Post
by steve » Fri Dec 18, 2009 11:09 am
Hi Ian,
I was considering your suggestion above, and, thinking about it more carefully, it does not seem to me that there would be any case where one partner in a sexual relationship was committing adultery and the other was not. All of the possibilities for the pairing of men and women (not married to each other) are listed below. In each case, either both parties are committing adultery, or both are not (under primitive Jewish thinking):
Married man—unmarried woman........neither is committing adultery, since the man's wife does not have exclusive claim on him
Married man—married woman...........both are committing adultery
Unmarried man—unmarried woman.....neither is committing adultery
Unmarried man—married woman........both are committing adultery
Now where the disparity comes in would be between the first and the last of these instances. The married man might have additional wives and mistresses without the stigma of adultery. The married woman could not do the same thing.
I believe the reason for this double standard was due to the nature and purpose of polygamy. Marriage was viewed primarily as the means of building a family and producing progeny—for the man. His name and estate were to be perpetuated if at all possible. If his first wife was barren, he (and she!) might think it good for him to take an additional female partner, who could, hopefully, fulfill this purpose (e.g., Gen.16:2; 30:1-3, 9). This was, I think, the "official" reason that polygamy was justified, though there is no question that it often was also adopted to serve less noble ends (e.g., lust, desire to build the family at a faster rate, and political prestige) among men whose wives were all fertile—e.g., Lamech (Gen.4:19ff), Jacob, David and Solomon.
I think polygamy was sometimes also practiced for the protection of women, who often outnumbered the men in the population, due to heavy casualties of war (see Isaiah 3:25—4:1). A widow was much more vulnerable to poverty and exploitation than was a married woman. For this reason, a man might charitably take widows, to whom he was not even attracted sexually, as additional wives into his home (as in the case of the man whose married brother had died childless—Deut.25:5).
In a culture where women were not regarded as equals to men (either by themselves or by society), the idea of a woman having to share a husband with other women was not regarded as the anomaly that modern westerners would regard it.
This being the purpose of polygamy, it becomes clear why there was a sexual double standard, so that women could not practice the same level of promiscuity as could the men. A man might have children by several women, and there be no question of parentage. On the other hand, a woman can only be pregnant by one man at a time, regardless of the number of men she sleeps with—and the parentage of every child could easily be in question. Also, widowed women were far more vulnerable than were widowed men, making it more necessary for them to find a husband, even if all the available men in town were already taken.
Extending this principle of polygamy to sex in general was a fairly predictable next step. A man could bear children by slaves and concubines as readily as by free women, so the former were legally available to him as well.
This does not mean that the society condoned actual sexual promiscuity on the part of men or women. Adultery was not the only sexual sin defined in scripture. Adultery is simply a sexual sin committed against a marriage covenant. For example, a man who would visit a prostitute may not technically have been an "adulterer"—but he could not do this without becoming a "fornicator" (1 Cor.6:15,18). Prostitution was forbidden in the Jewish law (Lev.19:29). Also, if a man slept with a girl who was not a prostitute, nor yet betrothed or married, it was not really a situation of "wam bam thank you m`am". He had to marry her and make the arrangement honorable. In fact, such an arrangement represents the only marriage, according to the law, which could never end in divorce (Ex.22:16; Deut.22:28-29).
There is no doubt that these customs provided unequal opportunities for men to vent their lusts and restrained women from doing so. The law was "weak through the flesh." It legislated, but it could not transform human nature. The purpose for the law's allowance of polygamy was probably reasonable, according to the sentiments of the day, but the sinfulness of man certainly will have stretched the principles to include morally unjustifiable behavior.