Let’s continue where we left off last time we talked about marriage, and elaborate a little on what Scripture has to say about marriage.

Like we said, to read romantic notions of marriage, i.e. exclusivity between one man and one women into biblical marriage is to insert a secular, romanticized concept into the bible that is simply not there.

If you want to point to the “Song of Solomon” for notions of romantic love, please remember who Solomon was and how many wives he loved – and yes, he sinned in not listening to the commandment not to multiply wives to himself as the king (Deu 17:17), and in marrying foreign wives who turned out to be a snare to him with their foreign religions (1 Kings 11:1-6). And Jesus came through this line, came through people like Abraham and Jacob, through the union of Judah and Tamar, David and Bath Sheba, Uriah’s widow, all of whom were people who in some way or another lived in a polygamous relationship, or in the case of Judah and Tamar, had issues with the Levirate marriage commandment – check it out in Matthew 1 and the respective chapters in Genesis, 2 Samuel and 1 Kings.

If you want to point to Paul talking about letting every man have his own wife and every women her own husband (1 Cor 7:2) to prove that Paul advocates monogamy, please look at the two different Greek words translated as “own” here and you will find that they both pertain to the man, that both state possession from the man’s perspective – her “own” husband is her “proper” husband, the husband that properly possesses her, just as his “own” wife, “own” being a reflexive pronoun here, is the wife that he possesses, that belongs to him, that he is responsible for. If you look at the language, this verse is not a verse pointing to exclusivity with regards to how many wives a man can have, but rather to a woman belonging to one man alone, thus pointing to the responsibility on the part of the man, but doesn’t indicate quantity when it comes to wives.

Besides, the context in 1 Co 7:2 indicates the reason for marriage in the first place: to avoid fornication. Men have to take responsibility for every woman they sleep with for by sleeping with a woman, a man makes her his wife. Even in today’s world, by the way – a marriage that is not consummated is not a valid marriage in court, but could be dissolved based on the fact that it was never consummated, since it can legally be considered null and void. So the biblical standard is kept up here in this regard.

The bible uses no specific term for polygamous relationships, but simply calls having a wife or more than one wife “marriage” – and whenever “marriage” is mentioned in the bible, it refers to the biblical definition of marriage that includes both polygamy and monogamy, and not to a modern day definition of marriage that is based on a romantic concept and a social preference, in our small part of the world, for this romantic ideal.

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