Polygyny

The Hebrew Bible does not prohibit a man from having more than one wife, and the way it handles the practice is more interesting than a prohibition would be: it legislates around the consequences. Deuteronomy addresses a man with two wives, one loved and one not, and forbids him to prefer the son of the loved wife when he divides the inheritance. A law of that shape assumes the arrangement and constrains its unfairness. Elsewhere the narratives report it of Abraham, Jacob, Elkanah, David and Solomon, and the tension it produces in a household, between Sarah and Hagar, between Leah and Rachel, between Hannah and Peninnah, is described at length and never resolved by a rule.

There is one clear ancient Jewish voice against it. The Damascus Document, from the Dead Sea material, condemns taking two wives in their lifetimes and cites the creation of male and female and the pairs entering the ark, which is an argument from the order of creation of exactly the kind Christianity would later make.

The rabbinic tradition permitted it and made it rarer by other means, principally the marriage contract, which made a second household expensive, and by the requirement of consent in some communities. The formal end in Ashkenaz came by enactment around the year 1000 and not by exegesis, which is itself the clearest evidence that the texts could not be made to yield a prohibition.

The Quranic permission comes in a passage about orphans and their property, and it is conditional twice over. A man may marry two, three or four, and then the verse says that if he fears he will not deal justly he should marry one. A later verse in the same chapter says that a man will not be able to deal equally between wives however much he wishes to, and asks him at least not to leave one suspended.

Classical jurisprudence read the required justice as covering the things that can be measured, maintenance, housing and the division of nights, and read the impossible equality as concerning affection, which nobody can command. On that reading the permission stands with a practical condition attached, and the courts enforced the measurable part.

Modern reformist argument put the two verses together and drew a different conclusion: that a permission granted on a condition the text elsewhere says cannot be met amounts to a strong preference for one wife. Muhammad Abduh in Egypt is the figure most associated with the argument, and it has been contested within the tradition ever since. Legislation went further in places. Tunisia prohibited plural marriage outright in its personal status code of 1956, and a number of other states require judicial permission, notice to the existing wife, or proof of means.

Beyond the scriptural traditions, polygyny has been widespread as custom rather than doctrine across much of Africa, parts of South Asia and many Indigenous societies. The atlas records it as one arrangement among several and takes no position for or against it.