Ugandan Adultery Law Curbs Effects of Polygamy

Well, one was if your brother dies without offspring — you had to take his wife even if you were already married and raise up offspring through her too. Also, if you were married and caught with another woman (unmarried) you had to marry her too — and could never divorce her.

Just two.

Also, there was a prohibition against marrying two sisters or a mother and a daughter at the same time.

Jesus was making an illustration, just as he did in that chapter about the Ten Talents, but nevertheless it does use a polygamist analogy in a polygamist society.

I will note that the upper classes of Jerusalem were more Romanized (the Romans tended to have one wife and a few slaves boys and women) so polygamy probably wasn’t as common with the upper classes but it was common among the religious people and the laboring/farming peoples of Israel. You see the same thing in Islamic countries today.

Polygamy is not adultery.

Arguable, but the point isn't whether polygamy per se is adultery. The point is that a woman who commited adultery could face criminal penalties while a man who committed adultery could not, which was fundamentally unjust and was based on a culture that condoned polygamy (but not, of course, polyandry).

It is possible, as a matter of theory, that there could be a society that both condones polygamy and respects the equality of women, but I cannot think of one that has ever existed. Every polygamous society with which I am familiar -- including polygamous subcultures in countries like the US where it is not widely acceptable -- abuses women, including "women" whom most of us would consider girls.

Well, one was if your brother dies without offspring — you had to take his wife even if you were already married and raise up offspring through her too.

Old Testament welfare. Women could not own property, so a woman's only security if her husband died was to have a father, a brother or a son. Otherwise, she would be destitute.So if your brother dies, your duty to his widow is not just to feed her today, but to give her a future. A son.

Everywhere and in every time before at least the 19th century, big families meant security -- it meant people to work the lands, daughters who could marry well, Sons who could land a bride with a dowry. And it made sense to have as many children as possible, since many -- if not most -- were likely to die of infectious diseases in childhood. Offspring were, to be blunt but honest, a form of wealth.

The old fantasy is of being the last man on Earth, with numerous women and a duty to replenish the species. In the hard-scrabble ancient days, a lot of civilizations and tribes were never far from that kind of threat of extinction. Polygamy is not a question of principle, but of pragmatism.

Men tended to die in work and war. Women in childbirth. A fertile woman not having kids was, again blunt but pragmatic, a finite resource going to waste. Sperm was a renewable resource. Women take time to gestate, and while waiting for that child to be born, a man can be out making more.

Look at any farm -- what's the ratio of bulls to cows, studs to mares, roosters to hens? Polygamy is like that. There's a reason that the art and science of efficient animal breeding is called husbandry.

Also, if you were married and caught with another woman (unmarried) you had to marry her too — and could never divorce her.

Old Testament child support. They didn't have paternity tests in those days' the way to hold a babydaddy responsible was to make him a husband, and thus the presumptive father.

Well, one was if your brother dies without offspring — you had to take his wife even if you were already married and raise up offspring through her too.

Okay, I'll grant you that one. So polygamy is okay if your brother dies without leaving children, and you marry his widow.

Also, if you were married and caught with another woman (unmarried) you had to marry her too — and could never divorce her.

Uh no, that was adultery and the punishment for that was stoning.

Also, there was a prohibition against marrying two sisters or a mother and a daughter at the same time.

So what would you do if your brother was married to the sister of your wife and he died without having children? ;)

With the exception of the one you stated above, polygamy is not God's design for marriage. God stated his plan for marriage in Genesis 2, and Jesus reiterated it in the New Testament.

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