Is Polygamy a Sin? What the Bible and the Churches Say

Yes. Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches teach that marriage joins one man and one woman, and that a Christian may not take a second wife while the first lives. The Old Testament records several wives for men from Lamech to Solomon, without holding it up as the pattern. Jesus pointed back to the beginning: “they twain shall be one flesh.”

No single verse forbids a second wife in so many words, which is why so many people ask. The answer goes back to a garden, to one man and one woman. The teaching rests on how Jesus read Genesis, on what Paul asked of the churches, and on how the Old Testament’s own stories of rival wives turn out. And where a man who already has several wives comes to faith, the churches that receive him forbid him to take another, and forbid him just as firmly to abandon the wives and children he has.

Why do Christians believe polygamy is wrong?

Because of the way the Bible tells of the first marriage. God makes one woman for the man, and Genesis draws the rule from it: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).

Jesus quoted that verse when the Pharisees asked him about divorce. “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:4-6). They had asked about divorce, yet his answer measures every marriage by the beginning: two people, made one. When the Pharisees pointed out that Moses had allowed divorce, Jesus replied that Moses did so “because of the hardness of your hearts,” and added, “from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). Christians have read the Old Testament’s many wives in that light: allowed for a time, never the design. Jesus’ words on divorce are explained more fully in Matthew 5:31-32 and what Jesus said about divorce.

Paul reached for the same verse from Genesis when he wrote that a husband’s love for his wife pictures Christ’s love for the Church: “they two shall be one flesh” (Ephesians 5:31).

The same teaching answers the question people now ask about polyamory, a relationship with several partners at once, usually without marriage. The churches hold that sexual union belongs only inside the marriage of one man and one woman, so several partners outside marriage fall under what the New Testament calls sexual immorality, and several partners inside it are polygamy.

Polygamy in the Bible: was it a sin in the Old Testament?

The Old Testament nowhere forbids it to ordinary Israelites in so many words, and nowhere holds it up as the pattern for marriage. It describes it, regulates it to protect wives and children, warns kings against it, and shows what it did to the families it describes.

Who had more than one wife in the Bible?

The first man the Bible names with two wives is Lamech, a descendant of Cain: “And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah” (Genesis 4:19). Noah, by contrast, went into the ark with one wife.

What the law of Moses said

Several laws touch the practice, and most of them limit its harm. One concerns a girl sold as a servant whose master “hath betrothed her to himself” (Exodus 21:8). If he married again, he had to keep providing for her: “If he take him another wife; her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish” (Exodus 21:10). A man could not pass over the firstborn son of a wife he loved less: “he shall acknowledge the son of the hated for the firstborn, by giving him a double portion of all that he hath” (Deuteronomy 21:17). A man could not marry his wife’s sister as her rival while she lived: “Neither shalt thou take a wife to her sister, to vex her” (Leviticus 18:18), which is exactly what Jacob had done with Leah and Rachel. And the king was warned: “Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away” (Deuteronomy 17:17).

One law could even bring a second wife into a house. If a man died without a child, “her husband’s brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife” (Deuteronomy 25:5), and the text does not say the brother had to be unmarried. He could refuse, at the cost of public disgrace before the elders (Deuteronomy 25:7-10). The law’s purpose was to give the dead man an heir.

The verses that come closest to forbidding polygamy are the warning to the king and the law about sisters, and neither forbids it outright to an ordinary man. The laws take the practice as they find it and guard the woman and children most likely to be hurt by it, much as the law allowed divorce and regulated it.

What the stories show

The narrators seldom stop to pass judgement. They let the households speak. Once Hagar conceived, “her mistress was despised in her eyes” (Genesis 16:4), and in the end Sarah asked Abraham to “cast out this bondwoman and her son” (Genesis 21:10). Jacob “loved also Rachel more than Leah,” and “the Lord saw that Leah was hated” (Genesis 29:30-31); Rachel in turn “envied her sister” (Genesis 30:1). In Elkanah’s house Peninnah “provoked her sore, for to make her fret” because Hannah had no children (1 Samuel 1:6). Solomon’s case is the warning of Deuteronomy come true: “his wives turned away his heart after other gods” (1 Kings 11:4).

One passage seems to say more. When the prophet Nathan rebukes David for taking Bathsheba and having her husband killed, he speaks for God: “I gave thee thy master’s house, and thy master’s wives into thy bosom” (2 Samuel 12:8). Readers differ on what the verse means. Latter-day Saints cite it for their teaching that God may command plural marriage. Christians who hold that marriage is between one man and one woman read it as God giving David the whole of Saul’s royal household, not as a command to take many wives; the point of the chapter is David’s sin against Uriah.

So the Old Testament bears with polygamy without ever holding it up as a model. The law tolerated it as it tolerated divorce, and the households the Bible lets us see up close paid for it in jealousy and grief. Christians read those chapters through Jesus’ words, “from the beginning it was not so.”

What did Paul say about having one wife?

Writing to the church at Corinth, Paul put the rule for every believer plainly: “let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband” (1 Corinthians 7:2). Each man one wife; each woman one husband.

For the leaders of the churches he set the same standard, in a phrase he used three times. An overseer, or bishop, must be “blameless, the husband of one wife” (1 Timothy 3:2); “Let the deacons be the husbands of one wife” (1 Timothy 3:12); an elder in Crete must be “the husband of one wife” (Titus 1:6). The phrase plainly rules out a man with several wives. Whether it also bars a man who has married again, readers have long debated.

What do the churches teach about polygamy today?

The main traditions agree, in their own documents, that monogamy is the norm for Christian marriage. They do not all treat a convert’s existing marriages the same way.

The Catholic Catechism explains why. Polygamy “is not in accord with the moral law,” it says, because conjugal communion “is radically contradicted by polygamy; this, in fact, directly negates the plan of God which was revealed from the beginning, because it is contrary to the equal personal dignity of men and women who in matrimony give themselves with a love that is total and therefore unique and exclusive” (Catechism 2387). A husband who gives himself to several wives cannot give each the whole of himself that she gives him.

The Westminster Confession, the standard of the Presbyterian churches, states the rule in full: “Marriage is to be between one man and one woman: neither is it lawful for any man to have more than one wife, nor for any woman to have more than one husband, at the same time” (24.1). The Orthodox Church in America teaches that the apostles likened “the unique marriage between one man and one woman” to the union between Christ and his Church.

Not every church has held the line so firmly. In the words of the historian Philip Jenkins, “The ancient Ethiopian church tolerated polygamy in some circumstances, despite periodic reform campaigns.” Among the African Initiated Churches, the independent congregations that grew up in Africa apart from the mission churches, “many AICs allowed polygamy on the basis of custom and the multiple examples supplied by the Old Testament,” some even for their clergy, while others “allowed converts to keep their multiple wives” without making the practice a rule. Yet, he adds, “even the old AICs are being pressured to change their polygamous ways.”

What happens when a man with several wives becomes a Christian?

Here the teaching meets real families, in places where plural marriage is lawful and common. A man who comes to faith may already have several wives, each with children. Sending any of those women away could leave her and her children without a home or a living. The churches that receive such converts have had to weigh the rule against the people it would hurt, and they have not all weighed it alike.

The Catechism takes it that a convert cannot keep more than one marriage, since it speaks of a man “obliged to repudiate one or more wives.” It says so with sympathy before it says so with firmness: “The predicament of a man who, desiring to convert to the Gospel, is obliged to repudiate one or more wives with whom he has shared years of conjugal life, is understandable.” It then binds him to the women and children: “The Christian who has previously lived in polygamy has a grave duty in justice to honor the obligations contracted in regard to his former wives and his children” (Catechism 2387).

The Anglican bishops changed their answer over a century. In 1888 the Lambeth Conference resolved “that persons living in polygamy be not admitted to baptism,” though their wives might be baptized in some cases. In 1988 it recommended that such a man “may be baptized and confirmed with his believing wives and children,” on condition that he “promise not to marry again as long as any of his wives at the time of his conversion are alive,” and that he “shall not be compelled to put away any of his wives, on account of the social deprivation they would suffer” (Resolution 26). Jenkins wrote in 2010 that Anglican churches “treat plural marriage as a pastoral difficulty rather than an outright sin,” while still restricting such men’s ability to serve in leadership.

So the two churches differ on whether the marriages themselves may go on. They agree on what a convert may not do: take another wife, or abandon the women and children who depend on him. The rule was never meant to throw a mother out of her home.

Did the early Christians teach against polygamy?

They did, and the clearest early witness is careful about the patriarchs. Justin Martyr, a Christian teacher who died a martyr at Rome about the year 165, wrote a long Dialogue with a Jew named Trypho. He did not condemn Abraham or Jacob. He argued that “the patriarchs had many wives, not to commit fornication, but that a certain dispensation and all mysteries might be accomplished by them,” and he read Jacob’s two marriages as figures of what Christ would do, while still noting that “it was not lawful for Jacob to marry two sisters at once” (Dialogue 134 and 141).

What he rejected was the practice in his own day. He rebuked the Jewish teachers “who even till this time permit each man to have four or five wives,” and who defended it from the patriarchs’ example. The rebuke belongs to a sharp debate between two communities, and Jewish law itself later forbade the practice for many Jews. Justin’s words show that plural marriage still had defenders in the second century, and that Christians already rejected it.

What do Latter-day Saints, Muslims and Jews teach about polygamy?

The Latter-day Saints

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints performed plural marriages from the early 1840s until 1904 and forbids the practice today. In its own words, “The Bible and the Book of Mormon teach that monogamy is God’s standard for marriage unless He declares otherwise,” and “Following a revelation to Joseph Smith, the practice of plural marriage was instituted among Church members in the early 1840s.” The United States passed laws against the practice from the 1860s to the 1880s. Then, in the Church’s words, “After receiving revelation, President Wilford Woodruff issued” the Manifesto, accepted by the Church on 6 October 1890, which advised members “to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land.” The Church says that some new plural marriages were still performed between 1890 and 1904, especially in Mexico and Canada; “In 1904, the Church strictly prohibited new plural marriages. Today, any person who practices plural marriage cannot become or remain a member of the Church.” Groups that kept the practice broke away, and the full history is told in Do Mormons have multiple wives?

Islam

The Quran allows a Muslim man up to four wives on a condition of justice. In the Saheeh International translation, it says: “And if you fear that you will not deal justly with the orphan girls, then marry those that please you of [other] women, two or three or four. But if you fear that you will not be just, then [marry only] one” (Quran 4:3). A later verse adds: “And you will never be able to be equal [in feeling] between wives, even if you should strive [to do so]. So do not incline completely [toward one] and leave another hanging” (Quran 4:129).

Judaism

The Torah’s laws assume that a man might have more than one wife, as above. Jewish law later forbade it for Ashkenazic Jews. Chabad.org explains that “Approximately one thousand years ago, the noted German scholar Rabbi Gershom” banned polygamy, a ban “accepted as law by all Ashkenazic Jews” though “not recognized by Sephardic and Yemenite communities.” It adds that polygamy “is almost nonexistent today even amongst Sephardic Jews.”

For Christians the answer still comes back to the garden, and to the words Jesus spoke over every marriage since: “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:6).

Related reading

• FLDS vs LDS: what the FLDS is and how it split from the Latter-day Saints
• How does the Bible define marriage?
• 17 Bible verses about wives
• Christianity vs Islam: what each believes about God, Jesus and Scripture
• Is remarrying after divorce a sin?
• Sexual immorality in the Bible