POLYGYNY
The Hebrew Bible clearly legislates
for, and assumes, polygyny, the marriage of a man to more than one wife. (Its
opposite, polyandry—the marriage of a woman to more than one man—would be
classified as adultery.) While sketchy, extant evidence suggests that at least
some, and perhaps most, post-biblical Jewish communities retained an allowance
for the practice of polygyny.
Two sources speak of the survival
of polygyny among Jews during the Second Temple Period. Josephus, in his
discussion of Herod’s many marriages, states explicitly (for the benefit of his
non-Jewish audience?) that polygyny is a patrios, or Jewish custom (War
1.477). A second, indirect source, is from the polemic against polygyny in the
Dead Sea scrolls. The Damascus Document condemns those who allow a man to marry
“two women during their lifetime” (CD IV 20-21). Whatever else it may
mean, this polemic would include those who allow polygyny. Similarly, the
Temple Scroll prescribes that a king marry only a single wife (11QTemple 57:15-19).
. . . The strongest evidence from the rabbinic period that Jews practiced
polygyny is from contemporary nonrabbinic sources. The Jewess Babatha . . .
entered her second marriage as a second wife. As Naphtali Lewis has noted, “Babatha’s
second marriage sheds a bright new light upon the extent to which polygamy was
practiced by Jews of the tannaitic period” (Naphtali Lewis, ed., The
Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters: The Greek Papyri
[Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society; Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1989],
23). Lewis’s main point is that contrary to much scholarly opinion, here was an
absolutely normal case of polygyny between Jews of moderate means. Justin
Martyr, writing only a few years later, also refers to the Jewish custom of
polygyny (Dialogue with Trypho 141 [PG 6:800]). In 393 the
emperor Theodosius (with Arcadius and Honorius) prohibited Jews from polygyny: “None
of the Jews shall keep is custom (morem) in marriage unions, neither
shall he contract nuptials according to his law, nor enter into several
matrimonies at the same time” (CJ 1.19.7). This imperial legislation was
apparently not fully successful—even outside the Land of Israel—because in 537
Justinian issued a novel that granted an exemption from laws against polygyny
to the Jews of Tyre. In 535, Justinian prohibited “abominable marriages,”
subjecting those who contracted such marriages to seizure of a fourth of their
property (Nov. 12). Two years later, the Jews of Tyre “supplicated with
tears that they shall not be forced now to send away their wives but that they
shall keep them and have the children born to them.” As late as the early sixth
century, then, at least some Jewish communities in Byzantium continued to
practice polygyny.
Rabbinic law too assumes polygyny.
In all of the rabbinic legal writings there are many, often tortuous,
discussions of polygyny and how it effects other legal areas, most notably
levirate marriage (Nov. 139). From the time of Zechariah Fraenkel there
has been a scholarly tendency to see these discussions as academic rather than
prescriptive, and there can be little doubt that most of them are (cf. Z.
Fraenkel, Grundlinien des Mosaisch-Talmudischen Eherechts [Leipzig: 1860],
10-11). Yet they may well reveal not only a theoretical possibility, but also a
living social institution. While it is impossible to gauge the extent to which
polygyny may have been practiced, it does seem fair to classify Jewish societies
in antiquity, at least in Palestine and Babylonia, as polygynous societies. . .
. Monogamous thinking made no headway into Babylonian Jewry. As many scholars
have noted, despite the absence of concrete evidence of polygynous marriages
among Babylonian Jews, Babylonian rabbinic statements simply assume a polygynous
society. In light of the contemporary non-Jewish practice of polygyny in
Babylonia, the fact that Jews too were polygynous is unsurprising. Like
Palestinian sources, Babylonian rabbinic sources give no indication of the
frequency of Jewish polygynous marriages. At the same time, Babylonian amoraim recognize
that a man’s first wife would not be overly thrilled at the prospect of acquiring
a “rival”: “[For] an evil wife with a large marriage settlement—[put] a rival
at her side,” Rabba advises (B. Yev. 63b. Cf. B. Pes. 113a). One sugya
in the Babylonian Talmud hinges on the presupposition that a man would not want
to marry his daughter to one who already has a wife (B. Ket. 64a).
The last source raises the practical
question of how polygyny was actually practiced in these societies. On this, we
have only the evidence from the Babatha archive. Babatha’s first marriage
appears to have been unexceptional: a young woman from an upper-class Jewish
family in Maḥoza married a local man of similar economic means. About Judah
Khthousion’s first marriage we know even less, except that he married a local
woman (from En-Gedi), and that they probably remained there for the first ten
to fifteen years of their marriage. His own means were probably always limited,
for the property he mortgaged (and eventually inherited) was worth no more than
forty or sixty denarii (P. Yadin 11). Judah was what we would call a
hustler. From what we can reconstruct on his business dealings, he was
continuously shuffling his finances, seeking to find capital. When he
(probably) met Babatha, she was not in good straits. She had some money from
her first dowry and a young son from whose guardians she kept trying to wheedle
more cash (P. Yadin 13, 14, 15 [124-125 CE]). Perhaps it was physical attraction
or love that brought them together, but it could not have hurt that Judah could
provide her with some immediate support, she could bring him some much needed
cash immediately, and he stood to obtain sizable land holdings later (Note that
once she obtained the gift of her father’s orchards, she dropped her suit
against her son’s guardians [P. Yadin 27 (August 19, 132 CE)], which I
interpret as a sign of her better economic circumstances).
One wonders if this was one “typical”
polygynous pattern. Levirates and widows made better “second” wives than
virgins, whose fathers wanted to marry them as first wives. Men may have been
attracted to a second wife for a variety of reasons, such as political
expediency (e.g., Herod) or as a source of liquid capital. If we can believe
the (formulaic) wording of the plea of the sixth-century Jews of Tyre, cold
calculation was not the only determining factor within these marriages.
Babatha appears to have lived in
the same housing complex as Miriam. Although Babatha may have established some relationship
with Miriam’s daughter (whose marriage contract was found with Babatha’s
documents and whose dowry she underwrote), Miriam was happy to evict Babatha
upon Judah’s death: “Before this” summons issued by Babatha, Miriam complains, “I
summoned you not to go near the possessions of my and your late husband” (P.
Yadin 26, lines 12-14). Again, we are at a loss as to how typical this kind
of relationship may have been. It is certainly reasonable—and by no means
anachronistic—to assume that there was some degree of hostility and competition
between “rival” wives. (Michael L. Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity [Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001], 189-90, 191-92)
Further Reading
Kevin L. Barney (reproducing comments from Ben McGuire), Polygyny in
NT Times