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Living in 21st-century America, most proclaim that polygamy is wrong and incontrovertible. The only reason polygamy might be an important issue to someone is if he happened to live in a country where polygamy was legal and he had more than one wife, or he is a Bible teacher and has to deal with converts who have more than one wife. I know a man who spent some time evangelizing in South Africa. He converted a man that had five wives. The African convert was informed that he would have to get rid of all them but one. He asked, “Which ones do I send away?” He was told, “Send them all away except your first wife.” He replied, “I married my first two wives at the same time.”
¶Situations like the above should cause us to be interested and open to a study of polygamy. Are we doing right when we break up marriages by teaching men to “put away” a legal wife?
Polygamy is a very important, and usually overlooked, factor in our study of divorce and remarriage (MDR). First, the idea that polygamy was practiced by faithful men of God is not even questioned by serious students of the Bible. Also, Jesus said not one word about polygamy. Now let us get to the point. The traditional MDR doctrine says that if a man legally divorces his wife (unless she committed adultery) Jesus teaches that both he and she must remain celibate and that if either marries another he or she commits adultery.
But when we apply the polygamy factor we see a very big problem for the theory noted above. At the time of Jesus' teachings a man could have more than one wife, so whether he was "still bound" to a particular wife after he divorced was irrelevant, as far as whether he could marry another. Yet it is claimed that the man who "divorced" her commits adultery with the woman he marries. How can that be? It makes no sense, especially when we look at Mark 10:11 and see that Jesus explains that the man commits adultery "against her," i.e., the wife he "put away" rather than, as commonly asserted, with the person in the second marriage.
Think about it. Why would God give a divorce law for the women (because of evil men with hardened hearts) so the men could marry another; but then come back later and say to the women (through Jesus) "Oh, but you are still married or still bound unless your husband committed adultery"? All the while, the man continues to have as many wives as he likes, or can afford.
It is commonly taught that a marriage is ended by divorce, but some insist that the guilty one is still bound to the other unless he initiated the divorce for fornication. If Jesus had actually taught this then he would have been in a real predicament when he taught it to the Jews. They would have understood him to say, "From henceforth, you don't have a right to marry another unless you divorced your wife for adultery. Moses was wrong. I’m teaching what God intended from the beginning.”
And, we are left to wonder why God went all those years without explaining to the Jews that divorce did not free the woman or man to marry another, unless the divorce writ stated that it was for adultery. He just let them commit adultery for hundreds of years; then Jesus came along, right before the end of the dispensation and Law of Moses, and finally told them it was adultery—but still said not one word about polygamy. And even though the Jews sought to entrap Jesus by enticing him to say something contrary to Moses, these so-called "friends" of Jesus are saying Jesus did indeed contradict Moses. They say this even though the Jews accepted Jesus’ saying regarding “putting away” and did not even charge him with teaching contrary to Moses on the issue. Who can believe it? | 
