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Pariah said:
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Methos said:
The Bible - Genesis 16:3, to be more specific - says otherwise.

From http://www.utj.org/Torah/parshah/03Lech_Lecha.html



It doesn't say once that Hagar was taken as a wife. Maybe acted as a wife, perhaps, but beyond that she is never referred to as Abram's "wife". In fact, that term is completely monopolized by Sarah. And more than that, it is not said once, that it was legitimately allowed.



It doesn't say it was disallowed either. God and Abraham were on quite close terms on account of Abraham's righteousness, and I don't think Abraham would do something that was improper in the eyes of God.

As for whether Hagar really did marry Abraham, I suppose that's just a matter of interpretation.

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Methos said:
If you'll forgive my saying so, reading over the debate over multiple marriages, it didn't start out as a question of endorsing them.



Yes it did. You're confused due to the lack of spoken context. r3x obviously referred to multiple wives in the Bible to make it seem like my views, taken from the Bible, were contradictory. Now, I already knew that there were cases of multiple wives in the Bible--However, the context he was implying was that it was proponed by the Bible. In which case, I've never heard of such a thing, so I asked him to point out his particular reference, which I expected to be something saying that multiple wives was allowed.



Well, since I still haven't read through this entire thread, I can't comment on context at this time, so I'll drop it.

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Methos said:
As for the question of the Bible endorsing them, the Bible gives us a bunch of cases and examples where men have more than one wife, and those are presented as acceptable scenarios.



Where?

It was said that they had multiple wives and that they allowed themselves muliple wives, but where was such a "scenario" approved by God.



Well, look at it this way. If multiple wives was considered improper in the eyes of God, he would have said so. The men with the multipe wives that I cited were incredibly righteous people. In the Bible, whenever a righteous person does something improper or even commits a sin, God lets them know that they've screwed up, either directly or through a prophet.

Examples:

Moses strikes a rock instead of speaking to it. God reads him the riot act and forbids him from entering the land of Israel.

King David arranges Uriah's death and steals his wife. God sends Nathan to tell him that what he has done is evil in God's eyes (i'm paraphrasing), and he will be punished for it.

King David conducts an illegal census, and God sends Nathan to tell him "you did a bad thing."

Since there's no record of God ever doing this to anyone just for multiple marriages, I can only assume that it wasn't anything he had an issue with.

The only exception I can think of is Solomon, who took one thousand wives, when the limit for a king was eighteen (plus he allowed his wives to lead him into idol-worship). As for the David/Bath-sheba/Uriah incident, that was more about David taking another man's wife and arranging his death than merely taking additional wives. So those may not even count.

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Don't get me wrong though, I'm actually open to the idea that back then, multiple marriages--Although I haven't actually seen any scripture in the Old Testament that gave precise instruction regarding the legitimacy of multiple marriage. However, whilst I can attune myself to the idea that it was allowed in the Old Testament, there are specific references in the New Testament that forbid it.



The New Testament isn't one of my areas of expertise, I must admit.

"Just because I don't like to fight doesn't mean that I can't."