Wealth and polygamy are correlated problems. Polygamy is expensive, therefore wealth is often necessary to support plural wives. We will also see multiple wives as a strategy for acquiring wealth. (See commentary accompanying Jacob 2:32–34.) The increasing wealth of the Nephites causes problems both in the social stratification that has come from pride, but also from some of the other “trappings” of the rich—a household of plural wives.
What is most interesting in Jacob’s discourse against polygamy is his problematic terminology. While he is certainly talking about polygyny (having more than one wife) he implies that it has no justification. Jacob knows the brass plates and therefore would understand that the revered patriarch Abraham had a legal wife and a legal concubine, each of whom bore him a son. He would remember that the equally revered patriarch Jacob had two legal wives and two legal concubines, all of whose sons were the equally regarded tribes of Israel and all of whom had an inheritance in the land of Israel. (Levi’s inheritance was the priesthood and maintenance drawn from all of the tribes, rather than land; but he was still an heir.) Yet Jacob’s language is strongly condemnatory. Why is this?
Jacob introduces the Nephite men’s “grosser crime” as committing “whoredoms,” which they are justifying by an appeal—not to Abraham and Jacob, but to David and Solomon. “Whoredom” obviously could not apply to the relationship of a man and a woman married to each other. Their sexual activity is morally and legally sanctified. So how can Jacob describe as “whoredom” the same relationship in which he calls the participating woman a “wife”? And in what way could David and Solomon be guilty of “whoredom”? They had many wives, but their relationships with these legal partners could not be whoredom. Nor can this condemnation be construed to apply to any non-monogamous relationship since verse 30 indicates that polygyny is sometimes acceptable.
I suggest that, even though David and Solomon had legal plural wives, many of these wives taken to cement political alliances were not, according to Israelite law, eligible marriage partners because they were “strange” (i.e., foreign) women. Russell Fuller, an assistant professor of theological and religious studies at the University of San Diego, describes Israelite marriage patterns:
Endogamy is marriage within one’s group, however that may be defined, and exogamy is marriage outside it; both are attested [to] in the Bible. In the ancestral narratives, endogamy was apparently the dominant practice; for example, in Geneses 24 Abraham sends his servant back to Mesopotamia to find a wife for his son Isaac from among his own kin (see also Gen. 28:1–2, 9). Yet exogamy is also reported, as by Esau (Gen. 26:34) and Joseph (Gen. 41:45). Exogamy was practiced by the kings of Israel and Judah, such as David, few of whose marriages were endogamous (beginning with Michal, Saul’s daughter; see also 2 Sam. 3:2–5, 1 Chr. 3:1–9), Solomon, and Ahab.
The Deuteronomic view of exogamy was hostile, expressly because of a fear of apostasy (Deut. 7:1–6, 1 Kgs. 11:1–8, 16.31–32) a view also found in postexilic literature (Ezra 9–10; Neh. 10:28–30, 13:23–27).
Thus, for Deuteronomists, foreign wives implied apostasy on the part of David and Solomon, because they were outside Yahweh’s community. I believe that the combination of exogamy and apostate influences—a key issue in Deuteronomist reforms—provides the most plausible explanation for Jacob’s discourse. 1 Nephi, Part 1: Context, Chapter 1, “The Historical Setting of 1 Nephi,” discusses Lehi’s relationship to the Deuteronomic reform. While that discussion emphasizes ways in which Lehi’s teachings are best read as resistance to those reforms, it would be a mistake to assume that Lehi was opposed to all of its issues. I believe that Lehi’s resistance centered on the Deuteronomists’ exclusion of Yahweh as Atoning Messiah. But because Jacob directly links the prohibition of polygamy to Lehi (Jacob 2:34), it seems obvious that Lehi agrees with the Deuteronomists in his condemnation of exogamy. Lehi may have added his personal distaste for polygamy, but there is no evidence that Lehi’s condemnation was prompted exclusively, or even primarily, by the number of wives per se. Given Lehi’s background with the Deuteronomic reform and the Lehites’ need to maintain their peoplehood in a world full of competing religions, the Deuteronomic fear of apostasy would be an issue on which Lehi would have agreed with them.