“WHERE IS THE PROHIBITION?” 🚫🤔

By Deborah Allen

Welcome, Call4Wisdom family, to another teachable moment! ☕📖

This week we are going to look at a recent comment a sister left on the channel and use it to rightly divide the Word.

A viewer named @gwichin... left this thought on a recent video:

"There's no such thing as biblical polygamy. There are accounts in the Bible of people living in polygamous marriages. God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. He only approves and ordains monogamous marriages. God Himself is coming back for His bride not brides 🤷🏾‍♀️"

MY RESPONSE

"I truly appreciate your passion here, Sister. Your confidence about what you believe God "approves and ordains" is definitely something to behold. There is just one tiny, glaring problem with your argument: you are asserting a conclusion that Scripture itself never actually states. So, let's stop talking to the serpents of modern Western culture and start looking at what Yah actually wrote in the Torah.

You claim that God only approves and ordains monogamous marriages. But where exactly does the Torah say that? 🤔

It doesn't.🙄

In fact, Torah does something entirely different by actively regulating a man having more than one wife. Exodus 21:10 lays it out clearly. It says that if a man takes another wife, he is still strictly obligated to provide his first wife with her food, clothing, and marital rights. Furthermore, Deuteronomy 21:15 through 17 gives very specific instructions regarding a man who has two wives and children by both of them. Yah was not giving Israel a step-by-step manual on how to commit adultery. He was clearly establishing a man's responsibilities within a plural household. So, If having multiple wives was sinful, God apparently forgot to mention it?

Come on! Torah is crystal clear when prohibiting sexual sins. Read Leviticus 18.

Now, some folks try to solve this theological dilemma by claiming Yeshua (Jesus) simply changed the laws on marriage.

Nice try, but no.

Yeshua Himself stated in Matthew 5:17 through 19 that He did not come to destroy the law or the prophets, but to fulfill them. He went on to say that not one jot or tittle would pass from the law. Yeshua could not take a marital structure that Yah's Torah regulates and suddenly declare it an inherently sinful act without contradicting the very Torah He came to uphold.

Let us look at King David. When the prophet Nathan rebuked him, Yah actually reminded David that He gave him his master's wives into his bosom. David's sin was never that he had multiple wives. His sin was taking another man's wife, Bathsheba, and then arranging for her husband to be killed.

We also cannot gloss over how Yah built the house of Israel. He deliberately chose a polygynous family to do it. Jacob had Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, and Zilpah, and through those four women came the twelve sons who became the foundation of the twelve tribes. Yah could have easily established Israel through a strictly monogamous household if plurality was so wicked. But He did not. He choose polygyny! His ways are perfect.

Ruth 4:11 even blesses Ruth by invoking Rachel and Leah, specifically remembering them as the two women who built the house of Israel.

But wait, the irony gets even better. Yah Himself chose to describe His own covenant relationship using the exact metaphor of a husband with two wives. In Jeremiah 3, Yah contrasts Israel with her sister Judah, speaking of them as sisters within His marital covenant. Ezekiel 23 makes this imagery even more explicit by naming two women, Oholah and Oholibah, representing Samaria and Jerusalem. Would Yah really use an inherently sinful marital structure as the central metaphor for His own holy covenant?. I highly doubt it.

Consider Matthew 25 as well, where Yeshua describes one bridegroom and ten virgins waiting for him. When the bridegroom arrives, the prepared virgins go in with him to the marriage celebration. While this is imagery, it clearly features one male bridegroom and a plurality of virgins, not a strict one-woman-only model.

A lot of this modern confusion comes from our completely incorrect definition of adultery. Biblically speaking, adultery is not simply a married man having sex with any other woman. Scripture defines adultery specifically as violating another mans existing marriage covenant, particularly when a man takes another man's wife. Leviticus 20:10 and Deuteronomy 22:22 explicitly define this around a woman who is already married to a husband. Therefore, if an unmarried woman enters a lawful marriage covenant with a man who already has a wife, it does not constitute adultery.

Adultery is always determined by the marital status of the woman involved.

Lastly, Deuteronomy 4:2 warns us not to add to the word or diminish from it. If Yah never prohibited it, Yeshua never prohibited it, and Paul never prohibited it, we need to be extremely careful about inventing a prohibition just to satisfy our modern sensibilities. We must allow Scripture to define marriage and righteousness for us, rather than letting church traditions and Western culture define those things and reading them backward into the Bible.

So, since calling polygyny sinful requires an actual Torah prohibition rather than just an emotional assumption, I have to leave you with one simple question: where exactly is that prohibition? 🤔📖

Deborah

Call4Wisdom ☎️

If you want to learn more about Biblical marriage buy my book. "STOP TALKING TO SERPENTS: A Woman's Guide Back to Biblical Marriage" This is a must-read for single and married women wrestling with these topics.👇 https://www.digginintheword.biz/product-page/stop-talking-to-serpents

📞 Need a consultation? Both Mike Allen and I are available for theological questions and relationship counseling on Clarity FM: just follow the link and book a session, [https://clarity.fm/deborah-allen]