Aside from noticing little details like that as employers of the handmaidens, Rachel, Leah, and Sarai could order their employees to have sex with their husbands? Just one more gross abuse of human power in a book full of stories of even grosser abuses of human power.
I must be a little too "woke" now.
A third world pastor asked me how he should deal with a new "Christian Family" where the husband had two wives who were related to each other. From memory they were cousins. The back story was that the first wife was apparently barren and because she loved her husband so much, she found a cousin to become his second wife so that he could have "descendant" children of his own. This arrangement of the second wife happened before the whole family became Christians.
Should the pastor ask this man to divorce his first wife in order to only have one wife?
Within their culture it is normal for a man to have more than one wife. If the man divorced his first wife, then she would become destitute as she would also be abandoned by her birth family as well.
My advice for my pastor friend, was that the whole church should embrace/accept the whole family as one family in Christ and love them all into the Kingdom of God.
Applying western culture to a third world culture can be more destructive than anything else. This is also true for imposing today's culture upon past cultures and the "solutions" that they employed back when the past cultures existed.
Our culture today is to divorce the first wife/husband first so as to marry the second wife/husband "legally." However, before the divorce, there is a time where one of the partners has more than two partners before they divorce so as they can marry the partner that they have had on the side.
Perhaps in our ignorance of cultural norms, we should not be so judgemental.
Shalom
x.com
