When did we go from polygamy to monogamy? 

Now our spaceships will have to have Emergency Biblical Scholar Holograms.

@@lightbearer313 "Please state the nature of the Biblical emergency."

It's a Grail shaped Beacon.

@@bskec2177 someone definitely needs to be punished for that!

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I suspect the biggest problem is how to construct divorce laws. It's already complicated with two persons, imagine what happens with more! Now that's not a reason not to do it, but it's obviously rather tricky. Anyway, I agree, from a moral/ethical point of view, as long as it's all consenting adults, I see no reason not to allow it. I suspect at that point, we'd have to handle marriages more like corporations of some kind - otherwise, there are far too many relations to consider (2 people, 1 relationship; 3, 3; 4, 6; 5, 10; 6, 15; 7, 21; ...; 10, 45; 20, 190; and so forth at n(n-1)/2. And that's only pairs. If you look at any possible subgroup, it's 2^n instead (10 people already have 1024 subgroups). So basing the legalese directly about people relationships is going to get insane.

Polygyny vs polyandry. Polygamy is the general term.

@@creamwobbly I stand corrected! Thank you.

​@@creamwobblyone set of smelly feet and socks is enough to deal with. Otherwise polyandry may have its appeal. But finding two men who clean up after themselves? They might not be interested in a wife.

@@Plethorality I was thinking of an all gay male group, however, there are some straight men who are known to bathe on occasion. Not many, but a few.

Evidence of it exists among the Norman elites but they probably inherited it from their Norse ancestors.

The Church allowed morganatic marriages well past the Carolingian period, which arguably made polygamy much worse for the majority of women in morganatic relationships due to the removal of inheritance rights from their offspring.

And of course, then Joseph Smith Jr. came along ...

@@KaiHenningsenWhat is interesting is a that Smith’s polygamy was never biblically based, where most of his other teaching s attempted to find biblical justification. This is one of the rare moments where he had an original thought.

@@digitaljanus Elites simply adjusted to taking unofficial wives, concubines, and mistresses, a practice that has never entirely gone away.

That's right. Nowadays biblical marriage is illegal for several reasons. What those churches do is select verses that happen to exemplify aspects of what they want marriage to be, create a narrative that stitches them together, and call it "biblical" just because they quoted the Bible.

Something the red pill crowd forget.

​@@alexmcd378how about the death rates ?

Not if the men are going to war

@@ahmad2itani Those are about equal as well. On account of everyone dies.

Polygamist wives would be polyandrous. Hard to keep all those husbands in check.

😂😂😂

Yes, but also the early Church was even more anti-sex than most current ones, so limiting the number of people Christians were copulating with was probably also a factor.

@@digitaljanus Most likely you are completely right. That even goes back to the Pauline epistles.

Logistics mandates that a minority of men would be polygamists.

Considering that polygamy pops up everywhere in different cultures all around the world it would be interesting to understand why the Romans didn’t practice it.

@@pansepot1490 It's likely a complicated topic but surely had to do with inheritance and Augustus' views on what was moral. It also was not monogamy is a sexual sense. Roman enslaved way too many people for that to even be common.

Very informative ,Thank you do you know any books about this subject ?

@@weirddude9367 Try Polygamy: A Very Short Introduction by Sarah Pearsall

@@Matt_The_Hugenot thanks

that’s not the same thing

@@bububooie I know. I was being facetious.

I’m not great at finances, but even if I could afford multiple wives, I just don’t have the energy or cognitive bandwidth.

Funny, but wrong. Dowries made the initial outlay _negative,_ but upkeep would bankrupt ya (I'm making light of it because that part was millennia ago, and part of a freakish resource-rich bronze age agricultural society. More recent polygyny is a misogynist practice that seeks to undervalue and undermine women's independence.)

It depends how you measure "correct or better". If you measure it by the slow advancement of women's rights (and men's rights as well) then western society is superior. It is hard to see how woman's rights could have advanced as they have in a polygamous society.

@@Nonplused Granted, but in a polyandrous society women's right are to the fore and it is men who lose out, at least by our standards. My point was that our familiarity with one way shouldn't blind us to other options or make us think those options are in some way wrong.

@@theoutspokenhumanist Nope, I'm going to think they are "inferior", based on my subjective view of what the goals are. For me, they are equality under the law, freedom of speech, innocence until proven guilty, security in your person from encroachment by the state, and property rights. Equality under the law makes it hard to see how either polygamy or polyandry can work. Actually it violates property rights too, or at least dramatically complicates them. A husband and wife can co-own things and split the assets when they divorce, but how do you handle that if there are 3 parties to the marriage? Anyway, I realize morals can be seen as subjective, but I am with Aristotle. Morality has as its main objective the increase of human happiness. Therefore any morality that subjugates people whether by unequal rights for women (or men), slavery, persecution, suppression of speech, etc. I am against. Sure it might increase happiness for the man with two wives, but that man's happiness has to be tallied against two very unhappy women who do not have equal rights. Same as slavery might make the slave owners happy, but the overall happiness total is down once you count how happy the slaves are. There is no way to be open minded enough to accept slavery just because it is occurring in a different culture (as it still does to this day). Polygamy is the same. The greatest moral ever put forward is attributed to Jesus, which is to "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." Mencius put it in the reverse but the message is consistent, "Do not do to others as you would not have them do to you." Combining these two, we can conclude that any man who would take two wives but not also be equally happy being one of two husbands to a single woman, knows in his heart that what he does is wrong. Objectively. Even if his revulsion to being one of two husbands is subjective.

@@Nonplused Great to learn your views. Thank you. A couple of things. Firstly, you used the word subjective and of course that’s fine. We are all allowed to hold our own subjective opinions. But that is different from an objective truth determined by data. I would also point out that your judgements are all based upon values set by our culture and traditions. They are therefore all relevant, and accurate, if multiple partner relationships were practiced within our culture. But they are not necessarily true if seen within different cultures. This is precisely where we must be careful not to think we are just better. Our reasoning must be objective, not subjective. As for the criteria, I tend to agree with your analysis. I was speaking solely about the western tradition of pairing up one man and one woman, with the male always being the senior partner and the female being subservient. This role allocation has mellowed over recent decades but still exists. There are, as you said, many ways to look at the situation but the goals you mention are secondary to the tradition itself. I.e. the western marriage tradition is not justified by use of those goals but by appeal to other reasoning, often based on religion or what we just imagine is the natural order. I think it’s important to realise that whilst your criticism of polygamy or polyandry, with regard to property rights, is true if it were practiced in our society. Where it is still practiced, these issues are not relevant, because other traditions exist within these cultures to overcome such difficulties. I largely agree with you, and Aristotle, regarding the purpose of morals. I think they evolved within our early ancestors to facilitate living in larger groups and were originally based upon the reciprocation found within family groups; still visible in our primate cousins. But we must be careful when using such terms as subjugation. This again is a subjective determination. For example, I view Muslim women as subjugated because they are granted less rights in every respect than their male counterparts and yet Muslim women refuse this. For them, because their whole culture is based upon Islam, the gender roles are as they should be, by God’s will. Are they subjugated if they do not think so? For me, yes. Do I have the right to impose my values on them? No. Your view of the happiness of people in a relationship of three or more people is based upon western ideas of what makes people happy. To us, equality is important but to others, this may be offset by having another person to share work and responsibility or just to talk to when the person of the other sex is being unreasonable. Sociology has shown us that such arrangements do work and people are happy, because they were not raised and indoctrinated into our way of thinking. Equating such relationships to slavery is simply false. Slaves have no rights. People in polygamous or polyandrous relationships, within a culture which is based around such arrangements, do have rights and, relevant to that culture, probably just as many rights as we have. The Golden Rule existed long before Jesus. Our earliest example is from Egypt around 2000 BCE but it is found in all human cultures. Because it is common sense. I agree that a man with two wives would almost certainly not be equally happy being one of two husbands. But that is irrelevant. If that man was raised and lived in a culture in which having two wives was the norm, he would never find himself as a secondary husband. It’s all about the wider culture. I hope I have demonstrated that whilst everything you have said is true, within our culture, the types of relationships we are discussing do not exist there, as a norm, and so any value judgments we make must be relevant to the culture in which they do exist. We cannot simply apply our values as if other people think or feel as we do. In other words, whilst our opinions may be subjective, the reality is not.

@@theoutspokenhumanist Well, I was intentionally intermixing "subjective" and "objective" because I find those distinctions blurry at best. Even "objectively" looking at "data" can be subjective because data selection is a thing. One man looks at temperature data for example and sees a horrifying trend, another looks at it and sees nothing outside the standard variation. I am aware that "Do unto others" may not have been original to Jesus. That's why I said it was "attributed" to him. For all we know he never said anything in the Gospels, they were written at least 70 years after his death so far as we know. Still, I like to look at the teachings without the man and see if they hold water. We don't really know Mencius actually wrote all of his works either. But we say Mencius because that's how the package came down to us. To me, the ultimate test of any system is whether it "works". If the goal is to land a rocket and reuse it, whatever Musk is doing is "working". So then his rocket system is "better" than the other current systems. Same with morals and human happiness. So far (although it is under threat), western society has achieved levels of happiness on a mass scale never before even contemplated by any other society. Therefore I can say that western society is "objectively" better, even though happiness itself is "subjective". That said, another man might say my criteria of equal rights, freedom, and escape from poverty are the incorrect measures and that they are subjective. The only time polygamy or polyandry increases happiness so far as I can tell is when there is a shortage of either women or men. So it seems to be an intermediate peak to deal with some sort of crisis. For example, if many of the men are getting killed in battle, it makes sense that the survivors need to pick up the slack when it comes to getting the women pregnant, or the loss of fighting men would translate into a population disaster for the tribe. But that doesn't make it ideal. In the case of polyandry, we are only talking about one or two small tribes discovered in Africa which we have decided to call "cultures" for the sake of argument, and it's never been explained (at least I didn't see it) what happened to all the women. Died in childbirth? Infanticide? I don't know. But if there were more women I think we can safely assume the number of husbands would drop proportionately. There is no way one woman could dominate many men while other women go unloved and single. Men just don't function that way. If there is a sexual opportunity, they take it, unless it has a high probability of it resulting in serious sanction or punishment. A lot of people hope, largely for their own delusional reasons so far as I can tell, that maybe we could maintain western society and allow polygamy, hoping I guess that they might be the beneficiary. But societies don't work that way. The social construct is a very delicate and finely tuned apparatus that evolves through trial and error, and is then passed down through the collective subconscious. It does change over time as it has, but it can't be designed. Any attempt to design it is bound to end in abject failure and societal collapse. All the nodes are too interconnected. That is why when a God dies, the society that created that God is usually not far behind.

It means what it says. The notion that "do not take too many" means "do not take more than one" is absurd. If that was the intent, it would have said so explicitly. Anyone who reads the passage as promoting monogamy is torturing the text.

@@avishevin3353 ‘torturing the text’ I visualized the book of Deuteronomy tied down and being waterboarded. 😂

In what world is 2 of anything "many." Even 3 or 4 is a stretch. If a man said "I have 2 houses" would you say "wow, you have many houses."

Hmm, have we ever determined if the adoption of agriculture had a positive effect on male fertility?

​@@thetopfaceNo, it means that polygamy was actually the norm in human society until fairly recently in our species' history. This may come as a result of the rise of agriculture, as the dates seem to match. Morality would not have been a factor in these societies yet, as the tying of sexual relationships to morality only came about around the Classical era. Something more basic gave rise to more monogamy thousands of years before that.

I've seen those and the rebuttals that show serial monogamy can explain the same results. Bear in mind that we're both using the generic word _polygamy_ when you probably mean _polygyny_ to prop up your dogma.

@@creamwobbly Serial monogamy is actually kinda bs in the context of genetic studies. Humans tend to have a near-even split between male and female births in each generation, so for serial monogamy to result in a high concentration of specific male genes, a lot of other males must have been prevented from having female breeding partners. Either they died out in droves before sexual maturity or the "winning" males got rid of their "contributions" somehow. Socially then, serial monogamy can only have worked in prehistoric human culture through the exact same mechanism as polygamy - or child murder.

Or two names for the same person like jacob/israel.

I don't know about the bronze age, but one of the things we observe in Mormon history is that polygamist families had less children per woman. While the number of children a singular man produced was increased, his time and resources were divided. A woman under polygamy didn't become pregnant more than a woman with a single partner. This resulted in big dynastic families, but didn't do much for population growth. It also decreased the number of young women available to the young men, causing a lot of men to leave the community and decreasing genetic variation. I realize a nineteenth century group would look very different from people who lived 5000 years before them. Noticeably, polygamy was rarer in most bronze age people groups, while in Mormonism it was practiced by a large portion of the community.

right so women as breeding mares…

@@bububooie I'm not saying it's great, or good, or even moral. I'm just stating the way the world probably was once upon a time many millennia ago. And civilization has pretty regularly given women the short end of the stick - our ancient ancestors aren't as different from us in that respect as we'd like to think. My own great-grandmother died of septicemia secondary to placenta previa in 1914 because birth control wasn't an option then, even though it existed. I try to not blame my ancient ancestors for doing such a crummy job of recognizing human rights when my own time has SO many advantages and somehow still manages to do a crummy job on human rights, you know?

Reading comments on Dan's content is like a attending graduate level seminar without mandatory semester end essay. Literally, free thought.

Unless you have overlapping polygamy. (The term for one husband with multiple wives is polygyny.)

It can be a majority practice for reproduction i.e. most children born to polygamist households.

It could easily be the majority practice among people with children. It is more fertile than monogamy to begin with.

Pedantry is never attractive, speaking as a recovering pedant myself

This channel is about biblical scholarship. You need to ask that question to scholars and scientists who focus on prehistory.

My grandmother was born in 1889 and knew of the horrors.

I think Dan McClellan talks about in his Mormon Stories interview. He said polygamy was a thing in the Hebrew Bible, but it wasn’t really sanctioned by God as essential for eternal salvation. It was something that just happened at the time, and nobody bat an eye. Going off of that, Joseph Smith either used that as an excuse to get married to a bunch of women or read that and thought “why don’t we do that anymore” and went ahead and started that (maybe even believing that it was revelation). Either case, it’s a practice that is frowned upon in modern society and has been the subject of uncomfortable (but also interesting) conversations with Mormons that distance themselves from such practices.

I’m listening to the Sunstone Podcast and they go into a lot more detail about the history of polygamy in the Church. Safe to say, how they got from doing polygamy to where they are today is a lot more messier than a simple “they stopped an people who didn’t like that they stopped left the Church and started their own” narrative.

Based on the evidence, it's pretty clear Joseph Smith and his cronies were simply doing the same thing that later became a cliché about (male) cult leaders, namely acquiring a harem in all but name only. In other words, less "We are restoring the way God intended us to live" and more "I want to tap that and this is a convenient explanation as to why it's okay and I'm not just a complete douchebag".

Notice how “traditional” polygamy is always a man with multiple wives and never the other way around? It basically relies on keeping women socially downtrodden so they don’t have other options but to accept being in a polygamous relationship for social stability reasons. (Not knocking modern, consenting polyamorous relationships btw).

they can talk to their friends.

@@mkprr its better not to marry. 🙂

Who is "we"? Of the first two "marriages" the bible mentions, one had no choice because there weren't other women for Adam to "marry". The second is Lemech, and he is recorded as having two wives. Seems to me that the Bible condones polygamy from the earliest opportunity.

In what way? He covered a lot of area about polygamy and monogamy and the historical Christian and Judaic church. Be more specific.

Your info is out of date

The modern mainstream Mormon church has not practiced polygamy for over a hundred years. There are fundamentalist sects that practice it. But they are not part of the mainstream church. So they are not part of the church Fan belongs to any more than a Protestant follows the pope.

That's a sex reference. 🙄

@@UniDocs_Mahapushpa_Cyavana Nope, that's a biological definition. 😘

@@frogmanvc I stand corrected Mormonism is a monalotry then. But why not address me since I made the mistake, not Dan? And I am not Mormon! I do not smoke pot. You are insane and evil.

Hmm... to be taken seriously, when you say "I quote", you really should say who or what you're quoting - for instance A) an expert with an important distinction relevant to the topic, or B) a whack-a-doodle with a jones for irrelevant distractions who is trying to denigrate someone that is trying to communicate effectively to non-experts.

@@johnmcgimpsey1825 Type in the words of the quote onto your internet search box. AI (Joseph Smith), will lead you to the source of my information that I present to all of you pot smokers. Folks who love the Book of Mormon written by a famous MYSTIC.