Multiple wives and concubines | male and female "original" intent
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"However, my question is still did the Pharisees as well as the rest of the crowd have any confusion..." - I think they definitely had a confusion in their minds at that moment and didn't right away realize the difference between God's original intent and God's forbearance toward His people already in the fallen state. The following verses show both their confusion (verse 7) and the Savior's pointing out to that difference (verse 8: " because of the hardness of your hearts ... but from the beginning it was not so")
Upvote:-1
Jesus is speaking of the children involved. One flesh is the offspring of the man and woman and the resulting family it creates. He is admonishing them not to separate the family. He goes on to say that this is not for eunuchs because they do not have children. This pericope ends with the little children coming unto Jesus.
Upvote:9
I think the Pharisees understood quite well that their ancestors were not perfect. The fact that they did X does not make X right. The example of David that you bring up is a case in point: He was guilty of adultery and murder. The Bible is unusual in that it holds someone up as a hero at the same time that it freely recounts his character flaws -- sometimes big ones like this. I don't think the Pharisees supposed that murder was okay because David did it, or would have found this in any way confusing.
(Ever notice that most history books and biographies tend to present their heroes as 100% good? Their character flaws are often whitewashed: he was forced into it by circumstances; this was accepted practice at the time, etc. There are exceptions, of course, but I see this a lot. But the Bible goes to rather the opposite extreme, being quite emphatic about its heroes’ sins.)
That said, the Old Testament does seem to at least tolerate polygamy. There are some clues in the OT that indicate that God intended marriage to be monogamous. For example, Gen 2:24 "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." Note "wife", singular, not "a man shall be joined to his wives". Etc. But these are subtle enough that one could debate them, and I don't know of anything in the OT that clearly, explicitly mandates monogamy. There are plenty of places where a person's sin is called out, and I don't know of anyplace where polygamy is called out as a sin. I'm interested if anybody else here can point to such a verse.
As Flimzy notes, Jesus was condemning divorce, not polygamy. That doesn't mean polygamy is okay, of course, I'm sure there are lots of sins that the Bible does not record Jesus discussing. But that's not what he was talking about here.
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