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NASB | 1 Kings 11:3 He had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines, and his wives turned his heart away. |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | 1 Kings 11:3 He had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines, and his wives turned his heart away [from God]. |
Bible Question: King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Polygamy was not uncommon in Old Testament times. Did God endorse polygamy then? Does He now? |
Bible Answer: Pointing to the fact that Adam was given only one wife in the garden before the fall is precarious at best. Many believe that his having been initally given only one wife became some sort of "unwritten law". This is highly questionable. Besides, I never said that polygamy is God's ideal for marriage, as many have assumed concerning my position. I also never claimed that God "endorsed" polygamy. What I DID say is that built into the protections that beneift the first wife, God made "governing provision" for a man to have more than one wife. Many have assumed from this that my meaning had to do with endorsement and even commandment. I made no such claims, contrary to all the false allegations from various of the respondents. One cannot help but to wonder at the declaration that Adam's having been given one wife became an unwritten law for all mankind. By what authority does one make such a claim when God's silence on such an alleged Law is agonizingly evident? I think this is a legitimate question that is being ignored by those who engage in nothing better than knee jerk, emotional reactionism. This is not a matter of tit-for-tat one-upmanship, this is about what I consider to be a legitimate question. Yes, there are many commentaries that carry the same old party line of discussing how polygamy was the cause of many woes in the lives of those patriarchs who practiced, but that party line is without any real merit in relation to MOST of the examples toward which is it generally directed. David did not fall BECAUSE he had a plurality of wives. He fell because of his adultery with another man's wife, and also the murder of that woman's husband to cover his adultery with her. Do I think that God desired that polygamy become the norm? No. Not at all. I know that most men do NOT have either the capacity and/or the desire within themselves to love more than one woman at a time. This is a given. There is a valid degree of legitimacy in questioning this practice of "pulling a theological rabbit out of the hat" from a context that simply does not support the alleged law of "monogamy only" idea. For MOST men, monogamy is the ideal for THEM, but when those very men reach into the "theological hat" and are not able to find that elusive "rabbit" they thought would come jumping out at their beconing, they then are left with resorting to junk theology by pulling that rabbit from a loaded sleeve. In Christ Jesus Don Dean |