halacha - Questions about Polygamy in Jewish Law and Culture

I've recently been studying polygamy (having more than 1 wife), and had a few cultural questions.

Was polygamy accepted at the time of David and Solomon? Were there any laws about it?

Was polygamy accepted during the first century CE? How common was it in the first century?

Are there any laws on having more than 1 wife in Judaism today? How common is polygamy in Jewish culture today?

Answer

You've come to the right place.

• The Bible explicitly allowed a man to have more than one wife. Exodus 21:10 talks about making sure the first wife still gets the same resources and attention now that she's not the only one.


• So yes, it was accepted in the times of Kings David and Solomon. Those kings are recorded as having quite a few wives (though Deuteronomy 17:17 warns against having too many, "lest his heart be swayed." (King David is recorded as having six; Solomon married way too many, apparently as a form of diplomacy with surrounding nations, and it appeared not to have gone well for him.) We don't know how prevalent it was for the average commoner in that era. Samuel's father, for instance, had two wives. My sense is the average was probably 1.3 or so.


• The best record we have, from a traditional Jewish perspective, on first-century life would be the Talmud, the first stages of which were published around the year 200. Any legal matter pertaining to marriage very clearly accounted for the possibility of more than one wife -- e.g. the Talmud discusses how to divide an estate between multiple wives, or how levirate marriage works if there's more than one wife. There is one mention of a limit of 4, just as a practical matter of how much um, "physical attention", a normal guy can be expected to provide to all these women. (A recent TV show addressed this issue with a character rushed to the emergency room due to an overdose of blue pills.) There was similar concern for a fellow who traveled between two far-flung places and had a wife and children in each place, that the half-siblings may one day grow up, meet and marry, not knowing of their relationship. (Today this could be solved by DNA testing).


• However, when describing guidelines for a life of wisdom, the Talmud warns "the more wives, the more witchcraft" -- you can read that literally, or simply as describing the difficult machinations that can ensue between co-wives. (Similarly, the book of Ecclesiasticus, written close to the first century, speaks of a father worrying that his grown and married daughter "may turn to witchcraft", i.e. her marriage may fall apart.) Note that co-wives are referred to by the Talmud as tzarot, i.e. "competitors." Studying the various stories of interactions between rabbis and their wives in the Talmud (and there are many such stories), virtually none involve more than one wife. So it's hard to tell how often it was done.


• Around the year 1000, the rabbinic leadership of Jewry living in France and Germany (or "Ashkenazic" Jews, many of whom would later migrate to Eastern Europe) declared a ban on polygamy, which still stands today. Hence in the English-speaking world today it's virtually unheard of.


• The ban never extended to the Jews of the Mediterranean or Northern Africa (known as "Sephardic" Jews). In some communities some ban caught on at some point, and in others polygamy was still not-unheard-of 100 years ago. Jewish marriage contracts from 200 years ago in the Arabic-speaking world often contained a penalty clause if the husband took an additional wife without the first one's permission.


• In the twentieth century, nearly all Jews from the Arabic-speaking world immigrated to countries speaking European languages (US, Europe, South America, etc.), or to Israel. In the former, polygamy is banned, both by civil law and by de facto Ashkenazic majority standard. In Israel the situation is a bit more complex; my understanding is that 50 years ago, a new Yemeni immigrant to Israel would have been allowed to keep his two wives; today Israeli law increasingly insists on monogamy.


• So it's virtually unheard of today.

In short, here's how I view polygamy vis-a-vis Judaism:

It's a lot like eating grasshoppers. Yes, the Bible allowed it, though never said it was a good thing. Nobody does it today except for a few Yemenites.

Lastly, and forgive the legal nitty-gritty, on very rare occasion there can be pro forma polygamy today: if a couple's marriage has fallen apart beyond repair (usually this involves a civil divorce), and the husband has made every reasonable effort to go through a religious divorce ritual with his wife but she refuses to cooperate, then if all other options have been exhausted, a lengthy process involving the signature of 100 rabbis can allow the man to leave the ritual divorce document in escrow for his first wife, and then re-marry. So technically Judaism would regard him as married to two women at the same time, but at no point would he come home to two "wives."