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Multiple Marriage: A Study of Polygamy in Light of the Bible

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There is a story about an Englishman lost in Ireland who asked a farmer how he could get to Tipperary. He got the answer, "If I was going to Tipperary, I wouldn't start from here." At the start of this book, Dr Hitchens sets himself the task of using the Bible to prove that polygamy is wrong. As even the more secular reader will be aware, if you don't like polygamy the Bible is not the best place to start from when you want to condemn it. The scene is therefore set for over 200 pages of mental gymnastics and theological contortions as he tries to show that having more than one wife at any one time is a Very Bad Thing. The contortions come as a result of having to deal with masses of the Bible's good guys who, to steal the words of 17th century writer John Milton on the same subject, "saw not in that primitive institution what we in our blindness fancy we discern so clearly".
The Bible doesn't push polygamy as if it were some ideal form of marriage, but it clearly has lots of positive stuff to say about it, and plenty of people practising it in a way that is very inconvenient to Dr Hitchens. In earlier centuries there have been plenty of such diatribes from the author's predescessors. Now Dr Hitchens may be on his own - and for that reason you may like to see his book. It is a fairly definitive, closely argued anti-polygamy text. But as such it does a good job of encapsulating all the errors you make when you have to clutch at straws to make impossible arguments.