“But king Solomon loved many strange women, together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites: Of the nations concerning which the Lord said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall not go in to them, neither shall they come in unto you: for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods: Solomon clave unto these in love. And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart” (1 Kings 11:1-3).
Solomon
Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. The mind boggles at the thought! How can one man have so many wives? How could he fulfil his marital duties effectively? If he slept with one wife every night he would be busy for over three years. And, in the confusion of faces, he’d forget which ones he preferred, which ones he would sleep with again. If he slept with each one on a roster basis, by the time he got around to the first one again, he would have forgotten her and it would be like sleeping with yet another woman/wife. And how could he love just one woman? At the beginning of his reign, apparently, he wrote his great love poem, The Song of Solomon. It opens with declarations and expressions of ardent love between Solomon and “The Shulamite”. They can’t get enough of each other, and all he can think of is his bride. This was the woman he had chosen, the one he loved passionately. But later, in his fickleness and being surrounded by so many desirable and available women, he loved his other wives and gave his heart – that which he had given to The Shulamite – to the foreigners; “he clung to these in love” (1 Kings 11:2).
And what about the women themselves? The system was so unfair, to say the least. They could only hope to sleep with their husband once every three years at best, unless they were favoured. Even “The Shulamite” experienced this lack eventually. And if they didn’t please him the first time, there probably wouldn’t be a second (Esther 2:12-14). If one of them pleased him, such as The Shulamite, then he’d be dallying with her for who knows how long, which would have a knock-on effect down the line for the other wives who were yet to take their turn with their husband; so the competitive spirit within the harem must have been intense. And the harem would have been prone to, if not rife with, all kinds of sexual immorality as the women tried to satisfy their natural urges and desires. And if one of the wives was up to some kind of illicit sexual activity and a rival wife found out about it, all she had to do was report it and the guilty wife would have been killed.
Women who were chosen for a king’s harem were beautiful young virgins that were given to him for various reasons, having had no say in the matter (e.g. 1 Kings 1:1-4; Esther 2:1-4). It wouldn’t be at all surprising if a large percentage of them would have chosen a life with a humble husband who managed his land, if they’d been given the choice; a life with a man who would love her and care for her, and give her children to bear and raise. Her natural instincts and desires for love and motherhood would have been fulfilled under such a circumstance. But such love, security, and fulfilment were denied the women in the harem. Harem life was unnatural. However, there would also have been many for whom being chosen to be the king’s wife or concubine was very desirable, and would be seen as an opportunity.
But whether the women liked their situation in a harem or not, they had security, all their other earthly needs were catered for, they had everything they wanted, and they were under the protection of their husband, the king. There would have been a social structure within the harem, the wives of longer standing being higher in the pecking order and thus having more authority than the more recently acquired wives and concubines; and, no doubt, the current favourite would also be up there. In Solomon’s harem, all the wives were princesses, with the queen, Pharaoh’s daughter, being over all. She therefore would not have lived with the other wives though, because he gave the queen her own house (1 Kings 7:8; 9:24; also Esther 2:9, 17). However, history has recorded that even some concubines, such as in the Ottoman and Chinese empires, were able to gain the emperor’s affection, and consequently rule the harem, have a say in the politics of the empire, and also ensure that it was their son who was in line for the throne on the death of the emperor.
I read somewhere that when the harem of either the Ottoman sultan or some Indian Hindu ruler was disbanded after the Europeans conquered them, the wives were “set free”. But the wives were distraught because everything they knew and all their security was being ripped away from them. They didn’t want to leave the harem – they had nowhere to go – they were homeless. So while I as a Westerner think of the evils of a harem, the wives didn’t necessarily see it that way.
Other Considerations
The daughter of Pharaoh seems to have been his principal wife and queen (1 Kings 3:1; 7:8; 9:16, 24) so, for the sake of argument, let’s assume she was his first wife. He would have inherited some of the others from his father, King David. Some of these would have been old women by the time they entered Solomon’s harem, so he would have cared for them for the remainder of their lives and not had sexual relations with them. The last of David’s wives was a young and beautiful virgin named Abishag (1 Kings 1:1-4). She had been drafted into David’s harem simply to keep him warm, and when she became Solomon’s wife by inheritance from his father, it seems she remained a virgin. Abishag is a prime example of the injustice of men regarding women as chattel. She was effectively nothing more than a hot water bottle for an old man, and by those who selected her she was as little regarded. Solomon’s brother, Adonijah, asked to have her as his wife, which he couldn’t have done if Solomon had fulfilled his conjugal duties to her. Solomon rightly saw Adonijah’s request as an attempt to gain legitimacy as heir to the throne by having one of David’s wives (1 Kings 1:2:13-25). So again, Abishag was seen as a means to a selfish end for a man, and her feelings completely disregarded.
However, the issue that the above scripture passage has is not with harems and multiple wives per se; God told Solomon not to have foreign wives, the reason being that they would turn him from the Lord. He wasn’t told not to have them for the reason that having multiple wives was wrong, or immoral, or a breaking of the principle of monogamy given in Genesis 2:21-25; the reason that having multiple foreign wives was wrong was the danger they would turn his heart away from God. These women were from the nations with whom Israel was not to have any intermarriage or sexual relations because of the danger of their being seduced into worshipping those nation’s gods. And this is, in fact, what happened to Solomon (1 Kings 11:3-10). Solomon, the king, led by example, and brought Israel into idolatry and apostasy, and subsequently judgment in his son’s reign (1 Kings 11:11-13); and the nation struggled with idolatry for the rest of their history until the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities.
Rehoboam
One of the significant fruits or casualties of Solomon’s disobedience to God by marrying foreign wives was Rehoboam, the heir to Solomon’s throne, and the son of Naamah, an Ammonite woman. Naamah, one of Solomon’s forbidden wives, no doubt taught or at least influenced Rehoboam about her gods. Just as she had seduced Solomon into worshipping Milcom, “the abomination of the Ammonites” (1 Kings 11:5), more commonly known as Molech (1 Kings 11:7), she also taught her son to do the same. Consequently, Judah, under Rehoboam’s reign, “….did evil in the sight of the Lord, and they provoked him to jealousy with their sins which they had committed, above all that their fathers had done. For they also built them high places, and images, and groves, on every high hill, and under every green tree. And there were also sodomites in the land: and they did according to all the abominations of the nations which the Lord cast out before the children of Israel” (1 Kings 14:22-24).
Following the example of his father, Rehoboam also took many wives: “And Rehoboam loved Maachah the daughter of Absalom above all his wives and his concubines: (for he took eighteen wives, and threescore concubines; and begat twenty and eight sons, and threescore daughters.)….And he dealt wisely, and dispersed of all his children throughout all the countries of Judah and Benjamin, unto every fenced city: and he gave them victual in abundance. And he desired many wives” (2 Chron 11:21, 23).
Hezekiah and Josiah
You could make some of the same observations, or at least speculations, about Hezekiah and Josiah. Presumably, each had a harem as well; and some of their wives would have been inherited from the previous king. Therefore some of these wives may well have been from the same nations, for the sake of political alliances, that Israel had been warned against. Yet Hezekiah and Josiah were praised as being the two best kings, because of their godliness, that Judah ever had (2 Kings 18:1-8; 22:24-25).
David
But polygamy, even without the problem of foreign wives who might turn their husband aside to worship their nation’s gods, was breaking the law of monogamy. Take David for example; we’re told that before he became king, he had two wives with him, Ahinoam of Jezreel, and Abigail, wife of Nabal who had died. He was also married to Michal, daughter of Saul, but Saul had since given her to Phalti, son of Laish (1 Sam 25:42-44). When he became king in Hebron, we’re told, “And David took him more concubines and wives out of Jerusalem” (2 Sam 5:13). He also took back Michal as soon as he got the opportunity.
But this doesn’t seem to have been enough for David because after accumulating many other wives, he stole Uriah the Hittite’s wife, Bathsheba, and committed adultery with her with the result that she fell pregnant. Following all the dirty deeds resulting from his watching Bathsheba as she bathed (2 Sam 11:2-27), God condemned David and what he had done. He said to David through Nathan the prophet, “I gave thee thymaster’s house, and thy master’s wives into thy bosom, and gave thee the house of Israel and of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would moreover have given unto thee such and such things. Wherefore hast thou despised the commandment of the Lord, to do evil in his sight? thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and hast taken his wife to be thy wife, and hast slain him with the sword of the children of Ammon” (2 Sam 12:7-9).
It is significant that God condemned David for breaking the sixth and seventh commandments (Exod 20:13, 14, 17), i.e. murder and adultery. And God pointed out that he had blessed David by giving him the wives of Saul, even though he already had an unspecified number of wives and concubines of his own. Moreover, if that wasn’t enough for David, he would have given him more wives. God was angry at David for committing adultery but he said nothing about polygamy. In fact, he regarded giving more wives to David as a blessing!
And yet, despite David’s terrible sins, God commended him: “Nevertheless for David’s sake did the LORD his God give him a lamp in Jerusalem, to set up his son after him, and to establish Jerusalem: because David did that which was right in the eyes of the LORD, and turned not aside from any thing that he commanded him all the days of his life, save only in the matter of Uriah the Hittite” (1 Kings 15:4-5).
Other Examples
There are other examples of men who had multiple wives, e.g. Gideon had many wives and seventy sons (Judges 8:30); Elkanah had two wives, Hannah and Peninnah (1 Sam 1:2); one of the descendants of Judah, Ashur, the father of Tekoah, had two wives, Helah and Naarah(1 Chron 4:5); one of the descendants of Benjamin, Shaharaim, had two wives (1 Chron 8:8); and so on.
God even gave instructions to husbands for right and fair conduct towards multiple wives, insisting that if a man had two wives, one whom he loved, and the other whom he either hated or loved less, and they have borne him children, the firstborn son, even if borne by the hated wife, still had the right of the firstborn, namely, a double portion of the entire estate (Deut 21:15-17). But he didn’t condemn polygamy; he only gave rules to protect the wife who was disadvantaged because of her husband’s preference for another wife. He doesn’t seem to be concerned about polygamy at all; it doesn’t seem to be an issue with him.
Adultery and Illegitimate children
God would not allow illegitimate children to enter the tabernacle or temple (Deut 23:2). He also absolutely forbade adultery (Exod 20:14). So, for the sake of argument, if the ideal of monogamy was one man and one wife, does that make polygamy tantamount to adultery? If so, the 999 wives and concubines after Solomon’s first wife were adulterous. In fact, if polygamy was tantamount to adultery, Solomon himself was illegitimate because his mother was not David’s first and only legitimate wife. Yet God never told David to put Bathsheba away; instead, he chose Solomon to be the one who would have a unique and lasting relationship with God, and the founder of an everlasting dynasty that would culminate in the Messiah, Jesus Christ (2 Sam 7:12-17; 1 Kings 9:1-9). God also blessed Solomon by giving him great wisdom, glory and wealth, so abundant that it was a byword throughout the world (1 Kings 3:5-15; 10:23-27). But if polygamy is tantamount to adultery, then Solomon was consequently illegitimate, and the Law forbade him to enter the “congregation of the Lord” (Deut 23:2). However, Solomon not only entered the tabernacle as a worshipper of God, he built the temple, entering it and offering sacrifices by the priest.
Jacob
Again, some of the same speculative reasoning could be applied to Jacob. Leah was his first and therefore only legitimate wife; the three others were adulterous, if polygamy is wrong. Yet God built the nation on these four wives and their twelve sons, and the scriptures always speak of these wives with honour; and the twelve sons were the patriarchs of the nation. But God didn’t regard them as illegitimate. When Jacob tried to flee from Laban, and took his family and possessions with him, Laban pursued Jacob with murderous intent; but God came to him in a dream before Laban had caught up with Jacob, and warned him not to threaten or harm Jacob (Gen 31:24). And when Esau confronted Jacob after they had been apart for twenty years, and he saw Jacob’s wives and children, he asked, “Who are those with thee? And he said, The children which God hath graciously given thy servant” (Gen 33:5). How could such great blessing which produced the nation of Israel, the chosen people of God, be built on adultery and illegitimate children?
If polygamy is wrong, why doesn’t God say that somewhere? None of the men who had multiple wives was ever said to have done wrong. Why was that? Even in the brief account of Lamech, the first polygamist, and second recorded person to have committed murder, there is no adverse comment made about his polygamy. However, Lamech knew he would be punished, or at least warranted punishment, for murder. One would think that if Lamech had broken the principle of monogamy so soon after it had been established, that God would have said something.
What Does the Bible Say?
At the creation of humanity there is implied a special intimacy between the man and the woman (Gen 2:18, 21-24); she was taken from Adam and this, along with the statement that the man would “cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh”, signifies the extent, strength, and depth, of the marriage bond. It is clear that God designed marriage to be a life-long monogamous relationship, where the husband and wife are devoted to each other and to the marriage.
Jesus confirmed this view (Matt 19:4-6) and, in the Sermon on the Mount, he likewise taught on divorce, saying, “It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement: But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery” (Matt 5:31-32).
So…..
Just as God allowed divorce because of the hardness of men’s hearts, he likewise allowed polygamy for the same reason. Polygamy and divorce do not express the purpose of marriage in the way God designed it; polygamy doesn’t allow the closeness, intimacy, mutual knowledge, security, and one-flesh nature of marriage. It comes close to some of these but falls short in all of them.