Polygamy!

Thus you should say to them, my little finger is thicker than my father’s loins.

I’m going to assume that means what I think it means.

It does. He’s holding up his pinky and going, this is bigger than my dad’s Johnson. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and we combat that pernicious spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Things are good. Things are good. Yeah, we got— we’ve got a fascinating one. This— this— I’m looking forward to this because the comments are about to get unhinged up in here. Yeah.

If you don’t watch our show on YouTube, which is totally great, most of our— the people who who partake of our wares don’t, you might want to head over there and just see what the people are saying because people might get riled up because we’re going to talk polygamy. And yes, Dan’s a Mormon. So ipso facto problems or something, historically speaking.

And so, yeah, we’re going to talk about that in the first half of the show. And then in the second half of the show, We’re gonna get to one of the great practitioners of polygamy, but probably one of the most famous. Yeah, we’re gonna do some Solomon stuff. We’re not going to talk about his polygamy in the second half. We might talk about it in the first half, probably.

Probably will.

Yeah, we’re gonna talk about the end of his reign, and the beginning of his son and all kinds of other historical stuff surrounding that, or ahistorical, or whatever. So that’ll be— it’ll actually be a lot of fun, and it’s very interesting. But first, let’s dive in with Taking Issue. And the issue we’re taking, as we said, is polygamy, but more specifically, I think, polygyny. Polygyny, yes, because polygamy is, as the Google has told me, is the practice of marriage with either multiple men, multiple husbands, or multiple wives.

Right.

And I don’t think that that first thing is what the Bible has anything to say on.

Not so much. No. So yeah, we’re talking about polygyny, or plural marriage is another, more English term. I don’t know. But is also unclear, but generally is referring to a man taking multiple wives. And this is in the news right now because, well, as of recording, right? Anyway, who knows what the news—.

We may have been scooped by a couple weeks on this one, but that’s okay.

There is a pastor in like Missouri named Rich Tidwell who posted back in June on his blog about basically coming out as polygamist. Yeah, he has 2 wives and 8 children between the 2 of them. Some of them have been adopted. But this, for whatever reason, people have only become aware of it recently, the beginning of November. And it is really—.

Went, oh, wait a minute, wait, what?

And so it has caused a bit of a firestorm on social media as evangelicals are swooping in to condemn this pastor who posted a biblical defense of polygamy on his blog. And I want to talk about the argument that he makes, and then talk about whether or not I think it’s supported by the data. Okay. But yeah, and certainly, you know, hijinks will ensue. There’s plenty of opportunity for all kinds of comedy and other things.

I’m just going to put a marker down now. Me being the ignorant guy on the podcast, I am definitely putting a marker down for the Bible supports polygamy quite a bit.

Quite a bit.

Yes. It may not be across the board. It may not be a total support every which way, but there’s a lot of polygamy in the Bible and sanctioned polygamy at that.

Exactly, yeah. And that’s one of the things that he starts off with. There are 3 passages that he points to from the Hebrew Bible that he suggests indicates God’s sanctioning of polygamy, God’s approval of polygamy. And I think a couple of them at least make good sense. One of them I’m not so convinced by, and that would be the earliest one chronologically, canonically, uh, Genesis 30 , verse 18. And this is where we have, uh, Jacob. And Jacob gets tricked into marrying the wrong woman and has to work for another 7 years. And we’ve got an episode where we talk—.

That was a fun trick. What a great— what a great trick that was. Sorry, you said this was Genesis what?

Uh, chapter 30, verse 18.

And so the woman he, uh, was tricked into marrying, Leah, said, God has given— obviously this is NRSV-UE, but I’m going to talk a little bit about the translation— God has given me my hire because I gave my maid to my husband.

So Leah’s like, “Here, hubby, have this other wife.” And then God rewarded her for that. That is what Leah is saying, that God has rewarded her for making that sacrifice of giving her husband another wife. So Jacob is just racking up wives. Yeah. And the 12 sons of Israel/Jacob come from a variety of different women. So, so that’s a suggestion that at least according to Leah, God is okay, was happy with this, rewarded her for that, right? Another one that I think is a little better argument has a little better case to make is in 2 Samuel. And this is 2 Samuel chapter 12, and verse 7 and 8 are the important ones. And this is where Nathan is chewing—Nathan, excuse me—is chewing David out. So you remember the “you are the man” speech.

And, uh, and here he says, “You are the man.” Oh, hey, there it is. “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul. And then verse 8 says, 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 that had been too little, I would have added as much more.” So here we have God ostensibly through the prophet Nathan declaring that God gave David many, many, many wives, right? Basically said Saul’s wives, they’re now your wives, right?

And among other, you know, various cash and prizes.

Yes, yes, there are other prizes as well. And, and the argument that I’ve seen made is that when it says gave them into your bosom, the idea here is I transitioned them to your protection. In other words, they were living, uh, in Saul’s household and now they’re—you are responsible for them. Which is nonsense because one, it’s like, “I gave you all this cool stuff. Oh, and also this burden.” This responsibility. Yes, which is very clearly not what God is saying here. God is saying, “I gave you all these women to have sex with. You’re welcome.” Yeah, and so very clearly that represents God prophetically as not only endorsing but facilitating plural marriage, including women who had been with another man, which is a little peculiar.

And yeah, there’s another one that I think might even be a little stronger. 2 Chronicles 24 , and we’re looking at verses—and we can start at verse 1, but we’re gonna go to verse 3. Verse 1 says, Joash was 7 years old when he began to reign. He reigned 40 years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Zibiah of Beersheba. Joash did what was right in the sight of the Lord all the days of the priest Jehoiada. And then verse 3 says, Jehoiada got 2 wives for him, and he became the father of sons and daughters. Okay, pretty clearly the author is suggesting that if Jehoiada got two wives for Joash, and Joash did everything that was right in the sight of the Lord all the days of the priest Jehoiada—

That Jehoiada is the priest, is the priest’s representative, or whatever—

That that is sanctioned, endorsed by God. Right.

And that, and that’s some New Testament stuff. Because I think, I think when we talk about this, that’s gonna, it tapers off towards the new, like the support for polygamy, I thought, tapers off.

It does, it does taper off.

But, but so I’m actually surprised to hear a, to hear that. Yeah, that sounds like it’s not, there’s certainly no full-throated condemnation happening of of polygamy?

No, not by any stretch of the imagination. Although there is a passage that some people will point to as an indicator that polygamy was not what God wanted. And this is a weird one. Again, it’s an interpretation that is forced and is nonsensical. But Leviticus 18:18 , from the NRSV-UE: And you shall not take a woman as a rival to her sister, uncovering her nakedness while her sister is still alive. So the idea here is obviously, hey, if you’ve already got a wife, don’t marry her sister also. Okay, that’s, you know, that’s a problem.

Again, that casts a weird light on the Jacob story.

Yeah, um, but, and, and some folks think Leviticus 18 and 20 were actually—these laws are actually following the narrative of Genesis. And so the idea is they’re, they’re making laws basically to address all of the circumstances and situations that are, that are happening in, in Genesis.

That’s not, that’s not for you. That was for him, not you.

But the argument is that this does not mean— this is not only limited to a biological sister, but just don’t take any woman as a— who could become a rival to a first wife, meaning polygamy, no good. And that reading isn’t supported by anything. That’s right. That’s silly.

But probably the most common objection— and I, you know what, I don’t even know if Tidwell actually brings this objection up in his blog post. Seems like he should, but I don’t think he does. I don’t think he engages the argument. Genesis 2:24 , which we’ve talked about many times in the past. Thus a man shall leave his father and his mother’s house and cleave unto his woman, and the two of them shall be one flesh.

Right.

And this is taken as a prescription of how— what God’s pattern, plan, ideal for marriage is. In other words, it’s supposed to be one man, one woman, one vote. But as we’ve discussed before, it’s clearly not a prescription of proper marriage. It’s just a descriptive etiology of pair bonding and independent kinship units. It’s not saying it must be one man and only one woman, because obviously the rest of Genesis is chock-full of Israel’s heroes and even precursors marrying multiple women. And so the authors are very clearly okay with with, uh, polygyny, and so are obviously not condemning that. So there are a bunch of passages in the Hebrew Bible that just outright endorse, uh, if not just condone polygamy.

Yeah, things start to change when we get to Greco-Roman period Judaism, and not because of the Bible, but in spite of the Bible. It’s because of Greek philosophy and Greco-Roman social conventions and mores. Because while the Greeks and the Romans were pretty socially loose, maybe, you know, you wanted to— fidelity within marriage might not have been at the top of their list of priorities, but they did find polygyny to be a practice of weirdos. They didn’t really like it, right? And then there were Greek philosophical treatises that kind of talk about the structure of society and things like that in the household and how it’s all supposed to work. And that endorsed monogamy as well, although slaves were entirely permitted and everything like that.

Totally fair game.

And a side piece here and there is obviously fine.

Right. So this rubbed off on Greco-Roman period Judaism. And so they didn’t come out and say, we no longer accept polygamy. But it was less and less common so that you didn’t really— you didn’t really see it happening because it wouldn’t have been acceptable within this Greco-Roman context. And so by the time of the New Testament, you— polygamy is not really— polygyny, excuse me. We agreed before filming that we were going to use polygyny and not polygamy.

I mean, we could say polygamy. It’s because most times when someone uses the word polygamy, they’re talking about the practice of marrying multiple wives because that’s been the only one, the only thing that’s been practiced for most of what is commonly known in human history. There may be some polyandrous societies, but I’ve never heard of them.

Yes, I think they mostly exist in comic books. Um, but, uh, yeah, I’m— I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but if you do know of some, uh, by all means let us know.

Um, and, and so you— polygyny is not really that big a deal, but you do have some places where it seems to be, uh, poo-pooed, uh, or, or if not condemned. So in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it seems to, uh to not approve of polygyny, right? New Testament has no outright condemnation of polygyny at all. It just seems to have been the norm that you only marry one wife at a time. The one exception would be 1 Timothy 3:2 . Now, 1 Timothy, pastoral epistle, not Paul. Okay, um, this is, uh, this is, uh, pseudo-Pauline. This is after Paul’s death. This is somebody trying to appropriate Paul’s authority by pretending to be Paul. But we have, uh, in this passage, the author is explaining what is required to be an overseer or a bishop and says that he must be a man of one woman, which is probably intended to address fidelity within marriage and then not remarrying after either divorce or the death of a spouse.

Because there was actually— and you know, you see this in Matthew, that if a man divorces his wife for anything other than sexual infidelity, that he commits adultery by marrying another woman and causes her to commit adultery if she marries another man.

You used yours. You used your one.

You ran out. Yeah, but it does seem to suggest that they’re not— they would not approve of a polygamous, polygynous marriage for a leader. And a lot of people try to insist that when it says overseer or bishop, that means pastor, but it doesn’t. Pastor is only mentioned once in all of the New Testament, and that is in Ephesians 4 .

What’s the difference?

Well, they’re different offices within the church, and they’re entirely different words in Greek. But there are folks who try to make the case that there’s a passage in Acts that talks about elders and overseers kind of being the same and talking about how they are to pastor or pastor the flock. So it uses verbs associated with pastoring to refer to them. And so people will say, see, that means a pastor is just the same thing. But the Gospel of John uses the verb pastoring to refer to an apostle as well as Jesus, as well as Jesus’s followers. So like that, the use of that verb by itself doesn’t mean this is a reference to the ecclesiastical office of a pastor, which again is only ever only known from Ephesians. Ephesians, also probably not Paul. That’s not one of the, uh, outright spurious epistles, but one of the disputed epistles.

So anyway, probably a later thing. Like, you know, it sounds to me like that’s, that’s when the organization, the organization chart has started to appear.

Yes, the org chart is showing up in emails and irritating everybody. But yeah, that’s, that’s a more developed hierarchy, a more developed institution where they’ve got these offices. And that’s— and Paul would not have been operating with those, with those institutions anyway. But anyway, 1 Timothy 3:2 , even though it probably is not directly addressing polygyny, it would preclude polygynous marriages, even though it is also just about the standards for someone who wants to hold that position. It’s not necessarily saying any follower of Jesus cannot do this, but it probably would have been a standard that became pretty widespread. So we do have one passage that does seem to prohibit polygyny in the New Testament, and Rich Tidwell is not ignorant of that passage. So, okay, he makes an argument for why 1 Timothy 3:2 does not prohibit polygyny.

He says in 1 Timothy 3:2 , Paul utilizes the Greek word mia, which we translated as one in English, and he talks a little bit about this in another passage. Although mia may translate as an indefinite one or a, as in the indefinite article, in the context of marriage in 1 Timothy 3:2 , mia means ordinal first. If Paul intended to communicate a man must have numeral one wife to be in ministry, he would have employed the word heis, as he did in 1 Timothy 5:9 , the same epistle, because heis explicitly means numeral 1. Mia must be used in 1 Timothy 3:2 as a grammatical rule. Uh, read my response titled ‘The Mia and Heis Saga.’ Therefore, 1 Timothy 3:2 ought to be translated ’the husband of his first wife,’ as Paul, like Jesus, is preventing hypergamy and divorce. In other words, he still has to be married to his first wife.

Should I make a guess as to your response to this?

Let’s see.

Because I don’t know anything about the grammar or words of Greek, but I’m going to guess that you’re going to object to his explanation of how these words are used.

Yes, it’s nonsensical. He says a man who divorces his first wife to marry another, as Jesus in Matthew 19:9 , also see also Malachi 2:15-16 , is not fit for eldership in the church. Paul is not addressing polygyny nor disqualifying the patriarchs from ministry. He is prohibiting hypergamy and serial monogamy among the elders of the church. And then he goes on to say something interesting. Moreover, do we truly believe that if Abraham, Jacob, or David resurrected—a possibility according to Matthew 27:52-53 , they would not be permitted to hold office or preach in the church. These polygamous men wrote or are featured in many of our holy scriptures, but we wouldn’t give them a microphone today? What utter nonsense. I believe the answer to these questions lies in Romans 11:29 . These polygamous men of the Bible were called by God and retained their offices despite their having several wives.

And I saw somebody who responded to that particular argument by barking that, yes, absolutely, they would be prohibited from being pastors. And they went on to say even God prohibited David from building the temple because he was a man of war, and so God can withhold certain offices and responsibilities from people.

Well, if it can be used that way, then there’s some legitimacy maybe to his argument.

Well, there’s the— yeah, it’s basically that you can’t prove it’s false, right? Argument. It’s possible. We’re ginning up that tiny little sliver of not impossible, right? But yeah, there are no scholars who read it that way.

But it does seem like he has a motivation Specific motivation.

A little bit, a little bit of a motivation.

I feel like it’s— I feel like the most interesting part of this whole thing is that the, you know, if you want to use the Bible to justify polygamy, polygyny, whatever, that seems easy. That’s like, he’s not wrong.

Yeah, not as easy as defending slavery, but certainly easier than defending same-sex intercourse or something. Like that. Yeah, like, there’s, there is ample, ample evidence that, that it was considered okay by God. And this is another thing that he talks about. According to the Bible, God does not change.

Right?

So God is okay with polygamy in the Hebrew Bible. God is okay with polygamy in the New Testament. And this is something that, that is a bit of a problem for the folks who want to understand the Bible to be condemning polygamy. Why would God allow it in one part of the Bible and then prohibit it in another? If God does allow it in the most important figures in the Bible, condone and even endorse it. Yeah.

And so it does raise the question of, you know, we have other— well, not we as in me, but a lot of these folks assert certain dogmas about God’s unchanging nature and about the universality of the moral principles on which the gospel is founded.

How do you get around that? And that is why I think you have a lot of folks who try to argue that, that God actually prohibited or didn’t like polygyny, just tolerated it. Like, I’m not sure about this, um, but I, I’ll, you know, I’ll see where this is going. And, and so people will bring up the argument that throughout the Hebrew Bible, uh, polygynous marriages are characterized by conflict and problems. It’s like every relationship in the Hebrew Bible is characterized by tension and conflict.

Every relationship in humanity is characterized by— I don’t know if you’ve had a spouse or a relationship, but you’re going to have conflict. That’s a guarantee.

And they’re like, bad things always happen. It’s like, Adam and Eve are a monogamous marriage. The worst thing happened, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, you’ve got all kinds of circumstances. Like, everybody who has a brother in the Hebrew Bible runs into all kinds of problems, right? It’s like, does that mean that having a brother is frowned upon? God’s like, “Mm, I don’t know about this one.

Let’s get him. " Yeah, you know, I think it’s so interesting that the Bible is so obviously explicit about this and so overwhelmingly, so loaded with it, as you know, example after example. And, you know, I suppose we should bring up Solomon, who like is the— he’s putting up Wilt Chamberlain numbers.

And that works on two different levels.

Well, we might get to the rest of that. But, but yeah, I mean, he’s— what does he have, 700 wives and 300 concubines or something like, according to the thing? So like, and, you know, there’s no part of that that’s condemned. There are things that like the Bible’s like, oh, Solomon wasn’t good about this or whatever, but it’s not that. Well, that’s except that they’re foreign wives.

Yes, they’re foreign wives and they influence him towards— and so, and, you know, people will bring that up as well. Well, look what happened to Solomon. With all them foreign wives. It’s like, well, he still had more than one local wife, and that didn’t cause any problems. God wasn’t like, I’m not too hot on that other thing either.

And his dad was like, his dad was loaded up too. Yeah. David had multiple wives as well.

So I don’t know, it’s just the thing that’s weird to me is that you can look at this book, you can read all of those stories of all of these men, who have all of those wives. And then, because your culture obviously is not okay with that— you know, my parents were both LDS historians. They were both historians of Mormonism. And they— so I’m fairly familiar with Mormon history. And of course, famously, infamously, the Mormons— the early Mormons and then later fundamentalist break-off offshoots of Mormonism practiced polygyny.

And the way that the world—.

I live in a city where one of them ran for mayor.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I can see the house, their compounds, from my front yard.

Yeah. Okay, well, there you go. So it’s, it’s still around, but the way historically that American culture came crashing down on these people for this thing. And on one hand, I get it in the sense that I think that the polygyny of Mormonism creates a wild power imbalance. It is something that has entered into, often unwillingly by the women. Yeah. And, and it is often forced upon women. And it is like the way it is practiced is not consensual and therefore not— there’s no way to excuse it. But how did these— did this country come down so incredibly hard? Like, literally, people were saying the dual barbarism. I don’t remember the exact quote, but they were equating slavery and polygamy as being the two barbaric practices of the United States of America.

Yeah. Reynolds versus the United States from 1879.

Oh, okay. There was the—.

Yeah. And a lot of people have been like this. They didn’t really have that good of an argument because it was mainly just like, you know, this is characteristic of barbaric people. Right. And I think also said it always leads to abuse. Or, or something like that, right?

Um, which I, I think it’s plain to see if you watch any reality TV, you know that it doesn’t necessarily lead to abuse. I never actually watched a single episode of Sister Wives, but it seems like he probably wasn’t abusive. I don’t know, would they— he wouldn’t get to keep his, his reality show if he was abusive.

I, I didn’t watch any of it either. I don’t— I don’t know.

But yeah, I couldn’t get past his hairstyle, to be perfectly honest. And I’m not one to talk. I know that.

I just think I wasn’t going to say anything.

I just think that it’s really weird that Bible-believing people, people purporting to be Bible believers, are so vehement against this. Like, I get why you’re vehement against slavery. That makes sense to me. And I get why you’d be vehement against a practice that was entered into against a woman’s will. That I understand as well.

But presuming that adults enter into an arrangement of their own free will and with their consent, full consent and approval, I don’t know how biblically minded people condemn that. I don’t get it.

Well, we’ve already seen that folks who would identify as biblically minded people have a way of massaging what the Bible is minding them about. But it’s interesting within Judaism, because I’ve mentioned before, one of the reasons that Christianity and Judaism deviated so significantly from each other is because Christianity really leaned into Greek philosophy and the Greco-Roman world, whereas Judaism tried to distinguish itself from it and rejected Greek philosophy. And to some degree, it was still quite influential. But, you know, they were like, Septuagint, not for us. We’re going back to the Hebrew. We’re going back to halachic legislation, all this stuff. And so for centuries after the split from Christianity, while Christianity is rejecting polygamy, Judaism was kind of like, we’re a little uncomfortable with this.

We can’t really find a reason to object in the Hebrew Bible, but we just don’t like it. So like, you have Josephus referring to it as an ancestral custom in one of his texts. But it’s like around 1000 CE when Greek philosophy and just philosophy in general becomes a lot more influential within Judaism, that you finally have some Jewish philosophers who are like, yeah, no polygamy, we’re just outlawing it.

It’s just not good.

So they had a longer time coming down as firmly as they ultimately did against polygamy. But yeah, it does seem like something that’s, you know, people appeal to all the time. People appeal to the Hebrew Bible and God’s design for marriage as what should be governing how marriage works. And except when it comes to that part, when they’re like, and then they’ll go to Genesis 2:24 .

And this should in no way, shape, or form whatsoever be misconstrued as me defending polygamy because I like it. I have already been accused of that countless times just because I posted a video a few days ago about this.

So of the two of us, I’m the one who’s more likely to come to the defense of— yes, of, uh, of a non-traditional, uh, uh, marriage slash love practices. Yeah, I suppose. I don’t, I don’t support polygyny, religiously mandated polygyny. I certainly don’t support that.

Certainly not. Yeah. And, and, and, and I think that’s one of the, the big issues is, is if it is something that is religiously sanctioned, then I, I think it does pressure folks, particularly young folks growing up in that kind of society, that conditions them to think this is my role. This is what I have to do. I mean, you already have women on Twitter saying, “We need to repeal the 19th Amendment!” Only because the men around them in their lives, kind of in control of their worldview, are conditioning them and convincing them that they need to defend that particular limit to their agency. And I think the last thing we need is a bunch of folks raising up young girls to believe that their only goal in life ought to be becoming a polygamist wife of another Tidwell or whoever.

Yeah. And too often in those situations, as we see with fundamentalist Mormons currently and historical Mormons back in the 1800s and early 1900s, when it— when it’s— when it’s culturally— especially when it’s shrouded in cultural shame and becomes this insular thing, really bad practices crop up. So like, you know, 14-year-old women being forcibly married off to 50-something-year-old men, that sort of thing.

It’s because God said so.

Yeah, it’s Epstein-level not okay. So, so yes.

And as of recording, there’s been a bunch of emails that have dropped and, you know, I’m sure that the dust will have settled to some degree unless more emails are dropping.

Yeah, yeah. It’s raining Epstein letters at this point. Okay, well, let’s erase our brains from that for a little bit and let’s actually move on to our chapter and verse. And the chapter, I guess, is— I guess what we’re going to do is we’re going to get to 1 Kings chapter 11.

And this is the thing. It starts out with talking about the marriages of Solomon, and the fact that he loved many women, many foreign women. That was the problem. It wasn’t the many women. It was the fact that they were Moabite and Ammonite and Edomite and Sidonian and Hittite women.

And not only was he in love with these women, but he was building shrines to their gods on the hills. So that’s sort of the— yeah, 700 princesses and 300 concubines. Princesses? Okay. I have seen wives in translations.

What does it say? It says nashim. Which would mean women or wives in Hebrew. Why does it say princesses?

Oh, NRSVUE. Are you getting a sassy—

Oh, sarot. No, no, it says wives, and then it says sarot, which would be the feminine plural of sar, which would be a prince or a nobleman. So yeah, princesses and 300 concubines.

So wait, it says among his wives were 700 princesses. The non-princesses, probably there’s a couple hundred more of those. Who knows? Again, it’s these— it’s those Chamberlain numbers.

Yeah. And, um, yeah, who knows how many trombones and, uh, and the camels. Yes, Genie, love the camels. Um, I see, I see how I was able to bring in not just The Music Man but also Aladdin.

Yeah, man, you, you, you went all over the map with that. You, you encircled the globe twice, uh, on that one.

But it says, when Solomon was old, his wives turned away his heart after other gods. And his heart was not true to the Lord his God, as was the heart of his father David. Kind of, yeah, kind of. David kind of got the raw end of the—

David fudged the rules a little bit here and there. But sure.

So, and, but I mean, I think the main thing is, and this is something that we’ve talked about, the main— one of the things that we need to remember here is that and one of the things that was never talked about in my religious upbringing was the fact that these other gods that Solomon was kind of falling prey to were real gods.

They believed them to be, yes.

They believed them to be real gods. So this is like really treading on Adonai’s turf here.

Yeah, yeah. And you have 1 Kings 11 is interesting for so many reasons. Verse 5 refers to Solomon following Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Sidonians, and Milcom, the abomination of the Ammonites.

Right.

So Milcom was a patron deity of the Ammonites. But then you— excuse me— you go down to verse 7 and it says, then Solomon built a high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab. We’ve talked about Chemosh before. And for Molech, the abomination of the Ammonites. So we’ve just seen it was Milcom who’s the abomination of the Ammonites, and now we have—

Oh yeah, that’s right—

Molech, the abomination of the Ammonites. This is a scribal corruption. Okay, there has been a change where Milcom and Molech, the only difference in written Hebrew anciently is one letter, the mem on the end of the word, the name. And so obviously the mem has just fallen out from, excuse me, from the word Milcom. And so a lot of people use this to argue that Molech was recognized as a deity, and Molech was not a deity. Molech was just a type of sacrifice. And then later Greek translators and later folks confused it for the name of a deity that never existed.

Oh, okay. So we’re saying that Milcom is the actual deity and Molech was was an incorrect—

Corruption. Yeah.

Textual oopsie.

I do think that Milcom is— would be a good name for a software company. Yeah, it just sounds right. I don’t know. Milcom and Molech would be a good— would be an interesting name for a, like, a buddy comedy. Oh, a buddy comedy. I love it. The two abominations of the Ammonites. I like it.

Yeah. All right.

So, so, okay, so let’s— yeah, let’s go on with the story here.

I’m going to get down to verse 23.

Okay, sounds good.

We have some adversaries raised against Solomon. Rezin son of Eliada, who had fled from his master King Hadadezer of Zobah. Um, whenever—

I just wanted to say that.

Whenever on, uh, like The Simpsons, they always have Ned Flanders saying some kind of nonsensical name from from, from the Bible. This is, this is one that I would have— if I didn’t know this passage, I would have been like, they made that up. That’s not in the Bible.

King Hadadezer of Zobah. Hadadezer.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It’s just Hadadezer. Hadad was the name of a deity. Ezer just means help of. So. So help of Hadad. Hadad’s helper.

And while we’re talking about names, Because it’s going to come up. What is the suffix “boam” mean? Because we’re going to get a Jeroboam and a— what’s the son’s name?

Jeroboam and Rehoboam.

Right.

Yes. So the “am” on the end is not clear. It could mean Like, it could mean people. Am means people. It could mean, uh, uncle. Like, there’s a form of this word that has reference to a male ancestor. Could mean an uncle god. It could be a deformation of Jerubbaal. Oh, so Jeroboam, Jerubbaal, they’re spelled the same except for the mem on the end instead of a lamed. So, um, at least when it comes to, uh, Jeroboam, it’s not clear what exactly is, uh, is going on with the, with the -am on the end of the name. Now, when it comes to Rehoboam, um, this is more likely to be like the, the, um, rachav means to be wide.

And this is a word that can mean street in Hebrew. So it might be this uncle god has made wide, or maybe it’s the people have become extensive, they’ve spread out.

Okay. So uncle god on the street is what I’m going with.

Uncle god on the street. Yeah.

All right. Sorry, I took us off down a rabbit trail.

No worries. Um, but we have Jeroboam, and, and this is a— this is an interesting story. Uh, oh, so, so anyway, a lot of people made trouble in Solomon’s neighborhood. They were up to no good. And then Jeroboam, uh, shows up, and he’s, he’s like a, a day laborer, and he’s coming down to Jerusalem, and he’s, he’s helping up with— helping out with stuff. And verse 28 says, when Solomon saw that the young man was industrious, he gave him charge over all the forced labor of the house of Joseph.

And a prophet, Ahijah the Shilonite, found him on the road, and he had a new garment on, and he gives it to Jeroboam, but tears it into 12 pieces, which is kind of like, cool, thanks, what?

Thanks for the shirt. I guess it’s rags now.

Yeah, he says, “Take for yourself 10 pieces, for thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, see, I am about to tear the kingdom from the hand of Solomon and will give you 10 tribes. One tribe will remain his for the sake of my servant David and for the sake of Jerusalem, the city that I’ve chosen out of all the tribes of Israel. This is because he has forsaken me, worshiped Astarte, the goddess of the Sidonians,” and so on and so forth. Yeah. So it’s just symbolic, you know, the prophet’s always doing weird symbolic stuff. Look at this jar, I’m gonna break this jar. Look, I’m nude. Look, I’m tearing your coat into 12 pieces. So they’re—

Can you just put— can you put your clothes back on, please? No? Oh, you’re tearing it up. Great.

Okay. So basically, the 10 pieces represent the 10 tribes of Israel, which was the northern kingdom.

So basically, Jeroboam— so what he’s saying is Jeroboam is going to get to be king, even though he’s just this day laborer guy.

Yeah, the prophet is like, hey, guess what? You’re going to take over 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel. And and Jeroboam is represented as, as rather humble. But Solomon finds out about this. And Solomon—

That’s— you never want that. That’s never any good.

Solomon not happy. But so he tries to kill Jeroboam. Jeroboam promptly flees to Egypt. To King Shishak of Egypt, and he remains in Egypt until Solomon dies. Yeah. And then Solomon’s dead, reigned in Jerusalem 40 years, slept with his ancestors, was buried in the city of his father David, and his son Rehoboam succeeded him. Now, Rehoboam— and here’s the thing, there was never a single united kingdom. Scholars are pretty sure that Judah in the south and Israel in the north were originally separate kingdoms. And there, there was a— there would have been a time maybe where, uh, where Israel might have subjugated the southern kingdom, or maybe the southern kingdom subjugated the northern kingdom, which is how it’s represented in this text, which is, by the way, being written from the perspective of somebody who lived in the southern kingdom. Um, and so Rehoboam goes up to Shechem which is the capital of the Northern Kingdom, for all Israel had come to Shechem to make him king.

And then Jeroboam heard about it, and he comes back from Egypt, and— or no, he stays in Egypt, and they call him, and all the— they sent and called him, and Jeroboam and all the assembly of Israel came and said to Rehoboam, your father made our yoke heavy. So, you know, Jeroboam is a forced laborer. “Now therefore lighten the hard service of your father and his heavy yoke that he placed on us, and we will serve you.” Basically saying, “Look, the northern kingdom, your dad was mean to us. If you will be nicer to us, we will happily be part of your kingdom.” Right.

Chill out a little bit. Let’s be kind, rewind, and maybe we can all get along.

And King Rehoboam took counsel with the older men, who had attended his father Solomon while he was still alive, saying, how do you advise me to answer the people? So he’s, he’s basically going to the elders who were his dad’s advisers, and they said, if you will be a servant to this people and serve them and speak good words to them when you answer them, then they will be your servants forever. Then he went to the cool kids, the younger crowd, right, and, uh, who grew up with him. So his Stephen Millers of the world, his friends, and he says, what do you advise? And they said, thus you should say to this people who spoke to you, your father made our yoke heavy, but you must lighten it for us. Thus you should say to them, my little finger is thicker than my father’s loins.

I’m going to assume that means what I think it means.

It does. He’s holding up his pinky and going, You know, this is bigger than my dad’s Johnson.

Meaning, I suppose, that like my dad was a wimp. Yeah. And because having a big schlong is—it makes you stronger as a human, as a person, or something. Makes you more powerful as a man.

Yeah. The one with the bigger Schnitzengruben is the manly man. So he says, “My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions.” So he liked the sound of that more than the elders’ recommendation. He’s like, “I want to make it worse for these people rather than better.”

Yeah, because I got to say, scorpions, I’d probably take it pretty cool. Be pretty cool over a whip. Whips seem like they do like way more damage.

Because, yeah, he wants to flex on them.

And, you know, that’s the tendency.

Show off the girth of his little pinky.

Yeah. See that ring? That’s like a 12. That’s a 13. So Jeroboam and all the people came to Rehoboam the third day, as the king had said, “Come to me again the third day.” The king answered the people harshly. He disregarded the advice that the older men had given him and spoke to them according to the advice of the young men: “My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions.” And basically they tried to kill him.

Yeah, it does seem like when he came face to face with the people, he skipped the little finger bit. So, you know, it sounds like he improvised a little bit in the moment. Yeah, so he wimped out on that one.

He was like, “I don’t want to try that one out with this crowd.” So, but he goes back to Jerusalem. He sends Adoram, who is the taskmaster over the forced labor, and he sent him up to Israel to basically say, “All right, come on, let’s go.” And they stoned him to death. And so, yeah, King Rehoboam then hurriedly mounted his chariot to flee to Jerusalem. So Israel has been in rebellion against the House of David to this day. So it’s the explanation for how the two kingdoms that were always separate kingdoms came to be separate. So it’s kind of an Aesop’s fable for a people who kind of came up with this origin story that we were once a united kingdom and we got separated. And that is probably fiction. And it’s being told from a southern perspective because after the destruction of the northern kingdom, the southern kingdom kind of appropriated all their traditions and was like, “We’re Israel now, right?”

And, and we’re—

And we’ve got the lineage of David.

Yeah. And the idea is, oh, we were always Israel. The northern kingdom just rebelled against us. And that’s why. That’s why they got destroyed in 722 BCE.

Is there any archaeological evidence that Rehoboam and Solomon—was Solomon a real person?

The scholars are a bit divided on that. I think there are those who would argue that David was probably a real leader of a dynasty. We do have the Tel Dan inscription.

I remember you talking about that.

Or the Tel Dan Stele. No relation to Steely Dan, but that, that talks about how Hazael the Aramean killed somebody who would have been part of the House of David. So that would have been a dynasty, not a kingdom, just a dynasty that occupied Jerusalem. And so it’s certainly plausible that there was a historical Solomon. Relationship to David, unclear, because they, you know, it tries to make David out to be Saul’s, you know, right-hand man initially. Right. And Saul then is trying to kill David. And David is a, you know, a mercenary for the, for the Phoenicians. Not Phoenicians. Oh, my gosh. Did I say Phoenicians? I’m having the worst time with names. Oh my gosh, who are the Sea Peoples?

Oh gosh, I can’t help you. Yeah, I mean, we’ve told that story. Go back, go back and look in our back catalog. You’ll get that.

Yeah, you’ll get that story. So anyway, a lot of these stories seem to be coming from centuries later where people are just kind of dressing it up to serve their memory of this golden age. And so there’s a lot of propaganda, a lot of fiction. So it’s certainly possible. Rehoboam, Jeroboam, more likely probably, I think, than Solomon to be historical.

Oh, really? Okay.

Yeah, yeah, I think so. But it’s really about 100 years after that that we get into a period where we can begin to archaeologically confirm these kings. So the Omride dynasty is where things really take off. And some scholars—and that was probably the most successful ruling dynasty in Israel.

Okay, interesting. Well, there you go. Uh, Shechem if you got them. And, uh, we’ll, we’ll, uh, close it out there. If you would like to help us make this show go, please consider becoming one of our patrons over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. You can just search it if you want to. Uh, you know, be a— become a monthly subscriber and you could get access to an early and ad-free version of every show, as well as access to our after party, which is a weekly— that we just do it every week. It’s bonus material. It’s, it’s Dan and Dan at their best. A lot of the guests come in and say cool stuff. So, uh, you, you don’t want to miss out on that. You, you want to part of it. So head on over there to Patreon and, uh, and become a patron if you can. Uh, if otherwise, you can always leave us 5 stars anywhere that 5 stars are available to you, and you can, you know, share us with your friends.

That’s always very helpful, and, uh, and we really appreciate it. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show, and thanks to you for tuning in. We’ll We’ll see you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

Polygamy!

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Scripture Index

Terminology