Category: Marriage/Sex

Q. Why was it considered adultery when David had sexual relations with Bathsheba (and rightly so ! 7th commandment ……….) and yet not when he had sexual relations with his 7-8 wives and many concubines. In reality he was ‘living’ in adultery all the time….I have struggled with this for most of my Christian life and have never found a satisfying answer. It is totally illogical to me.

There is a difference between adultery and polygamy. If a man who is married has sexual relations with a woman who is not his wife, that is adultery, whether or not the woman is married. And if a man has sexual relations with a woman who is married to another man, that is adultery, whether or not the first man is married. This, as you noted, is explicitly forbidden by the seventh of the Ten Commandments.

However, if a man has more than one wife and has sexual relations with each of his wives, that is not adultery, since the man is not having sexual relations with a woman who is not his wife or a woman who is the wife of another man. It is polygamy. Please see the post below for a discussion of whether polygamy is sin, according to the Bible. I hope this post will help answer your question.

Is it a sin for a man to be married to more than one woman?

Q. King David sought the Lord consistently in battles. However, I don’t know of any time he sought the Lord about anything to do with his wives. Did he and I’m not finding it?

You’re right that David sought God’s guidance about how he should protect his people by fighting against their enemies. In fact, he did this in a way that is exemplary for us. In one instance, the Philistines attacked Israel and, with God’s guidance, David attacked them directly and defeated them and drove them off. Later the Philistines returned and attacked Israel at the very same place. Many of us would probably assume that if God wanted us to attack directly the last time, we should also do so this time. But David sought God’s guidance again, and God told him, “Do not go straight up, but circle around behind them.” Following this guidance, David once again defeated the Philistines, this time definitively.

It would be good if David had been just as diligent in seeking God’s guidance about marriage, but he was not. As you say, we cannot find any place in Scripture that describes David asking God about this. David married Michal, the daughter of King Saul, even though she appears to have been an idol-worshiper rather than someone devoted to God as David was. Michal later showed that she indeed did not share David’s devotion to God when she criticized him for dancing exuberantly before the Lord as he brought the tabernacle into Jerusalem.

In addition, before he became king, David married two other women, Abigail and Ahinoam, but there is no indication that he sought God about this. And after he became king, David married more wives, including at least one who was the daughter of another king, so he may have been making marriage alliances. But once again the Bible says nothing about David seeking God’s guidance. And we know from the rest of David’s story what great trouble came about because of the rivalry between the sons of David’s various wives. Some of this may have been due to the influence of the wives themselves, if they did not inculcate godly character and values in their sons.

The issue you raise is very important. My late wife and I ministered directly to college and university students for 25 years. We served churches next to schools, and then in our 50s we became front-line campus staff. (Lots of adventures to tell about there!) From our sad observations, we had to warn students that nothing was more likely to undermine their effectiveness in God’s service or even turn them away from the Lord than getting involved in a relationship with someone who was not devoted to God as they were. But the desire to love and be loved is so strong that many people are likely to get involved in such relationships unless they are committed to doing nothing except what God clearly directs them to do.

In other words, a Christian should only marry someone as an act of obedience to God. Certainly, if things are as they should be, this will be joyful and enthusiastic obedience! But this must be the principle. If God says no, then the answer is no.

Remember the promise of Jesus: “Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.” In this context, I would take “leaving wife” to mean not marrying someone if God says no, and “a hundred times as much” to mean potentially finding a much better match later on if we obey God in that way.

To quote the apostle Paul, “I say this for your own benefit, not to lay any restraint upon you, but to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord.”

Q. What is the difference between wives and concubines in the Bible? I understand wives had higher status and that Abraham’s and Jacob’s concubines were their wives’ servants. Is concubine basically a technical term for servants that double as sex slaves? Or did they actually have rights within the family structure?

There is no question that concubinage was an exploitative practice. However, women who were concubines were not exploited primarily for sex. They were exploited for the children they could have. In the agricultural Old Testament culture, children were needed to work the land, and they were also needed to carry on the family name and preserve family rights to property. So most typically, men would marry concubines when their wives could not have children or when men felt they needed more children.

A concubine was legally married to the man whose concubine she was. We see this, for example, in the terminology of “father-in-law” and “son-in-law” that is used in one Old Testament account for the relationship between a man and the father of his concubine. But a concubine had a lower status than a wife.

The difference in status was not that the wife was free while the concubine was a slave. It is true that the Old Testament discusses cases in which a man might marry one of his female slaves, who would then become his concubine as well. It is also true, as you noted, that a man could marry one of his wife’s female slaves as a concubine. So there was a connection between concubinage and another very exploitative practice, slavery.

But the essential difference between a wife and a concubine was that the children of the wife were certain to have inheritance rights to the property of their father, while the children of the concubine did not necessarily have such  rights. I think it would probably be too much to say that children of concubines could not inherit from their father, but their situation was very tenuous.

For example. when Abraham’s wife Sarah could not have children, she had him marry her female slave Hagar so that she could adopt the son of Hagar. But when Sarah later had a son of her own, Isaac, she insisted that Abraham send Hagar and her son Ishmael away so that only Isaac would inherit. After Sarah died, Abraham married a woman named Keturah as a concubine, but he gave her sons gifts in lieu of inheritance and sent them away as well.

By contrast, when Jacob married Bilhah and Zilpah, the slaves of his two wives Rachel and Leah, in order to have more children, he gave the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah full inheritance rights along with the sons of Rachel and Leah.

But in general the position of concubines and their children within the family structure was very insecure. It seems that women who were already in a vulnerable position, for example, as slaves or foreigners or both, were further exploited as concubines for the children they could have. Later in Israelite history, kings would marry many concubines as a symbol of royal prestige and perhaps to pursue certain political ends. These women were not being exploited for their children, since such kings already had many wives and many children by them, but they were still being exploited for those other reasons.

So I think it would not be quite accurate to describe a concubine as a “secondary wife.” While she was legally married, her situation was so different from that of an actual wife that I think a separate term should be used to identify it. Marriage is meant to be a relationship characterized by mutuality and equality. The power differential in concubinage is so great that it is not true marriage. And so I believe we should work to eliminate the practice of concubinage in our world today, just as we should work to eliminate slavery. The fact that concubinage is depicted and described in the Bible does not indicate any sanction for it or approval on God’s part.

Q. How should we understand Ezekiel 23? Is it pornographic?

The parable that the prophet Ezekiel tells about two sisters named Oholah and Oholibah is not pornographic in itself. However, since it does use explicit sexual imagery, I would encourage people who struggle with pornography to be careful about reading it. I’ll discuss some options for them at the end of this post.

Pornography, by definition, is gratuitous. That is, it uses explicit sexual imagery only to excite sexual desires in readers or viewers. The imagery serves no higher purpose.

In Ezekiel’s parable, by contrast, all of the sexual imagery is used carefully to serve a higher purpose. Ezekiel wants the people of the southern kingdom of Judah to feel a proper sense of shame for their worship of idols instead of the true God. He also wants them to realize how foolish it is for them to worship idols when they have already seen God judge and punish the people of the northern kingdom of Judah for doing exactly the same thing.

The parable is essentially an extended metaphor: Idol worship is like infidelity in marriage. Because the people of Judah would have felt a sense of horror and shame about infidelity, Ezekiel describes it in explicit terms to try to make them feel the same thing about the way they have betrayed God by worshiping idols. All of the imagery, while graphic, is presented in a controlled and purposeful way. It is subordinated to the higher purpose of trying to call shamelessly disobedient people back to God before it is too late and they need to be judged and punished for their disobedience and disloyalty.

However, as I said, if someone struggles with pornography, then it may be difficult for them to read this passage without losing ground in that struggle. In that case, one possibility I would suggest is that they not read it. Even within a program to read through the Bible, such as many churches and other organizations sponsor, the understanding could be that in the interests of the highest goal of that program—a closer walk with God—participants would be free not to read this chapter if doing that might lead them to stumble.

Another possibility would be to read the chapter in a version of the Bible that translates it less explicitly. This might be a version translated at a simpler reading level whose intended audience includes children.

The final suggestion I would make is that if someone who struggles with pornography decides that they do need to read the chapter (in order to read all the way through the entire Bible, for example), they should not read it online or in any Bible app that appears on a screen. Instead, they should read it in a printed Bible. This will avoid reinforcing any connection between sexually explicit material and the greater visual stimulation of a glowing screen.

Q. I just want to know where it is categorically written in the Bible that men should not marry more than one wife because the way things are going with the Christian ladies is terrible for us.

I believe you’re saying that there aren’t enough godly Christian men out there to provide husbands for all of the Christian women who desire to be married, and so it would help if men (specifically, godly Christian men) could marry more than one woman. Before I offer any reflections about that from the Bible itself, let me say first that I am very sympathetic to your concern. In response, I’d like to challenge all the men who read this who might be hovering around the edges of the faith to step up and commit to following Christ and becoming godly so that they could be a suitable husband, if that turns out to be God’s will for them, to one of the many wonderful Christian women who have this desire. And I wish the comfort and companionship of God for those women as they wait for their longing to be fulfilled. I do appreciate how difficult that can be.

It is important, however, to seek to understand God’s ideals for human life as they are disclosed in the Bible, and not come to conclusions based on the needs and constraints of our present situations. And so, to pursue the biblical teaching on the subject you’re asking about, let me say that I believe it is actually not embodied in a categorical statement. That is, I’m not aware of any biblical commandment along the lines of, “Thou shalt not marry more than one wife.” Rather, the clearest teaching on the subject is found by analogy to an answer that Jesus gave to a different question about marriage.

According to the gospel of Matthew, some Pharisees came to Jesus and asked him whether men could divorce their wives for any reason they wished. Jesus answered, quoting from Genesis, “Haven’t you read that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

The Pharisees responded, “Then why did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?” They were referring to a law in Deuteronomy that actually says that if a man divorces his wife and gives her a certificate of divorce, he can’t take her back again if she marries someone else and that second husband subsequently divorces her as well. So it isn’t actually the case that Moses commanded men to give their wives certificates so they could divorce them. Nevertheless, the Law of Moses does regulate the situation of divorce (the certificate would have proved that the woman was legally free to remarry, which was important for her protection and provision), and thus the Law tacitly recognizes that situation.

Jesus explained this distinction in his reply to the Pharisees. “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives”—he didn’t command this—”because your hearts were hard. But it was not that way from the beginning.” Jesus added that therefore if a man divorced his wife for a reason other than marital unfaithfulness and then married another woman, he would be committing adultery.

I think there is a clear analogy here to the issue you’re asking about. Suppose the Pharisees had instead asked Jesus whether a man could marry more than one wife. He would likely have answered the same way at first, by quoting from the Genesis creation account. And the Pharisees would likely have responded in the same way, by appealing to the law of Moses, which regulates various situations that might arise from a man having more than one wife and so tacitly recognizes that situation as well.

For example, a law in Exodus says that if a man marries one of his female slaves (so that she becomes his concubine, both his slave and his wife) and he then marries another woman, “He must not deprive the first one of her food, clothing, and marital rights. If he does not provide her with these three things, she is to go free, without any payment of money.” And another law in Deuteronomy says that if a man has two wives and the less-preferred wife bears his firstborn son, he can’t deny that son the double share of his inheritance that’s the “right of the firstborn” and give it instead to a son of the more-preferred wife.

But even though the Law of Moses regulates and thus recognizes the situation of a man having more than one wife, I believe that Jesus would have said the same thing about this situation that he did about divorce: “It was not that way from the beginning.” So while we must acknowledge that the practice of men marrying more than one wife has been followed in many different times and places (indeed, Old Testament figures such as Abraham, Jacob, and David followed it themselves), and that this practice in fact continues in some places today, if we are looking for God’s ideal for human life as disclosed in the Bible, we find it embodied in the answer that Jesus gave to the question he was asked about divorce: As it was at the beginning, “A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” Just the two of them.

Once again, let me say that I am very sympathetic to the concern that leads you to ask about this. But I would encourage you to resolve to pursue God’s ideal, and nothing else, in this area and in all others, so that no matter what happens, whether a desire to be married is ultimately fulfilled or not, you will be drawing closer and closer to God over the course of your whole life.

Q. Why God didn’t create Eve along with Adam?

In the ancient world, animals were the original “high-tech devices” that enhanced and expanded human capabilities. The Bible actually speaks about this in many places:

“Where there are no oxen, the manger is empty, but from the strength of an ox come abundant harvests.” In other words, keeping an ox to plow the fields is well worth it because of the far greater harvests this makes possible.

“If you have raced with men on foot and they have worn you out, how can you compete with horses?” Even though this is spoken to Jeremiah as a metaphor, it’s drawn from the ancient experience of relying on horses for much greater than human speed in communication and warfare.

“Be sure you know the condition of your flocks, give careful attention to your herds … the lambs will provide you with clothing, and the goats with the price of a field. You will have plenty of goats’ milk to feed your family and to nourish your female servants.” Here again the benefits of relying on animals, in this case for food, clothing, and wealth, are highlighted.

Because animals expanded human capabilities so greatly, in the ancient world they were even worshiped as manifestations of divine power. The bull, for example, became a symbol of Baal, a fertility god.

But to speak to your question directly, and to address it from within the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis, I think God first brought all of the different animals to Adam “to see what he would name them“—which implies that he would recognize their various qualities—so that it would become apparent that despite all the advantages the animals could confer, nevertheless “no suitable helper was found” for him. Adam was supposed to say, “I still need something more.” And then, when Eve was presented to him, he would exclaim,

Q. Did the apostle Paul ever have any children?

Paul seems to indicate in his first letter to the Corinthians that he has always been single. Addressing the question of whether a believer should marry, he says, “I wish that all of you were as I am. But each of you has your own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that.” His further comments indicate that what he means here is that he wishes they could all serve God with the advantages of singleness, as he does: “An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife— and his interests are divided.” However, Paul does acknowledge that singleness and marriage are both callings—indeed, “gifts”—to each believer from God, and so “each person should live as a believer in whatever situation the Lord has assigned to them, just as God has called them.“

So if Paul never married, then he never had children. However, it seems that in his case, the promise of Jesus came true that “everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.” Even though Paul never married, and this allowed him to be “concerned about the Lord’s affairs” with undivided attention, in the very course of his work for the Lord he met Timothy, who became his close co-worker, and more than that. In his letters to Timothy, Paul addresses him as “my true son in the faith and as “my dear son.” He also calls Titus, another young co-worker, “my true son in our common faith.” So even though Paul never had children of his own, in the Lord he had at least two dear children who joined him and helped him in his mission.

Q. You state in one of your posts that Levirate marriage applied to brothers who were married (as well as those who were single). Do you have an example or statement of that fact in the Bible? If not, where does this idea come from, as I am not able to confirm it one way or the other?

A good example can be found in the book of Ruth. Boaz is willing to marry Ruth so that she can have a son who will carry on the name of her late husband, a son who can also care for Naomi, who would be his grandmother, in her old age. But Boaz knows that there is someone more closely related to Naomi who needs to be asked about this first. He approaches this man at the town gate, and he replies that he can’t marry Ruth “or I will ruin my own inheritance.” What does that mean? One translation puts it this way, which I think is quite accurate: “I might harm what I can pass on to my own sons.”

In other words, this man must already be married with a family. But he can’t afford to have additional children in a Levirate second marriage because he doesn’t have enough land and other resources to pass on to Ruth’s children in addition to the ones he already has. On this basis he is released from the obligation and Boaz, who seems to have sufficient means, marries Ruth and helps her start a new family.

We can see a direct connection to Levirate marriage here by the way the other relative removes his sandal and gives it to Boaz. While the book of Ruth explains that this was “the method of legalizing transactions in Israel,” there’s some further background. The book of Deuteronomy also connects sandal removal with a man declining or refusing to marry his brother’s widow. It says: “If a man does not want to marry his brother’s wife, she shall go to the elders at the town gate and say, ‘My husband’s brother refuses to carry on his brother’s name in Israel. He will not fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to me.’ Then the elders of his town shall summon him and talk to him. If he persists in saying, ‘I do not want to marry her,’ his brother’s widow shall go up to him in the presence of the elders, take off one of his sandals, spit in his face and say, ‘This is what is done to the man who will not build up his brother’s family line.’ That man’s line shall be known in Israel as The Family of the Unsandaled.”

However, in the case of Ruth, it’s recognized that the other relative is a man of good will but limited means. So Ruth doesn’t remove his sandal (or spit in his face!). Rather, he removes it himself, and it is graciously accepted.

If men who were already married were not expected to fulfill the duties of Levirate marriage, Boaz would never have brought this man up or dealt with him in the first place.