Here’s what Lisa Miller wrote about polygamy:
Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel — all these fathers and heroes were polygamists.
... Social conservatives point to Adam and Eve as evidence for their one man, one woman argument — in particular, this verse from Genesis: “Therefore shall a man leave his mother and father, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” But as (Alan) Segal (of Barnard University) says, if you believe that the Bible was written by men and not handed down in its leather bindings by God, then that verse was written by people for whom polygamy was the way of the world.
... Marriage, specifically, has evolved so as to be unrecognizable to the wives of Abraham and Jacob. Monogamy became the norm in the Christian world in the sixth century; husbands’ frequent enjoyment of mistresses and prostitutes became taboo by the beginning of the 20th.
And here’s the response of C. Ben Mitchell, director of The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity and associate professor of bioethics and contemporary culture at Trinity International University:
A mere 50 years ago Lisa Miller’s essay would have been deemed unworthy of publication in any respectable magazine because of its ignorance of basic Bible facts. The article is so outlandish that, were it not for contemporary biblical illiteracy, to respond to it would be to give it too much credit. But — because as Boston University’s Stephen Prothero has shown, 60 percent of Americans cannot name five of the Ten Commandments and 50 percent of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married — Miller’s biblical revisionism is especially dangerous.
The biblical ideal for marriage is for one man and one woman to enjoy a “one flesh” type of union for life. This much is clear from the creation story. After God made the first man, Adam, from the dust of the earth, He made the first woman from Adam’s side. Genesis 2:24 then teaches, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (ESV). The Hebrew word translated “one flesh” describes a deeply intimate union between a man and a woman that is consummated in the sexual relationship. Note that “a man” (singular) shall leave his family of origin and shall join faithfully with “his wife” (singular).
Everyone knows by painful experience how traumatic it is to violate any aspect of this ideal. If the union of a husband and wife is broken by death, trauma results. If the marriage covenant is broken by adultery, trauma results. Similarly, according to the biblical narrative, if the covenant is violated through polygamy, trauma follows.
Polygamy brings trouble according to the Bible. The Patriarch Abraham, for instance, had a wife, Sarah, and later added to their family an Egyptian servant named Hagar. Now we must understand that this was not a traditional polygamous relationship. Because of her infertility, Sarah invited Abraham to have a child through Hagar (Genesis 16:1ff).
Furthermore, the relationship was disastrous from the beginning. Sarah and Hagar never got along, their lives were miserable, and their children suffered as a result. Gideon, Jacob, David, and Solomon also had polygamous relationships — all of them to their detriment. Remember, the violation of the ideal always leads to trauma.
Interestingly, though Jesus nowhere explicitly condemns polygamy, when asked by his detractors, the Pharisees, about the grounds for divorce, Jesus made a beeline for the creation ideal. “Have you not read,” He answered them, “that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matthew 19:3-6). The disciples understood exactly what Jesus was saying about the seriousness of the marriage relationship, because they responded, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry” (19:10). Jesus then said that not everyone has the gift of celibacy. The point is, Jesus believed the Genesis instruction was true: God made humanity male and female, and sexual intimacy between men and women is to be enjoyed only in the “one flesh” marital union of one man and one woman.
Since this is the case, why would anyone expect homosexual marriage to result in anything but heartache and disappointment? If the violation of the marital ideal through death, adultery, polygamy, and divorce is so painful, discerning people should be able to anticipate that homosexual marriage is not going to bring happiness, but eventually the same trauma as every other violation of biblical marriage.
