Does the Bible Endorse Polygamy? Tolerated in Israel, Never the Ideal

Critics of Christianity often point out that Abraham, Jacob, David and Solomon all had more than one wife, and that the same Bible which tells their stories never issues a plain "you shall not marry two women." Latter-day Saints raise the question from another direction: if God allowed plural marriage in Israel, why could he not command it again? And many Christians, reading Genesis for themselves, are surprised to find polygamy on the page at all.

The usual Christian answer is that the Bible records polygamy without approving it. That answer is partly right, but it is often stated too strongly. The Law of Moses does not only describe plural marriage; it makes rules for it, and in one prophetic speech God says he gave David his master's wives. The Church Fathers did not pretend otherwise. This article sets out what the texts say, how ancient Jewish and Christian readers understood them, and why the Orthodox Church nonetheless confesses that marriage in Christ is the union of one man and one woman.

In brief

The Old Testament never commands polygamy as an ideal, and it never presents it as the pattern God set at creation. But it does more than record it. The Law of Moses regulates plural households (Exodus 21:10; Deuteronomy 21:15-17), the levirate law expected a man, married or not, to take his brother's childless widow (Deuteronomy 25:5), and Nathan's oracle says God gave David "your master's wives" (2 Samuel 12:8). Ancient Jewish interpreters read the Law as permitting polygamy, and St John Chrysostom says plainly that the Jews were allowed "to have two wives at one time." So the claim that the Bible "never endorses" polygamy cannot be defended in its plain sense. What can be defended is more modest and, in the end, more persuasive. Genesis gives one woman to one man; the narratives repeatedly show plural households torn by rivalry; Deuteronomy restrains the king; and Christ, quoting Genesis in the form preserved by the Septuagint, says "the two shall become one flesh" and "from the beginning it was not so" (Matthew 19:5, 8). The apostles and Fathers received that teaching, and the Church requires monogamy of every Christian.

Thesis: Scripture tolerated and regulated polygamy in ancient Israel, but it never holds it up as the creational or Christian pattern, and Christ restores marriage to the union of one man and one woman.

What the Old Testament actually says

The Law regulates plural households

Exodus 21 deals with a slave woman whom a man designates as a wife for himself or his son. Then it adds: "If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights" (Exodus 21:10, RSV). The law protects the first wife, but it plainly assumes the second marriage is lawful.¹

Deuteronomy 21:15-17 begins: "If a man has two wives, the one loved and the other disliked, and they have borne him children..." It forbids the father to transfer the firstborn's double portion to the son of the favored wife. Again the purpose is protective, and again the arrangement itself is treated as a legal fact, not a crime.

The levirate law goes further. "If brothers dwell together, and one of them dies and has no son ... her husband's brother shall go in to her, and take her as his wife" (Deuteronomy 25:5). The text does not exempt a brother who is already married, though it lets him refuse at the cost of public shame (Deuteronomy 25:7-10). (The Book of Ruth is related to this custom but is not a strict case of it; as H. H. Rowley noted, "this is clearly not strictly a case of levirate marriage, since Boaz is not a brother-in-law or levir."² Ruth therefore cannot settle whether a married levir was expected to take a second wife.) The Jewish Encyclopedia drew the obvious conclusion more than a century ago: "In the case of the Levirate Marriage, monogamy was legally invaded; otherwise, polygamy was merely tolerated and not set up as a laudable rule."³

The king may not "multiply" wives

Deuteronomy 17:17 says of Israel's future king: "And he shall not multiply wives for himself, lest his heart turn away." The verb is "multiply," and the stated danger is that the king's heart will turn. That is a real restraint, and Solomon's story is told as its fulfilment: "his wives turned away his heart after other gods" (1 Kings 11:4). But it is not, on its face, a ban on a second wife. The rabbis of the Talmud read it as a numerical limit; the Jewish Encyclopedia reports that Sanhedrin 21a limits the king to "18, 24, or 48" wives depending on how 2 Samuel 12:8 is interpreted.⁴ Some Jewish groups read the Law more strictly. The Damascus Document, a sectarian text found in the Cairo Genizah and among the Dead Sea Scrolls, "invokes Genesis 1:27 as the basis for opposition to polygamy" (CD 4:20-5:1).⁵ So ancient Judaism itself disagreed about how far the Torah's restraint reached.

God "gave" David wives

The hardest text is Nathan's oracle after David's sin with Bathsheba: "I gave you your master's house, and your master's wives into your bosom, and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah; and if this were too little, I would add to you as much more" (2 Samuel 12:8). Here God is the subject of the verb. The point of the speech is God's generosity, set against David's theft of Uriah's one wife, and "your master's wives" is often read as royal succession language: the new king inherits the old king's household. Jon Levenson and Baruch Halpern argued in 1980 that David's marriages carried real political weight, including a claim on Saul's throne.⁶ Others doubt parts of that reconstruction; a 2024 study concludes that David's wife Ahinoam and Saul's wife Ahinoam were probably "two separate people, albeit with a common name."⁷ Either way, the honest reader has to admit that this verse speaks of the wives as something God gave, not something God condemned.

A second text is quieter. Of King Joash the Chronicler writes: "And Jo'ash did what was right in the eyes of the Lord all the days of Jehoi'ada the priest. Jehoi'ada got for him two wives, and he had sons and daughters" (2 Chronicles 24:2-3). The priest arranges the marriages, and the narrator offers no criticism.

{{strong: The Old Testament regulates and in places assumes plural marriage; it does not forbid it to ordinary Israelites in so many words.}}

The pattern set at creation

Against that background, the beginning of Genesis stands out. When God sees the man alone, he says, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him" (Genesis 2:18). He makes one woman, and the narrator concludes: "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24, RSV, following the Hebrew).

The Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, which the Orthodox Church reads as its Old Testament, makes the point sharper. In Brenton's translation: "and they two shall be one flesh."⁸ The traditional (Masoretic) Hebrew text has no word for "two"; the Septuagint does, as do some other ancient versions, and so do the words of Christ in Matthew 19:5 and Mark 10:8 and of St Paul in Ephesians 5:31. Christ and the apostles quote the verse in the form that names the couple as two. (The site's article on which Bible Paul quoted looks at this pattern more widely.)

The rest of the primeval history fits the same shape. The first man said to take two wives is Lamech, in the line of Cain: "And Lamech took two wives; the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah" (Genesis 4:19). His only recorded words are a boast of vengeance to those two wives (Genesis 4:23-24). Genesis passes no explicit verdict on his marriages, though the company they keep is hardly flattering. When the human race is saved through the flood, it is saved in pairs: "Noah and his sons ... and Noah's wife and the three wives of his sons" (Genesis 7:13). Jewish scholars have noticed this too. The Jewish Encyclopedia observes that "the first man (Adam) was given only one wife, and that the first instance of bigamy occurred in the family of the cursed Cain."⁹

{{very-strong: The creation account presents marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and this is how both Jesus and Paul read it.}}

How the narratives portray plural households

The stories of Israel's polygamous families are, with few exceptions, stories of rivalry and grief. Sarah gives Hagar to Abraham "as a wife" (Genesis 16:3), and the result is contempt, harshness and finally expulsion (Genesis 16:4-6; 21:10). Jacob loves Rachel more than Leah, and "when the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb" (Genesis 29:31); the sisters' rivalry passes to their sons. Elkanah has two wives, and Peninnah, called Hannah's "rival," used "to provoke her sorely" (1 Samuel 1:6). Gideon "had seventy sons, his own offspring, for he had many wives"; his son by a concubine, Abimelech, later "slew his brothers the sons of Jerubba'al, seventy men, upon one stone," and only the youngest escaped (Judges 8:30; 9:5). Solomon "had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines; and his wives turned away his heart" (1 Kings 11:3).

This pattern matters, and Christian writers are right to stress it. But it needs to be stated with care. Hebrew narrative often lets events speak without comment, and trouble in a household is not the same thing as a divine verdict on how it was formed. Some of these stories also show God's blessing at work inside the polygamous family: he opens Leah's womb, he "hearkened to Leah" (Genesis 30:17), and he builds the twelve tribes of Israel from Jacob's four wives. In David's case Nathan ties the coming disaster to the murder of Uriah and the taking of his wife (2 Samuel 12:9-11), not to David's other marriages. With Solomon, 1 Kings 11 stresses that his wives were foreign women from nations Israel had been told not to marry (1 Kings 11:1-2), as well as their number. And the kingdom divided under Rehoboam because of Solomon's unfaithfulness and Rehoboam's harsh answer to the northern tribes (1 Kings 11:11; 12:13-16), not because of Rehoboam's eighteen wives.

So the narrative evidence supports a real but limited conclusion: Scripture consistently shows plural marriage as a source of pain, and never tells a polygamous family's story as a model to imitate. It does not by itself prove that every such marriage was sinful.

Does Leviticus 18:18 forbid polygamy?

Some defenders of the strong thesis argue that the Law does contain a ban. Leviticus 18:18 reads, in the RSV: "And you shall not take a woman as a rival wife to her sister, uncovering her nakedness while her sister is yet alive." Richard M. Davidson, following Angelo Tosato's study in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly (1984), argues that the phrase should be read as the idiom "one [woman/wife] in addition to another [woman/wife]," and concludes "that this verse refers to any two women, not just to two consanguine sisters. In other words, this legislation prohibits all polygamy."¹⁰

This reading deserves a fair hearing: Davidson points to the same idiom elsewhere in Hebrew, and the verse sits among the moral laws of Leviticus 18. But it is not how most English translations read it. The RSV, like others, takes the verse to forbid marrying two sisters, which would echo Jacob's marriage to Leah and Rachel. Mainstream rabbinic interpretation did not read the verse as a general prohibition, and rabbinic law permitted polygamy for centuries afterwards. Davidson himself concedes that "there are no punishments mentioned for this practice during Old Testament times." An argument that needs a disputed reading of one verse to carry the weight of a universal ban is not the place to rest a case.

How Jews and Christians later read these texts

Rabbinic Judaism continued to permit polygamy while discouraging it. The Jewish Encyclopedia says that polygamy "was, however, sanctioned by Jewish law" and that "An express prohibition against polygamy was pronounced by R. Gershom b. Judah ... (960-1028)," accepted in northern France and Germany, while the Jews of Spain, Italy and the East "continued to practise polygamy for a long period after that time."¹¹ The point here is that Jewish law treated the Torah as permitting what it did not command.

The earliest Christian writers knew this. In his Dialogue with Trypho (about 155 to 160), St Justin Martyr rebukes Jewish teachers "who even till this time permit each man to have four or five wives," and argues that the patriarchs' marriages had a providential and prophetic purpose, the marriages of Jacob being "types" of what Christ would do.¹² He does not deny the patriarchs' marriages; he denies that they license his contemporaries.

St John Chrysostom, preaching on 1 Timothy 3:2, says that Paul's requirement that a bishop be "the husband of one wife" is given "as prohibiting his having more than one. For even the Jews were allowed to contract second marriages, and even to have two wives at one time."¹³ One of the Church's greatest teachers thus states plainly what a flat "never endorses" would deny.

St Augustine, defending the patriarchs against the Manichees, argues that their plural marriages were "no sin," because they were entered "not for wantonness, but for the begetting of children," were customary at the time, and were "forbidden by no law."¹⁴ Yet he insists just as firmly that "the Sacrament of marriage of our time has been so reduced to one man and one wife, as that it is not lawful to ordain any as a steward of the Church, save the husband of one wife."¹⁵ His basic pattern, permitted then and not now, is the common patristic answer.

St Basil the Great reflects the Church's discipline once that answer had settled. In his canonical letter to Amphilochius he writes: "On polygamy the Fathers are silent, as being brutish and altogether inhuman. The sin seems to me worse than fornication."¹⁶

Christ restores what was "from the beginning"

The decisive text for Christians is Christ's answer about divorce. "Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined 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 put asunder" (Matthew 19:4-6). When the Pharisees appeal to Moses, he replies: "For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so" (Matthew 19:8).

The question in Matthew 19 is divorce, not polygamy, so care is needed. But Christ distinguishes what the Law of Moses allowed because of human hardness from what God intended at creation, and he holds his disciples to the creational intention. That is exactly the shape of the patristic answer to polygamy. The Law's toleration was real; it was also provisional.

St Paul then quotes the same verse and adds: "This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church" (Ephesians 5:32). Christ has one bride. The Orthodox Church takes this as the key to marriage itself: a man and a woman are joined as an image of Christ and his Church (see the site's infographic Marriage as a Holy Mystery). A plural marriage cannot be that image.

The phrase "the husband of one wife" (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:6) is sometimes cited as a ban on polygamy for all Christians. Its exact sense is debated. Chrysostom took it to exclude having more than one wife, but the matching phrase for widows, "having been the wife of one husband" (1 Timothy 5:9), cannot refer to polyandry, which suggests that faithfulness and the avoidance of remarriage are also in view. The verses set a standard for clergy and assume monogamy as the Christian norm; they are not by themselves a general law.

The prophets and the marriage image

The prophets often picture God as Israel's husband, and it is sometimes said that this image "admits no plurality." That is not quite accurate. In Ezekiel 23 the Lord speaks of "two women, the daughters of one mother," Oholah and Oholibah, and says, "They became mine" (Ezekiel 23:2-4); they stand for Samaria and Jerusalem. Jeremiah 3:6-8 similarly speaks of "faithless" Israel and her "false sister Judah." The prophets could use a two-wife picture when Israel was divided into two kingdoms.

The deeper movement of the image is still toward oneness. The Song of Songs sets the beloved against a royal harem: "There are sixty queens and eighty concubines, and maidens without number. My dove, my perfect one, is only one" (Song of Solomon 6:8-9). And in the New Testament the people of God, no longer divided, is Christ's single bride. The image does not prove that the prophets thought every polygamous marriage sinful, but it shows where Scripture's theology of marriage is heading.

Malachi 2:15 is also often quoted, in versions that render it "Did he not make them one?" The Hebrew is notoriously difficult: the RSV has "Has not the one God made and sustained for us the spirit of life?", and Brenton's Septuagint "And did he not do well? and there was the residue of his spirit." The verse clearly commands faithfulness to "the wife of his youth," but it is too uncertain to carry an argument about polygamy.

The Orthodox position

It helps to separate three levels of teaching.

• Settled teaching. Christian marriage is the union of one man and one woman, blessed by God as an image of Christ and the Church. The Church does not bless plural marriages, and its canons treat polygamy as a grave sin (Basil, canon 80).
• Common patristic understanding. The Law of Moses permitted polygamy as a concession, as it permitted divorce, and Christ restored the creational pattern. The Fathers did not condemn the patriarchs; the Orthodox Church commemorates them on the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers, "the ancestors of Christ according to the flesh, who lived before the Law and under the Law."¹⁷
• Theological opinion. Exactly how to judge the patriarchs' marriages is left open. Justin saw a prophetic purpose in them, Augustine thought them sinless in their time, and some modern writers such as Davidson think they were always contrary to God's will though not punished. An Orthodox Christian may weigh these views; none of them is dogma.

The Fathers read the Law in the light of Christ. The site's article Does the Bible Endorse Slavery? faces a similar problem: a practice regulated in the Law and left behind in the Church.

The strongest objections

"If the Law allowed it, then God approved it."

A skeptic can fairly say that a law regulating plural marriage is a form of approval, and that Christians are redefining "endorse" to escape the evidence. There is some force in this, which is why this article no longer claims the Bible "never endorses" polygamy. But permission and ideal are different things in any legal system, and Christ himself makes that distinction in Matthew 19:8. The Law also permitted divorce, which Christ says was never God's intention. Saying that God tolerated something for a time is not special pleading; it is how the New Testament itself reads the Law.

The Latter-day Saint objection

Latter-day Saints accept 2 Samuel 12:8 at face value. Doctrine and Covenants 132:39 says: "David's wives and concubines were given unto him of me, by the hand of Nathan, my servant." The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints now teaches that "the marriage of one man and one woman is the Lord's standing law of marriage," and that "In biblical times, the Lord commanded some to practice plural marriage."¹⁸ The essay cites the Book of Mormon, where the Lord says, "if I will ... raise up seed unto me, I will command my people" (Jacob 2:30), as one reason God commanded it.

This position takes the Old Testament evidence more seriously than some Christian replies do, and it deserves a careful answer. The Orthodox response is that the Old Testament shows permission and regulation, not a command; no Old Testament text commands anyone to take a second wife except in the narrow case of the levirate. Christ's own appeal to "the beginning" points away from polygamy, not toward a future restoration of it. The Book of Mormon also says that "David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me" (Jacob 2:24), while Doctrine and Covenants 132:38 says of David, Solomon and others, "in nothing did they sin save in those things which they received not of me." Latter-day Saints reconcile the two by reading Jacob 2:24 as condemning the wives and concubines that were not given by God (the exception Doctrine and Covenants 132:38-39 itself makes, naming Uriah's wife in David's case) and Jacob 2:30 as allowing God to command the practice when he chooses; readers can judge whether the harmony holds.¹⁹ The history of the practice in the early Latter-day Saint movement is discussed in the site's infographic Why Did Joseph Smith Marry Other Mormon Men's Wives?

"Polygamists like David are honored as righteous."

They are, and the Church commemorates the forefathers. But honoring their faith is not the same as making their marriages a pattern. The Fathers held both at once: Justin and Augustine defend the patriarchs, and Basil calls polygamy among Christians worse than fornication.

What we can say confidently

• Genesis 2 presents marriage as one man joined to one woman, and Jesus and Paul quote it in the Septuagint's form, "the two shall become one flesh."
• The Law of Moses regulated plural marriage (Exodus 21:10; Deuteronomy 21:15-17) and restrained the king (Deuteronomy 17:17), but did not forbid polygamy to ordinary Israelites in explicit terms.
• No text of Scripture commands polygamy as an ideal, and none presents it as the creational pattern.
• The narratives repeatedly show plural households marked by rivalry and grief.
• Ancient Jewish interpreters and Fathers such as Chrysostom and Augustine understood the Law as permitting polygamy in Israel; Justin instead explained the patriarchs' marriages as a providential dispensation.
• From its earliest writings the Church required monogamy of Christians, and the Fathers treated polygamy as outside Christian life.

What remains disputed

• Whether Leviticus 18:18 forbids marriage to two sisters only or to any two women (Tosato, Davidson).
• Whether 2 Samuel 12:8 implies that David actually married Saul's wives, or uses conventional language for royal succession.
• Whether the patriarchs sinned in taking more than one wife, or acted lawfully in their time (Augustine), or fulfilled a prophetic purpose (Justin).
• The precise sense of "the husband of one wife" in 1 Timothy 3:2 and Titus 1:6.
• Whether the narrative pattern of household strife was meant by the biblical authors as an implicit judgment on polygamy itself.

Conclusion

The honest answer to "Does the Bible endorse polygamy?" is that it permitted it in ancient Israel and never held it up as God's design. The Law made room for it, as it made room for divorce, and the Fathers said so without embarrassment. But the Scriptures begin with one man and one woman, show again and again what happens when that pattern is broken, and end with one Bridegroom and one bride.

The Orthodox Church reads the Old Testament as a story that moves toward Christ. In him the concessions made to hardness of heart give way to what was "from the beginning," and marriage is restored as a path to holiness and an image of his love for the Church. Christians do not need to deny what the Old Testament says in order to give thanks for that restoration. They can read the hard texts honestly, as the Fathers did, and still say with confidence that in Christ "the two shall become one flesh."

Notes

1. All Bible quotations are from the Revised Standard Version (1952 OT; 1971 NT edition) as published on Bible Gateway, unless marked as the Septuagint. Proper names keep the RSV's pronunciation marks (e.g. "Jo'ash"). On the slave-wife setting of Exodus 21:7-11, see also Jewish Encyclopedia, "Polygamy." ↩
2. H. H. Rowley, "The Marriage of Ruth," Harvard Theological Review 40, no. 2 (1947): 77-99, at 77 (opening page, as published by Cambridge University Press). ↩
3. Joseph Jacobs and Israel Abrahams, "Monogamy," Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901-1906), section "Legal Aspects." Online at jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10949. ↩
4. Executive Committee of the Editorial Board and Julius H. Greenstone, "Polygamy," Jewish Encyclopedia, citing Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 21a. Online at jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/12260-polygamy. The Talmudic passage (the Mishnah's limit of eighteen, and the readings giving twenty-four and forty-eight) was checked in the William Davidson translation at sefaria.org. ↩
5. Editorial note to "Jesus on Divorce," The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 2, Emerging Judaism, online at posenlibrary.com/node/10215, citing CD 4:20-5:1. ↩
6. Jon D. Levenson and Baruch Halpern, "The Political Import of David's Marriages," Journal of Biblical Literature 99, no. 4 (1980): 507ff. DOI 10.2307/3265190. Bibliographic data checked; the article itself was not opened, and its argument is reported here as summarized by Parker (note 7). ↩
7. Stephen Parker, "A Tale of Two Ahinoams: Did David Marry Saul's Wife to Usurp the Throne?" Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 67, no. 1 (March 2024), beginning p. 27; quotation from the published abstract. ↩
8. Genesis 2:24, in The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, trans. Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton (London: Samuel Bagster, 1851), as published at ebible.org. ↩
9. Greenstone, "Polygamy," Jewish Encyclopedia, opening section. ↩
10. Richard M. Davidson, "Condemnation and Grace: Polygamy and Concubinage in the Old Testament," Christian Research Journal 38, no. 5 (2015): 32-37, online at equip.org. Davidson cites Angelo Tosato, "The Law of Leviticus 18:18: A Reexamination," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 46 (1984): 199-214, which was not opened for this article. ↩
11. Greenstone, "Polygamy," sections "Rabbinic Aversion to Polygamy" and "Rabbi Gershom's Decree." ↩
12. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 134 (see also 141), trans. Marcus Dods and George Reith, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), online at newadvent.org/fathers/01289.htm. ↩
13. John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Timothy 10, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1889), online at newadvent.org/fathers/230610.htm. ↩
14. Augustine, On the Good of Marriage 33 (section numbering of the NPNF translation), trans. C. L. Cornish, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 3 (1887), online at newadvent.org/fathers/1309.htm. See also sections 17 and 20. ↩
15. Augustine, On the Good of Marriage 21, same translation. ↩
16. Basil of Caesarea, Letter 217 (the third canonical letter to Amphilochius), canon 80, trans. Blomfield Jackson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 8 (1895), online at newadvent.org/fathers/3202217.htm. ↩
17. Orthodox Church in America, "Sunday of the Forefathers," Lives of the Saints, oca.org. ↩
18. "Plural Marriage in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," Gospel Topics Essays, churchofjesuschrist.org. ↩
19. Book of Mormon, Jacob 2:24, 27, 30; Doctrine and Covenants 132:38-39, both as published at churchofjesuschrist.org. ↩

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version. New York: National Council of the Churches of Christ, 1952; 2nd NT ed. 1971. biblegateway.com.
• Brenton, Sir Lancelot C. L., trans. The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament. London: Samuel Bagster, 1851. ebible.org/eng-Brenton.
• Justin Martyr. Dialogue with Trypho. Trans. Marcus Dods and George Reith. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885.
• Damascus Document (CD 4:20-5:1), as cited in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 2, Emerging Judaism, entry "Jesus on Divorce," posenlibrary.com.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• John Chrysostom. Homilies on First Timothy. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13. Ed. Philip Schaff. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1889.
• Basil of Caesarea. Letter 217 (canons 51-85). Trans. Blomfield Jackson. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 8. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1895.
• Augustine of Hippo. On the Good of Marriage. Trans. C. L. Cornish. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 3. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887.
• Orthodox Church in America. "Sunday of the Forefathers." Lives of the Saints. oca.org.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Davidson, Richard M. "Condemnation and Grace: Polygamy and Concubinage in the Old Testament." Christian Research Journal 38, no. 5 (2015): 32-37. (Argues the Old Testament condemns all polygamy.)
• Greenstone, Julius H., and the Executive Committee of the Editorial Board. "Polygamy." Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901-1906.
• Jacobs, Joseph, and Israel Abrahams. "Monogamy." Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901-1906.
• Levenson, Jon D., and Baruch Halpern. "The Political Import of David's Marriages." Journal of Biblical Literature 99, no. 4 (1980): 507ff.
• Parker, Stephen. "A Tale of Two Ahinoams: Did David Marry Saul's Wife to Usurp the Throne?" Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 67, no. 1 (2024).
• Rowley, H. H. "The Marriage of Ruth." Harvard Theological Review 40, no. 2 (1947): 77-99.
• Tosato, Angelo. "The Law of Leviticus 18:18: A Reexamination." Catholic Biblical Quarterly 46 (1984): 199-214. (Cited via Davidson; not opened.)

Sources from the tradition discussed (Latter-day Saint)

• The Book of Mormon. Jacob 2. churchofjesuschrist.org.
• Doctrine and Covenants. Section 132. churchofjesuschrist.org.
• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "Plural Marriage in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." Gospel Topics Essays. churchofjesuschrist.org.