Posted on 05/29/2005 6:21:09 PM PDT by Coleus
Good post!
trust me, you don't want more than one wife. I've had three and if I had had just two of them at the same time, I would be dead... series!
Great read. Thanks for posting.
I doubt you could cite a single instance in the Bible where a polygamous marriage was happy. This is one of those instances where Biblical narrative works against Bilical law, openning the way to to Judaism's finally banning polygamy in the middle ages, and, in fact, a restoration of Genesis 2:24...
"Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh."
Note the singular emphasis. One flesh.
"Seven Laws of Noah,"
http://www.aish.com/wallcam/7_Noachide_Laws.asp
Do not murder.
Do not steal.
Do not worship false gods.
Do not be sexually immoral.
Do not eat the limb of an animal before it is killed.
Do not curse God.
Set up courts and bring offenders to justice.
Makes sense to me.
This is the most unscholarly work I have ever read. Judaism had legal concubines. Some sects still do.
PS Christianity ended polygamy - not the Jewish religion. Minor point.
This paragraph, the first, stopped further reading. The Chinese historically had strong family bonds. Islam puts strict constraints on sex. Yet, Christianity with a tradition of marriage is the cause of western success? That's what the lead implies.
Both China and Islamic countries are stuck in a quagmire of brute rule all the while multipling like rabbits in marital bonds. So was Christian Europe until the Renaissance. I think western success has more to do with freedom and right to property. The Romans built an Empire that ascended when farmers could own land. It fell when the government began taking too much of their property. Christianity did not save Rome. It didn't save the commoner from servitude for the next 1000 years.
Monogamy was introduced by the Church.
It became customary around the time of Ezra. For that matter, many of the prophets before that were monogamous. Neither Isaac nor Moses were polygamous.
Fascinating, i bookmarked it for later.
Pity you didn't read the rest of it.
What Judaism did was define some basic guidelines which were expanded and made more precise by Christianity. And Judaism and Christianity were what gave birth to the person, or at any rate, to the social concept of the individual person, which is what accounts for Western success.
The Romans and the Greeks, for all their splendid legal thought, did not extend individual "personhood" to all people of all classes. Property ownership is impossible for someone who is not a person, along with things like marriage, inheritance, etc.; and if a society simply does not consider all of its members to be persons, it is never going to be able to move into the economic world to which you attribute its success.
By defining a woman as a person, and a specific kind of person in relation to men, sexually and otherwise, Judaism set up a sexual dynamic that really did alter human society. Monogamy came more slowly, because while some of Jewish thought and self-understanding came through direct revelation, much of it came through the gradual revelation received through thousands of years of living the Commandments as a people. And this experience did lead to monogamy, although it was codified at a relatively late date.
Islamic society puts strange constraints on sex that essentially reflect what Prager mentioned: in traditional sexual morality, everything was divided on the basis of penetrator/penetrated. Islam permits polygamy, women are basically worthless, and homosexuality and bestiality are rampant. As in Roman and Greek society, the only person actually considered to be homosexual is an adult male who allows himself to be penetrated. Boys, on the other hand, are fair game, but when they grow up, are expected to be the aggressive parties, just like their fathers or uncles or whoever used them.
Ever wonder why Islamic societies fester and stagnate? About 100 years after they overrun other societies, those societies cease to be productive and creative - reflecting the rate at which sharia is extended. Look at the social structure brought about by their peculiar sexual attitudes and by polygamy, which also has the side-effect of causing a situation where there are not enough women to go around and creating large numbers of poorer men who will never marry. One of the best analyses I read attributed much of the undercurrent of anger and resentment in Muslim societies to the fact that many men will never be able to marry and have families, and hence will remain marginalized and rootless. In addition, the many children produced by polygamous marriages result in the excessive division of inheritances or in situations where only certain children inherit.
It took a long time for Christianity to bring this concept of the person to full fruition, although it is certainly part of early Church law. Women, for example, were to be able to freely consent to their marriages, were supposed to be old enough to do so, etc. - although naturally, the king who married off his unwilling 14 year old daughter as a peace offering to a rival king was a common feature of the Middle Ages. In later centuries, in countries that practiced slavery, slaves were supposed to be permitted to marry, inherit, and buy their freedom. Naturally, civil governments ignored many of these inconvenient provisions, and actual practice was uneven. The failure of the Church to get everybody to do what it ordered does not indicate failure, but simply reminds us of how slow the process was - just as it was with the gradual self-understanding of the Jews.
Furthermore, civilizing Europe was a very slow process; some areas were not even converted to Christianity until the 9th and 10th centuries. In other areas, barbarian incursions kept destroying the system brought by the Church. Spain, for example, was overrun by the Visigoths who brought their own brutal social system, which Arianism had never softened. Unfortunately, shortly after the conversion of the Visigoths to orthodox Christianity, Spain was overrun by the Muslims, who brought the repressive, anti-individual and anti-personal social system of Islam to Spain, where it was imposed in some areas for 800 years.
Excellent article!
But it became a rule among the Jews about 1000 years after birth of Christ.
In terms of enforcement, yes. But monogamy was always the Biblical norm, all the way back. Only one Eve in the garden.
In fact the rabbinical ruling was a response to people breaking the custom (within the letter of the law).
Who is he that is not of woman borne?
Thomas Hobbes had this to say about such a doctrine...
First, for the tormentors, we have their nature and properties exactly and properly delivered by the names of the Enemy (or Satan), the Accuser (or Diabolus), the Destroyer (or Abaddon). Which significant names (Satan, Devil, Abaddon) set not forth to us any individual person, as proper names do, but only an office or quality, and are therefore appellatives, which ought not to have been left untranslated (as they are in the Latin and modern Bibles), because thereby they seem to be the proper names of demons, and men are the more easily seduced to believe the doctrine of devils, which at that time was the religion of the Gentiles, and contrary to that of Moses, and of Christ.
Because by the Enemy, the Accuser, and Destroyer, is meant the enemy of them that shall be in the kingdom of God; therefore if the kingdom of God after the resurrection be upon the earth (as in the Scripture it seems to be), the Enemy and his kingdom must be on earth also. For so also was it in the time before the Jews had deposed God. For God's kingdom was in Israel and the nations round about were the kingdoms of the Enemy; and consequently, by Satan is meant any earthly enemy of the Church.
Another relic of Gentilism is the worship of images, neither instituted by Moses in the Old, nor by Christ in the New Testament; nor yet brought in from the Gentiles; but left amongst them, after they had given their names to Christ. Before our Savior preached, it was the general religion of the Gentiles to worship for gods those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream. This is the reason why St. Paul says, "We know that an idol is nothing": not that he thought that an image of metal, stone, or wood was nothing; but that the thing which they honored or feared in the image, and held for a god, was a mere figment, without place, habitation, motion, or existence, but in the motions of the brain. The worship of these with divine honor is that which is in the Scripture called idolatry, and rebellion against God. For God being King of the Jews, and His lieutenant being first Moses, and afterward the high priest, if the people had been permitted to worship and pray to images (which are representations of their own fancies), they had had no further dependence on the true God, of whom there can be no similitude; nor on His prime ministers, Moses and the high priests; but every man had governed himself according to his own appetite, to the utter eversion of the Commonwealth, and their own destruction for want of union. And therefore the first law of God was: they should not take for gods, alienos deos, that is, the gods of other nations, but that only true God, who vouchsafed to commune with Moses, and by him to give them laws and directions for their peace, and for their salvation from their enemies. The second was that they should not make to themselves any image to worship, of their own invention. For it is the same deposing of a king to submit to another king, whether he be set up by a neighbor nation or by ourselves.
An image, in the most strict signification of the word, is the resemblance of something visible: in which sense the fantastical forms, apparitions, or seemings of visible bodies to the sight, are only images; such as are the show of a man or other thing in the water, by reflection or refraction; or of the sun or stars by direct vision in the air; which are nothing real in the things seen, nor in the place where they seem to be; nor are their magnitudes and figures the same with that of the object, but changeable, by the variation of the organs of sight, or by glasses; and are present oftentimes in our imagination, and in our dreams, when the object is absent; or changed into other colors, and shapes, as things that depend only upon the fancy. These are the images which are originally and most properly called ideas and idols, and derived from the language of the Greeks, with whom the word eido signifies to see. They are also called phantasms, which is in the same language, apparitions. From these images, it is that one of the faculties of man's nature is called the imagination. From hence it is manifest that neither there is, nor can be any image made of a thing invisible.
It is also evident that there can be no image of a thing infinite: for all the images and phantasms that are made by the impression of things visible are figured. But figure is quantity every way determined, and therefore there can be no image of God, nor of the soul of man, nor of spirits; but only of bodies visible, that is, bodies that have light in themselves, or are by such enlightened.
Whereas a man can fancy shapes he never saw, making up a figure out of the parts of divers creatures, as the poets make their centaurs, chimeras and other monsters never seen, so can he also give matter to those shapes, and make them in wood, clay or metal. These are also called images, not for the resemblance of any corporeal thing, but for the resemblance of some phantastical inhabitants of the brain of the maker. But in these idols, as they are originally in the brain, and as they are painted, carved molded or molten in matter, there is a similitude of one to the other, for which the material body made by art may be said to be the image of the fantastical idol made by nature.
Besides these sovereign powers, divine and human, of which I have hitherto discoursed, there is mention in Scripture of another power, namely, that of "the rulers of the darkness of this world," [Ephesians, 6:12] "the kingdom of Satan," [Matthew, 12:26] and "the principality of Beelzebub over demons," [Ibid. 9:34] that is to say, over phantasms that appear in the air: for which cause Satan is also called "the prince of the power of the air"; [Ephesians, 2:2] and, because he rules in the darkness of this world, "the prince of this world" [John, 16:11] and in consequence hereunto, they who are under his dominion, in opposition to the faithful, who are the "children of the light," are called the "children of darkness." For seeing Beelzebub is prince of phantasms, inhabitants of his dominion of air and darkness, the children of darkness, and these demons, phantasms, or spirits of illusion, signify allegorically the same thing. This considered, the kingdom of darkness, as it is set forth in these and other places of the Scripture, is nothing else but a confederacy of deceivers that, to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavour, by dark and erroneous doctrines, to extinguish in them the light, both of nature and of the gospel; and so to disprepare them for the kingdom of God to come.
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