On the Losing End

Hagar. Leah. Peninnah. Michal. What do these four Bible women have in common?

If your answer is something like “They came out on the losing end of a bigamous or polygamous relationship”, congratulations. I don’t have any great reward for you, but if you’ve learned the practical lesson these women’s stories teach us, you will be disinclined to pit family members against one another with your attention and love as the prize. Being flattered and chased is fun, but it’s neither kind nor fair to those forced to compete.

Even the “winners” in these oddball relationships lost something in the bargain.

Hagar, Leah, Peninnah, Michal

Hagar was a servant called off the bench like a pinch-hitter by her mistress and dispatched into the bed of a patriarch to do what Sarah could not. But Hagar’s inability to handle the elevation in household status gracefully once she conceived resulted in all kinds of conflict and she was exiled from the home not once but twice.

Leah married the wrong man under orders from her father, then produced more than twice as many children for him as her favored sister. She remained comparatively unloved even after Rachel died bearing her second son.

Peninnah’s rival was barren. Somehow, she remained second fiddle in a three-cornered marriage. The double portion always went to Hannah, whose desperate prayer miraculously enabled her to conceive not just Samuel but five more children. For those who object that Peninnah seems like a nasty piece of work who got what she deserved, you may not be far wrong.

As the daughter of Israel’s first king, Michal might have ended up David’s one-and-only if her father had not tried to murder her husband. She was his first wife and possibly also his ninth after he spent years on the run, accumulating in the process Israel’s first royal harem. Let’s just say marriage to David the second time around did not end well for Michal. By that time he had way too many options.

Each of these dysfunctional households had misery to spare, not just for the competing wives, but also for their competing sons, who understandably felt little attachment to their many half-brothers.

Why Does God Allow …

Why did God allow stuff like that anyway? Ever think about that? Some people definitely do.

All sins are offensive to God, but some sins are more offensive than others. Bigamy and polygamy are truly small potatoes compared to some of the vile crimes God has overlooked over the centuries in view of man’s ignorance, as least for a time. Both practices certainly fall short of God’s ideal for marriage, which is a loving, respectful lifetime commitment between one man and one woman, a precedent established in Genesis and confirmed as the divine plan by the Lord Jesus himself.

All the same, pairing up for life with squabbling sisters is incontestably orders of magnitude less offensive to man and God alike than, say, sacrificing your child on an altar to a false god. The Canaanite perpetrators of that latter offense got 400 years to change their ways before God acted in genocidal judgment against them for it, while bigamy and polygamy continue unabated and divinely unabolished to this day. The point is that God acted in one case but not in the other. Some sins just scream for direct judgment in this life. Sub-optimally ordered marriages are not among them.

Bigamy and Polygamy

Around the world, 160,000,000 people currently live in bigamous or polygamous households notwithstanding their illegality in many countries. In the US, the estimated numbers range from 30,000 to 100,000 living in mostly-informal polygamous relationships. Despite the fact that both practices are technically crimes, prosecutions are as rare as hen’s teeth. From a judgment-of-God perspective, as far as I know, the worst thing that happens to bigamists and polygamists is that their entire households have to live with the envy, rivalry and other emotional baggage of their choices, good and bad, and bear the financial expenses that go with them.

So then, all things in proportion. Nevertheless, to my amazement, you will find people complaining online that the persistence of practices like bigamy and polygamy throughout the centuries are evidences against God’s goodness or even his existence. That reasoning truly puzzles me. On the contrary, I see them as evidences of the seriousness with which God takes the principles of autonomy and delegated authority. He allows people to make the choices they make. Judgment, for the most part, comes later, as God has promised, though negative natural consequences are often immediate.

There Oughtta Be a Law!

Where the execution of God’s justice in matters big and small seems painfully prolonged to some, at least it has the virtue of being absolutely fair and final when it comes. Man’s attempts to impose fairness on his world are simply impotent. My whole life I’ve been hearing the complaint “There oughtta be a law!” about everything from out-of-control immigration to the neighbor failing to spay her cat. That would be the consensus human solution to the types of problems Hagar, Leah, Michal and Peninnah experienced: a proliferation of rules.

Believe me, regulating household misery has been tried. Like so many laws, those banning the accumulation of wives have met with limited success, especially in very poor countries with no social safety nets, where 50% or 33% of a husband, protector and provider is a whole lot more appealing to a single woman than 0%. In fact, Isaiah contemplated a future day in which seven women would propose this deal to a potential marriage prospect simultaneously: “We will eat our own bread and wear our own clothes, only let us be called by your name; take away our reproach.” For many women in bad circumstances, a dysfunctional household, perhaps even one you pay to get into, is still one step up from no household at all. For a man of means, a personal harem may seem like a sweet deal too. Initially at least.

What Does That Look Like Anyway?

Now, I can understand when people look at the body counts from a tsunami or an earthquake and wonder aloud how a loving God could possibly permit such things. Natural disasters are theologically and personally difficult. I can relate to the struggle to maintain faith in such a context. I have greater difficulty with the idea that we ought to blame God for unpleasant situations that are entirely a product of human choice. Sometimes we are on the losing end of our own schemes, looking our defeated selves squarely in the eye.

For those who complain that God should “do something” about bigamous and polygamous household dysfunction, one wonders what bringing him into the mix was (or is) supposed to look like. Yet another law? How should God enforce it? Social shaming? Ejection from the camp of the righteous? Maybe a major tax break for monogamous couples, or an “extra spouse tax” annually? Personal reinforcement, with or without lightning bolts? Zapping the spare spouse or three out of existence? Rolling back time and undoing a choice that was the genuine product of several individuals’ personal preferences?

I have no idea what the complainers have in mind. The very idea of expecting God to micromanage the solutions to problems people both create and perpetuate mystifies me. Who would want a God like that?

I can only conclude that some people just like blaming God, and they don’t think much about alternative explanations for human unhappiness before doing it.