Christianity Today October 29, 2026 10 min signal 2026-10-29

If Polygamy’s in the Bible, Why Is Polyamory Wrong?

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You may have noticed increasing chatter about polyamory: romantic and sexual relationships with more than one person at a time. Research from 2021 found that roughly 1 in 6 Americans say they have a “desire to engage in polyamory,” while 1 in 10 claim to have already done so.

Defenders of polyamory emphasize that it always requires consent from every participant. It’s different from adultery, they say, because everyone knows what’s happening and nobody objects.

For Christians, that attempted justification should fall flat. But if we turn to Scripture to try to explain our thinking, we may be stumped: Heroes of the faith like Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon took multiple wives. So why couldn’t polyamory—or, if formalized in marriage, polygamy—also be a biblical expression of marriage? And where did the Christian insistence on monogamy come from anyway?

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There’s no single Bible verse that says, Thou shalt not commit polyamory. But biblical authors argue against polygamy through narrative rather than simple commands. They build their case story by story, describing plural marriages and their disastrous consequences: violence, fractured families, even national failure. Jesus’ teachings on marriage reinforce those stories, and the full witness of Scripture on these matters is unmistakably a warning.

The Bible is not alone in using narrative to condemn the tragic choices of its protagonists. Some of our best storytelling—prestige TV shows like The Sopranos, Nurse Jackie, and Breaking Bad—uses the same technique. Our culture’s obsession with antihero stories like these helps us understand how description can be a form of prescription, a caution about what can come of evil.

Likewise in gritty biblical narratives of polygamy. When men take multiple wives in the Old Testament, what follows is as bad as we can imagine: A man’s son has sex with his stepmom. Sons murder their half-siblings, go to war against their fathers, and rape their half-sisters. A father maroons his son in the wilderness to die. A husband exposes unfavored wives and children to violence coming for him (Gen. 32). It’s not a radical claim to say the Bible consistently connects polygamous relationships with negative outcomes—and that should be instructive for our thinking.

Examined in more detail, the chaos flowing from biblical stories of polygamy comes in three flavors: violence, rivalry, and national catastrophe.

Examples of violence arise immediately after Eden. In his book Flood and Fury, Old Testament scholar Matthew Lynch points out that the first mentioned polygamist—Lamech—is remembered only for threatening his wives with wanton violence (Gen. 4:19–24). He brags to them about murdering a boy for striking him—a vengeance later forbidden in the Mosaic law (Ex. 21:18–19). Lamech’s boasting about murder over a minor provocation suggests he’s a threat to everyone around him. No direct connection is made to his polygamy, but plural marriage is introduced under a dark shadow.

Later in Genesis, Sarah brings Hagar into her marriage as a surrogate. But soon she compels Abraham to exile Hagar and her son Ishmael to the desert, almost certainly dooming them to death had God not intervened (Gen. 16).

King David collects brides during his crusades through Hebron and Jerusalem after defeating their husbands and fathers (1 Sam. 25–30; 2 Sam. 5:13–15). He eventually takes Bathsheba in an act that many scholars consider sexual assault, then misuses his position to murder her husband (2 Sam. 11).

David’s son Amnon rapes Tamar, the daughter of one of his father’s other wives (2 Sam. 13:14). Another of David’s sons, Absalom, raises up an army to overthrow his own father (2 Sam. 15). For reasons the Bible does not explore in detail, the association between plural marriage and violence between siblings and parents persists across the history of Israel.

Then there’s rivalry, which tends to appear between wives and leads to enmity between their children. Jacob is tricked by his father-in-law into marrying a wife he does not love: Leah. He then brings her sister Rachel into the marriage, and the sisters enter into a child-bearing competition (Gen. 29–30). Rachel loses.

The closest the Old Testament comes to explicitly forbidding polygamy appears to be narrative judgment on this arrangement, if the fiasco of it all weren’t enough. The stories of Jacob’s simultaneous marriages are a longform argument for a ban on taking a woman and her sister as rival wives, and Leviticus 18 specifically prohibits this.

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On the national scale, the Old Testament repeatedly shows that when kings indulge in polygamy, the nation follows in their folly.

Even before Israel had kings, Deuteronomy commanded future rulers not to “take many wives” (17:17). David’s son Solomon notoriously shows us how a polygamous king hurts the nation: His marriages far outnumbered his father’s, for he “loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh’s daughter—Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites,” ending up with “seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines” (1 Kings 11:1, 3).

Verse 3 makes no bones about it: “His wives led him astray.” Solomon’s altars on the Mount of Olives—including altars for human sacrifice (vv. 7–8)—result directly from the pressure of his many wives.

We could expand the discussion to Jacob’s son Reuben, Gideon’s son Abimelech, Hannah and Peninnah, and more. Taken in total, it’s overwhelming: We don’t get glimpses of the good times these people had before things went wrong in their plural marriages. It’s all bad. With the possible exceptions of Moses and Saul (with whom it is unclear if they had sequential or simultaneous wives), the scriptural portrait of polygamy is not merely negative but calamitous through and through.

Despite all that, there’s one form of polygamy the Old Testament not only permits but prescribes: the practice we call levirate marriage, in which a married man would take his brother’s widow into his own household, possibly conceiving children who then would be treated as the dead brother’s offspring. How does this practice fit into the wider biblical witness about faithful monogamy?

The answer is that levirate marriage (derived from the Latin levir for “husband’s brother”) is the exception that proves the Bible’s negative view of polygamy. Its purpose was not sexual variety or pleasure. It was to safeguard widows under the protection of a household in a violent society in which childless, single women were at extreme risk.

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Isolated women were a common concern in the Torah, and levirate marriage allowed a man to take a conjugal role with a widowed sister-in-law (as Tamar wanted of Judah in Genesis 38) for that reason. This is as close to advocating polygamy as we get in Scripture, but it’s far afield from contemporary polyamory: The goal in the Torah was to produce children who would provide future income and protection for the widow, continuing the family name so she could retain her husband’s inherited land (Deut. 25:5–10). It’s also worth noting that this was optional for the brother of the deceased—and his wife.

This legal process to enfold vulnerable women into a family, which we see in greatest detail in the story of Ruth, speaks to the high value of protection, progeny, and inheritance in ancient Israel. We may not have the same priorities today, but these concerns are ever-present in both testaments. Levirate marriage allowed a childless, widowed woman—in her years of fertility—to join a family, work with them, and produce children who could secure her future. It has no real commonalities with the polyamory practices of our moment.

The biblical authors show us what marriage shouldn’t be, but Scripture also speaks to what it should be. And unlike many topics, this is one on which we get direct instruction from a famous first-century Jewish interpreter of Scripture: Jesus of Nazareth.

When Pharisees press him on the conditions under which marital bonds can be broken, Jesus roots marriage in creation rather than divorce legislation (Matt. 19:1–9; Mark 10:2–12). He skips past all the laws in the Torah on these matters and grounds his thinking in the opening chapters of Genesis. Jesus cites creation as God’s ideal for marriage—the way it was supposed to be.

And Jesus doesn’t stop at connecting marriage to creation. He zeroes in on sexual union as the tie that binds, bound by God himself! And then he immediately moves to remarriage. That radical new insight about the centrality of sex and the desire to remarry suggests what the Pharisees’ questions were about: Jesus implies that they were asking not merely about divorce, but about divorce for the sake of remarriage and, thus, sex with another woman.

Jesus’ teaching is a positive vision for marriage, but it is also a source of clear prohibitions. Jesus declares that divorce with remarriage in mind is tantamount to adultery. And he delivers that little gem of a saying that connects the creation of humanity to God’s intentions for marriage: “Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”

Genesis ties the logic of marriage to creation pretty tightly. In the beginning, we are created in the image of God, “male and female.” God “builds” the female as a “facing counterpart” to the man whom he just “fashioned” (my translations from Genesis 1–2). They sexually unite, clinging to one another, and Jesus tells us this was God joining them together. Thus Jesus sees the Pharisees’ casual suggestion of divorce—“Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”—as violating not only a particular marriage but the nature of creation itself.

And here’s the kicker: The same is true of our marriages today.

That’s why, despite no single Thou shalt not, polyamory is never approved by Scripture. Because it was designed to meet perceived needs for intimacy outside monogamy, it is very different from levirate marriage, which aimed to protect vulnerable women in the ancient Near East.

Though it may not lead to treason, murder, or sexual assault, contemporary polyamory is morally akin to the many examples of ruinous polygamy peppered across Scripture—and consequences like rivalry, exploitation, adultery, and family division still follow.

The Old Testament’s detailed and consistently negative stories, plus Jesus’ appeal to marriage in the creation order, offer strong wisdom against this practice. Modern polyamory is consensual, but then, so are many of the bent desires of our hearts. Under the weight of these recurring narratives and teachings, polyamory cannot be an expression of the biblical vision of marriage.

Dru Johnson is the Templeton Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford, and a visiting professor of religion at Hope College in Michigan.

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