So reducing verse 16 to “one” is reductionism but reducing verse 17 to “one” is not??? I don’t understand how it applies differently.
Jews operating in Deut 17 times would reference themselves back to Noah's ark. In the ark, there would have been at least TWO horses...one male; one female. [see Gen. 7:2,15] No king would have had fewer than two such horses to see to the continuation of that breed.
Your attempt, therefore, to reduce a King's horse stall to just one as some sort of parallel therefore ignores Biblical history and Jewish culture...both a cardinal sin of basic Biblical hermeneutics as well as reductionism.
...reducing verse 17 to “one” is not???
(a) Because a man wouldn't in the same way necessarily need more than one wife to ensure his seed is passed on. Right?
(b) Because culturally -- and historically -- the Jews of Deut 17 were rooted in Genesis 2:24, were they not?
24 That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his WIFE [not "wives" right?], and they become one flesh.
Are you somehow claiming that "sister wives" plural are "one flesh" with each other? Really? (If so, what kind of apologist are you then for lesbian "marriage"???? I expect an answer here)
And why do you either outright IGNORE -- or gloss over -- Gen. 2:24 in this whole discussion???? As if the EARLY Jews -- and that's what we are discussing here -- would have somehow "written off" Gen. 2:24 as irrelevant to them.
(c) Lastly in pre-modern med times, women died early...often while giving birth. A man being told to refrain from "many wives" may have indeed had more than one wife...but it's up to YOU to offer evidence that this was bigamy/polygamy -- and not serial monogamy arising AFTER the death of a previous wife.
Since YOU are the one arguing from silence, YOU need to produce the evidential timetable case that "many wives" = polygamy. There's 2 or 3 Lds "apostles" RIGHT now who are serial monogamists. (To hear you tell it, just because they have been sealed to more than one wife in the Lds temple, they are somehow automatically presumed to be CURRENT polygamists...]
AND...finally even where you could find 1 or 2 instances where polygamy indeed occurred in Genesis times, your insinuation that God somehow smiled upon it...or it wasn't rooted in sin...or that it was in any way, shape or form common is also "MIA" of any real Biblical substance.
What? Do you think you can just cite Jacob's family as some sort of prototype of marriage? Really?
What would you do next? Cite Gomer's "cottage industry" of post-marital prostitution -- as she was married to Hosea -- and claim that since God allowed that to occur, it would be "a-ok" for the Mormon "prophet" to dictate marital "cottage industry" prostitution? [After all, wasn't Hosea a "righteous man???"]
You'd be one sick puppy if you tried to claim this...and yet that is about tantamount to what you're doing!
You've offered absolutely NO proof that this was COMMON by the WILDERNESS time that the latter part of Deut. was enunciated in Hebrew culture.