all know that Elohim (God) does not want all men to be equal: some have been created to be poets, some engineers, some workers, and so on. Why should Elohim (God) have wanted all men to be monogamous?

  If Elohim (God) had wanted to stress it, He would have made it clear, by creating 100 men and 100 women and made them to live in monogamous marriages (in fact, polygamous men have never been but 5-15% of all men). But He did not.

  He did say very clearly that He wanted ALL human beings to be married (“It is not good for man to be alone”). But, alas!, the Catholic Church interprets this very clear and direct command and forces priests to be single. But Yah'shua (Jesus) said that the ones who understood it could stay single (not the forced ones, as it has happened to so many priests and nuns, thrown into convents by their families for XVIII centuries), rectifying this way the Genesis. But Yah'shua (Jesus) never rectified the consent of polygamy, shown 1,000 times in the Old Testament. On the top of it, no church treats as a public sinner, a man, who decides to remain single.

  Why? If polygamy is a sin, because Adam got a wife, why is singleness not a public sin, where, again, Adam got a wife and Elohim (God) told that to be single is not good? WHAT A DELICIOUS DOUBLETHINK have the Churches in respect to polygamy!

  The fact is that Elohim (God) gave to us genes, that produce more male than female births and more women than men through death in marriage age. This is the way things are after Paradise.

• 3. If something is clear of Adam’s one wife is that Elohim (God) wanted all humanity to descend from one pair (monogenism), for obvious anti-racist reasons, putting up with the incestuous marriage of Adam’s children. By which, by the way, He showed that, unlike Church leaders, He knew the “Theorem of the second best” and that, confronted with two evils, you have to choose the smallest one (by which the argument that polygamy is bad, because it WOULD HAVE BEEEN bad in Paradise, disappears).

• 4. Once Elohim (God) decided to create JUST one man (and not 100), He could not give to him more than one wife, for instance, two, because it would have meant that this was to be THE GENERAL RULE or that Elohim (God) considered monogamous men as half-married, by which He would have condemned to 90-95% of men to half-marriage (the more we progress in this argument, the more ridiculous it is).

  That the GENERAL RULE is one man one wife, does not need the Paradise story to be understood: the population pyramid does not allow more than 5-10% of polygamous men. If Adam would have got two wives, would this have outlawed monogamy? What if a man did not find two compatible women he fell in love with? Here we see how ridiculous the argument is.

  Again, the more we develop and consider this “argument”, the more absurd and ridiculous it gets.

SUMMARY: Nature gave us a ratio of 1.10 women to 1 man. Elohim (God) could not give more than a wife to Adam, because the women:men ratio only allowed 5% of men to have more than one wife. If Elohim (God) wanted to show something with this fact, it, presumably was, that all men came from only one couple (monogenism) and this desire seems to be so strong, that He forced Adam’s children to commit incest. If He had wanted to show monogamy for everybody, He would have created 100 monogamous couples. Even if He had wanted to show monogamy for Paradise, as many other things were to be observed in Paradise (no army, no private property, going naked), simple common sense proves that outside Paradise different customs had to rule.

We thus see, from simple logic and mathematics (quite apart from scripture) a divine purpose in which Yahweh has ordained the creation, viz. that up to 5% of men are to live polygynously and the rest - 95% - monogamously. That polygyny is enshrined in the Law (Torah) proves that polygyny is a part of the divine will. As a corrollary of this study we see that polyandry is excluded as also multiple (mixed) marriage. This data is irrefutable.

We may, however, freely debate the reason for this state of affairs since clearly polygyny was designed into marriage and the scriptures bless many of those living the practice. Of course, polygyny has its own failure stories as monogamy does and so we must not fall into the trap of judging a principle simply because some people bungle it - otherwise we must judge and condemn monogamy in the same way.

Although there are certainly many “naturalistic” reasons to explain the need for polygyny - men with high testosterone levels, a surplass of women caused by war, etc. - and whilst Yahweh may very well have legislated for polygyny for these cases to prevent sin - there must be another, altogether more spiritual reason as well, that parallels the need for the creation of a companion for lonely Adam. As Eve was designed for Adam, could it also be that some men were designed to have several woman, and some women to share a single man? And if so, what clues are we given to this in Scripture?

Yah'shua/Jesus is called the “second Adam” and His “Eve” is the Church, or Assembly of Believers. His relationship to the Church/Messianic Community is described as an allegorical mariage. This marriage is, on one level, a monogamous one (1:1) but on another a polygynous one (1:millions). This allegorical marriage awaits a heavenly consummation wherein Bride and Bridegroom become perfectly one. The Christian/Messianic faith is, therefore, the marriage of One to the many who are themselves “one” in their love and adoration of their Messiah.

We can see from this that both monogamy and polygyny are natural reflections of this heavenly marriage and that both are necessary. Those who are called to be married monogamously are therefore called to reflect this oneness between Bridegroom and Bride: Similarly, those who are called to be married polygynously are called to reflect the miracle of oneness between many and their oneness with their Head.

To be sure the demands made of both husbands and wives in polygynous and monogamous households are very different though the principle of Christ-like love is the same for both. If both monogamy and polygyny are in Elohim's (God’s) will, then we must expect to find other reflections in the Church/Messianic Community also. And this we do indeed find. For just as every marriage must have a head, so the local assembly must have headship also. The Pastor has a similar kind of allegorical marriage to his congregation as Christ has to the whole Body, and both are composed of male and female. And we are told that when Christ returns to rule and reign in the 1,000 years of millennial peace, a special appointment of Christians/Messianics who have kept themselves unspotted from the world to be co-rulers will be made. Many, like ourselves, believe these to be the 144,000 mentioned in the Book of Revelation.

But there are two other classes of people mentioned in this book as well - the “great multitude” of Christians (numbering in the millions, we suppose) and those who are the survivors of the Great Tribulation. There will almost certainly be three levels of society in the New World to come - the 144,000 (from amongst the faithful polygynist Christians) princes (and princesses - if we include the wives in the 144,000), some 3,000,000 mostly monogamist Christian administrators (based on the 5% figure), and the rest - the suvivors of the holocaust. Though this is admittedly speculation is does at least correspond with the biblical patterns.

Author: JG & SBSK