I First heard of plural marriage when...

[starlit]

I'm curious if others could share when they first heard of biblical plural marriage? How did you find out about it? What was your initial reaction? How long have you been studying the topic and supporting it?

In another thread i shared my journey of reading about it in a book at the library. I had never heard of it before. It was definitely a life changing moment. Im curious how others found out about it.

 

[UntoldGlory]

A few years back I'd had a dream about poly and within a couple days (honestly can't remember which came first) I also saw an interview with 3 wives (in retrospect, I think it was the Dargers) on like, Oprah or something. We talked about it a bit at the time, but didn't really start researching it or anything because we kind of assumed that it was outlawed somewhere in the Bible, or was at least illegal to practice here. It was more recently (maybe last August or Sept?) that I saw an ad for Sister Wives, and we started watching that on Netflix, pausing the show and talking about it. That started actual study and prayer and deep talking on the subject.

 

[starlit]

What i find really interesting about my journey on this topic is that when i first read that book about polygamy that i never once questioned it. I also knew right away that this is what I had been prepared for by Heavenly Father. Lol, then when i started sharing my feelings with my family they didnt really object either. It was a pretty unique moment in my life. Overall, i think my family was more concerned about me moving far away then who i married. At least i know for sure i wont be disowned by my family if i become a plural wife. I'm thankful for that. I know some families and women are disowned by their families or rejected when they do marry. The more i study about this topic the more i learn too. Im grateful i'm able to have others to share my feelings with and learn from in an encouraging environment.

 

[Wesley]

I learned about poly when I was thirteen. I was a bit of a slut as a teenager so feel free to laugh at my indiscretions. Just please don't judge me. We've all done things that we regret.

My discovery of polygamy came in two stages. In the first stage I discovered polyamory. Then I came to Christ in the second stage and struggled with the fact that God wasn't leading me away from poly but was instead leading me into what I perceived at the time as a male -chauvinist version of it.

Stage one...
The first relationship in which I was sexually active started around Christmas of 1978. I had just turned thirteen in November of that year. We met in school.

Along about April of that year she came to me in tears and told me that she didn't want to break up with me but she also had feelings for another young man, one of my friends at that time. I discovered that I really didn't have a problem with it. I gave her the go ahead to start a relationship with him as well. The three of us hung out together for about a month. Whichever male wasn't "busy" with her covered for the other two. Sometimes he and I would play video games together on my Atari.

After about a month one of our friends got wise to what we were doing and told us about a polyamory group that met there where we were in Louisville, KY. The next meeting, a kid friendly picnic, was scheduled to take place in a public park that June. The three of us went to the meeting and met adult poly families. We made friends with some of the kids of the poly families that were about our age.

That gave us a place where we could all three hang out together rather than having to pair off or one cover for the other two. We all told our parents that we were hanging out at a friend's house, which was true. The teenage children of the poly families were our friends. They didn't want us getting "busy" there at their houses but we could hang out and talk with no problems. That relationship lasted all Summer of 1979.

I stayed in contact with the polyamory community and spent the rest of my teenage years in one poly relationship after another.

Stage two...
As a nineteen year old sailor I found myself on an aircraft carrier with a fire in one of the main engine rooms. I won't bore you with the details but the fire was so bad that we were notified that the captain had ordered the escorts to come in close in case we had to abandon. We were North of the Arctic Circle and the water was so cold that if we went into it our life expectancy was about a minute, not long enough to actually be picked up.

I don't mind telling you that I was scared. So were about 5500 other men on that ship that day. One of the officers told me "If you're not scared then you're not sane. Courage isn't the absence of fear. Courage is in what you do about the fear. If you face it and do what's right instead of running from it then that's courage."

We finally got the fire put out and we got a unit citation for fighting our ship and staying on station until relieved in spite of adverse conditions. That prompted me to start thinking about where I was going when I die however. Death was no longer an ephemeral concept that was sixty or eighty years in the future. I now understood that I might not survive tonight.

I investigated various religions. I found that the Bible is the only one whose instructions to the faithful don't contradict themselves. The fact that more than fifty people could write more than sixty books on morality over the course of fifteen hundred years without contradicting each other in any way on a touchy subject like morality seemed like a blessed miracle in and of itself.

So at that point I committed myself to Christ.

My life changed gradually. It wasn't like a light switch coming on. It was more like a long climb up a hill with each step being a struggle but worth it in the long run because the more changes I made the better I liked myself as a person. Thankfully Christ was patient with me while I struggled to get closer and closer to Him.

At first I assumed that God would lead me away from the sexual immorality of my teenage years. He did but not in the direction that I expected. I had seen the hypocrisies of the various churches my mother attended when I was a kid and I knew that I wanted my faith to be real not something made up by a church. When I discovered that the New Testament doesn't prohibit polygyny and a man can actually be required to accept more than one wife if turning a woman away would harm a sister-in-Christ I was dumbfounded. I argued with God, "Wait a minute, You're supposed to be leading me away from this stuff not into a chauvinistic form of it."

It took me months to get used to the idea. I just couldn't wrap my brain around the idea of a loving patriarch. I'm an adult victim of child abuse so I never had an example of such a person in my life. Christ taught me what I needed to know. The problem was that I was hard headed and didn't listen part of the time and the rest of the time I was having trouble believing. How could I be worth having two (or more) women love me til-death-do-us-part? That just didn't make sense to me.

Now I'm forty-nine years old and I still struggle with self-worth issues sometimes. According the therapists that I've been to I probably will for the rest of my life. Christ is still working to convince me that He believes I'm worth dying for and I'm still working to believe Him. It's a struggle however. It's still hard for me to believe that I could be worth two women's time sometimes.

 

[Wesley]

Wow! Was my comment so offensive that it scared everyone away?

 

[UntoldGlory]

Heh, not offensive. Deep and personal perhaps, but not offensive. Maybe no one wants to follow that up with "I saw TLCs Sister Wives and was curious", lol.

 

[NetWatchR]

Not offensive at all. Powerful, inspiring, thought provoking, maybe even "shockingly transparent", but not offensive. Although it's not too often you hear a man admit that he was a slut. Very honest. I like that.

No, you asked a question that most people would want to craft their response carefully. Also, some, like me, may use their phone and the thought of tapping out a lengthy response is a big boat load of no thank you.

I plan to tell my tale, but my poor nose picker is already "tapped out".

Ciao

 

[NetWatchR]

Maybe no one wants to follow that up with "I saw TLCs Sister Wives and was curious", lol.

Like the accountant that has to tell his firefighter and police buddies how stressful his day at work was.

 

[Slumberfreeze]

I had always known that plural marriage existed in the bible, at least in the OT. I was in my teens (I guess? Maybe college. Time is weird for me) when I read in 1 COR 7:2 that each man should have his own woman, and each woman her own man. In order to reconcile the apparent contradiction, I decided that this was a refinement of morality. Now that we have entered the Church age and have access to the Holy Spirit, multiple wives were no longer acceptable. Or something. At any rate, whenever the subject came up, which was rarely- I taught that the New Covenant commanded monogamy based on Corinthians. Using English only the logic is inescapable, so no one ever challenged me on it.

Since that time I had begun some rudimentary studies in learning biblical Greek, and had been shown by the Holy Spirit some places where the English translations, while not wrong, were misleading due to inconsistency and other normal translation difficulties, (such as words that we have no precise word for). I have long given up my studies because I am too lazy to finish anything, but I had learned the value of cross referencing English texts with Greek study aids.

And so it was about a year ago? Maybe? That I found myself sort of idly poking around in the Greek and poked at 1 Cor 7, and saw that the words 'his own' and 'her own' were not variants of the same word, but different words entirely. I made a friend of mine assist me in a study where we tracked down every usage of autos and idios in the NT (I have a hard time doing exhaustive studies on my own.. tendency to quit. Like I said, I'm lazy). Our findings were that in cases where the words were in reference to ownership of other PEOPLE autos implied the ability to have more than one, but idios implied only having one proper. (among other things, summarizing effectively would require me finding the notes. Can't be arsed.) At any rate in Jude both words are again used in the same verse, with just that implication. bla bla blah anyways the verse that I had used to assert monogamy in fact re-asserts the legitimacy of polygamy. (polygany..whatevs)

At that point I asked a few of the brethren to do their own study and see if I'm right. One of them did and came to the same conclusion. A couple did not, but declared me incompetent nonetheless. And then of course I have a couple of friends that more or less take my word for just about anything, so they balance out.

My reaction was excitement and relief. Excitement because I always enjoy discovering a biblical truth without having to have it spoon fed to me. Relief because scripture had proved itself seamless. I didn't have to look for the reason for a shift in marital attitudes from God's perspective, I just had to recognize that God hadn't actually changed anything in that respect, and the only difficulties we have are the ones we've always had: Spiritual blindness, enemy spirits, and ridiculous barbarian chatter for a language.

 

[starlit]

..... I didn't have to look for the reason for a shift in marital attitudes from God's perspective, I just had to recognize that God hadn't actually changed anything in that respect, and the only difficulties we have are the ones we've always had: Spiritual blindness, enemy spirits, and ridiculous barbarian chatter for a language.

Slumberfreeze you made me laugh. Yes i have a tendency to be lazy at times too, mixed with sporadic periods of pure energy. The last paragraph there i quoted reminded me of something i had heard...God never changes...He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. All too often we try to put our definition or opinions on what should or shouldn't be...when in reality it's already spelled out for us. It's always interesting to me when i read scripture and then go back later and pick up something i hadn't seen before or understood. Everything is given to us in good time.

 

[starlit]

Wow! Was my comment so offensive that it scared everyone away?

No not offensive Wesley...if you will note my comment to Slumberfreeze...i was just a little too lazy to comment on each one and read it through. I will definitely say the old saying that women mature faster than men was NOT the case with me. I'm just now at the age of 39 feeling i'm old enough to raise children. Must explain why i look so young! Or it's genetic, because my parents didn't have me until their late 30's.

 

[FollowingHim2]

When Samuel and I were dating he would joke that he was going to have five wives.
2 to work outside the home and bring in income.
1 to cook.
1 to clean.
1 as a personal assistant.
Of course I found this idea hillarious and played into it too, telling him that that was fine as long as I was the personal assistant!
When we'd been married about a year I told him about something I'd seen on television about Warren Jeffs. I said he was claiming to be a Christian but was practicing polygamy so clearly wasn't.
Which is when Samuel threw the delightful bombshell that polygany wasn't banned in the bible.
Cue me freaking out.
I asked him if he'd ever want another wife and he said that he thought of it as more of a thing they did in third world countries as a sort of social welfare, and he didn't think it was appropriate for the first world. However if we were missionaries in Africa he would seriously consider it.
At that moment I resolved to make sure we never became missionaries in Africa!
Years later Samuel was doing a sermon at church about getting people to dig into the bible. He chose three things, circumscision, what marriage really is (does it require a licence etc), and polygany.
It was as he was researching this that he found this website. We were both shocked that people were actually practicing it and Samuel read heaps on here.
After the sermon though he couldn't get the thought out of his head about having another wife. I knew the bible said it was ok, but I just couldn't possibly see how any woman could do it now days. I was quite afraid at the time. I also had a gut feeling that God was wanting us to do this but I couldn't bring myself to look into it further.
I had quite a few young children and a few weeks later I was looking for websites and groups with people with similar values and family sizes. Samuel suggested BF to me since he figured if people had multiple wives then surely they had fairly large families too!
I spent three days reading everything. I did the bare minimum with the children and Samuel did everything else, letting me just get my head around the idea and giving me space.
At the end of that three days I was positive that God wanted this for us and that I could do it.
It's been three years since then. I now have even more young children lol! I thought at that time that I was ready and I would do anything that God told me to and we would be fine. I was wrong. I wasn't ready then. I know this because I've worked on some things since then that would've been problems.
I don't think I'm ready now either. I've still got stuff I'm working out, and God knows that. I want a SW but I need to improve myself so I can be the best SW I can, and the best wife I can be to Samuel.

 

[FollowingHim2]

I will definitely say the old saying that women mature faster than men was NOT the case with me. I'm just now at the age of 39 feeling i'm old enough to raise children. Must explain why i look so young! Or it's genetic, because my parents didn't have me until their late 30's.

I read something the other day saying that if you can have children naturally in your late thirties then you're more likely to live much longer. It's got something to do with aging slower. Women who had children after the age of 33 generally lived until about 95 or so.

 

[GloryGirl]

[/quote]
I read something the other day saying that if you can have children naturally in your late thirties then you're more likely to live much longer. It's got something to do with aging slower. Women who had children after the age of 33 generally lived until about 95 or so.[/quote]

This is great to know since I barely escaped being considered of "advanced maternal age" with my last one.

 

[Wesley]

Maybe no one wants to follow that up with "I saw TLCs Sister Wives and was curious", lol.

Like the accountant that has to tell his firefighter and police buddies how stressful his day at work was.

BF needs a 'like' button. I got a good chuckle out of this considering that one of my primary jobs in the Navy was firefighter. Thanks.

 

[mystic]

Re: that word 'polygyny'

polygany..whatevs

Yeah, the word gets me, too. Seems like too many Ys in "polygyny". But it has three building blocks, each of which adds a Y, so in the end it makes sense:

The poly means "many", the gyn means "female" (from the Greek gune, same root as in gynecological), and the added final Y indicates that this "many women" thing is a state, condition, or quality. (As contrasted with, say, polygynitis, an inflammation of the many women.)

The g is soft, so the whole thing rhymes with "religion-y" or "religioney" — or it would if there were such a word — as in, "Him? He's not just religious, he's downright religion-y." Polygyny, religiony. Why soft? I dunno. Maybe because it's nice and soft-sounding.

 

[Wesley]

Re: that word 'polygyny'

polygany..whatevs

Yeah, the word gets me, too. Seems like too many Ys in "polygyny". But it has three building blocks, each of which adds a Y, so in the end it makes sense:

The poly means "many", the gyn means "female" (from the Greek gune, same root as in gynecological), and the added final Y indicates that this "many women" thing is a state, condition, or quality. (As contrasted with, say, polygynitis, an inflammation of the many women.)

The g is soft, so the whole thing rhymes with "religion-y" or "religioney" — or it would if there were such a word — as in, "Him? He's not just religious, he's downright religion-y." Polygyny, religiony. Why soft? I dunno. Maybe because it's nice and soft-sounding.

It is a rare occasion in which I find a person capable of having an intelligent discussion about grammar and spelling. Thank you for this.

The g is soft because it is followed by a y that makes the short i sound. Whenever a g is followed by an e or short i it makes the soft, or j sound as in 'gem', 'gin', or 'George'. Since the y makes the short i sound in this case it follows the same rule.

The Greek word "γυνή" (gynē) is actually pronounced gü-nā'. This is why the y was first used in words such as 'gynecologist.' The y initially made the same sound it makes in the word 'you' in order to match the Greek pronunciation.

That was several hundred years ago however and English is not a dead language. It is every growing and changing because it is actually in use throughout the world. Thus, because of those changes, we have a difference in pronunciation between words such as 'polygyny' and 'gynecologist' even though they come from the same root word.

 

[starlit]

At the end of that three days I was positive that God wanted this for us and that I could do it. It's been three years since then. I now have even more young children lol! I thought at that time that I was ready and I would do anything that God told me to and we would be fine. I was wrong. I wasn't ready then. I know this because I've worked on some things since then that would've been problems.
I don't think I'm ready now either. I've still got stuff I'm working out, and God knows that. I want a SW but I need to improve myself so I can be the best SW I can, and the best wife I can be to Samuel.

When i look back at my first interactions with families like 6 years ago i was really naive and green. There were so many red flags and different things that should've made me stop and ponder what the heck i was doing. I had this intent desire in my heart to do something i felt i had been called to do and i was walking forward with blinders on. I sincerely wish now i had never proceeded with that family, i had spent many, many nights praying that their marriage would survive and that the children would forgive us for tearing their family apart. As i focused on them my heart grew softer and i had this indescribable experience where i knew i had been forgiven and them as well. As my heart has healed and i decided to try and drudge forward again on this search it has made me very acutely aware of what to hear and read between the lines. I definitely agree that taking your time is extremely important.

 

[Wesley]

I definitely agree that taking your time is extremely important.

Agreed!

 

[rustywest4]

I can remember asking as a child... "why did King David and others have several wives in the Bible" ... As a young man with mommy issues it of course interested me very much; the idea of having many wives and a big family with lots of children! ... I can also remember the answers given to me not only then, but any of the numerous times I brought this topic up! Most common response to my questioning was to point out the incident David had with "Bathsheba", or being told that Abraham was simply lacking faith in Gods plan when he wrongfully harkened to Sarah's voice and took Hagar.... Needless to say, no answers ever put the issue to rest in my heart and mind! It's haunted me since I was a young boy!

I truly believe God has been gently trying to lead me into this truth all along! Oh how I wish I knew back then what I know now! Lol I could have shut down all those lame answers I was given!

Rusty