How paganly ignorant can you get!!!!!!!!!!!! [The very wording of the Ten Commandments presupposed theft, adultery, murder, envy, coveting, idolatry, misuse of the tongue, workaholism, and the like! That doesn't mean any of these practices were great Biblical traditional "heritages" to follow!!!]
This is what happens when liberals try to impose their lifestyles over the Bible & cut & paste only minute portions of it to evaluate.
From the article: The hypocrisy of the monogamist majority reached its height in the denial (often heard in Congress) that there could be a serious religious argument for polygamy: hypocrisy, because the monogamists were denying their own heritage. Joseph Smith did not pull polygamy out of the air. He found it in the Old Testament, where many patriarchs are represented as polygamous. Yet in 1878, the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold an anti-polygamy statute...So the justices did not see themselves as repudiating their biblical heritage, although this is precisely what they were doing.)
Many?
(1) Jacob, who was deceived into entering the practice of polygamy.
(2) Many mistake Abraham for a polygamist, but he slept with "the help" for one night for surrogacy purposes, and after doing so, none of the biblical narrators or commentators ever refence Hagar as anything but either a slave or servant (and that lineup is pretty impressive, for it includes Abraham himself, Hagar herself, Sarah herself, Moses as author, the apostle Paul, and even the Angel of the Lord--whom some say was the appearing of the pre-incarnate Son of God!).
(3 & 4) That leaves David & Solomon...Solomon was judged for allowing his heart to be led astray by foreign wives (1 Kings 11:3-4, 9-11), which God warned would happen because of polygamy (Deut. 17:17)...David was judged for his affair with Bathsheba and lost an infant son over it...and with David, it's not clear which wives died when, and some of them were concubines who slept with his adult son, Absalom...so if the behavior of David's concubines was worth emulating, then I'd guess the "biblical heritage" Nussbaum is talking about should = servant help sleeping with family members!!!
(5) (Of course, some others did practice polygamy in OT times, but I wouldn't reference them as the pillar "patriarchs")
Polygamy is essentially slavery. The early Hebrews did all sorts of things that we wouldn’t do now, and in fact God educated them away from these things as He gradually built His Chosen People. The Old Testament is essentially the story of this, and it is clear that polygamy was one of the things that God led the Jews away from. [Livius]
Well, when this author claims that 19th century monogamists were denying their own heritage, the fact is monogamy was indeed the standard for both old & new testament times:
OLD: Deut. 17:17 & Gen. 2:23-25 + implied by Hebrew laws in Ex. 20:17; 21:5; Lev. 18:8,16-20; 20:10; Num. 5:12; Deut. 5:21.
NEW: Monogamy practiced as "THE" standard: 1 Tim. 3:2,12; Titus 1:5-7; 1 Cor. 7:2; Matt. 19.
Many, indeed! You are incorrect to make polygamy to be a extremely rare exception under biblical code. One modern example: The Jews of Yemen practiced polygamy until they were returned to Israel in the 1950s and 60s. Second example: Samuel’s parents.
LOL! Too true. Just because something appeared in the Bible does not mean that it was recommended. In fact, it usually appeared because it was being held up as a bad example and God was going to do something about it...