Marriage and Marital Issues

[Director Michael]

The Bible says it is okay for a man to have multiple wives, but in Genesis 2:24 it says that "a man shall leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife..." So can't we infer that a man is supposed to leave his parents and live with this 1 woman?

There is no prohibition against polygamy in the Hebrew scriptures - i.e., a Gentile or Jewish man establishing multiple wifes as his family. (Note that the Torah requires that if a Jewish man wants to take more than one wife, each wife has to be made fully aware of the other wives before she is married, and each wife must be provided with her own separate home in which she is visited privately by her husband.) But in the tenth century, Rabbenu Gershom, the renowned Talmudist known to his contemporaries as "Meor Hagolah" ("Light of the Diaspora"), saw that it was necessary to make a Rabbinic decree that a Jewish man can have only one wife at a time. (This was not fully accepted by some groups of Sefardic Jews in the Arabic countries.) There was never any such Rabbinic decree passed for Gentiles, but most modern Western countries have passed secular laws against polygamy.
(Polyandry, by contrast, is forbidden and a woman may never formalize a relationship with two husbands at the same time. If she does, she is considered as married to the first and having committed adultery with the second.)
But it is important for Gentiles to understand that if their secular courts or governments see that it is fitting for the overall good of the society, they have the authority to place legal limits on the number of wives a man may take, if that is acceptable to the population in general. Then by the Noahide "Law of Courts," it becomes required of the Noahide citizens to observe that law, and the courts can apply any rule for punishment that the public in general accepts. This is called "going beyond the letter" of the Scriptural law. In this context, the court system has the right to limit the male citizens to only one legally contracted wife at a time (including both formally registered marriages and common-law marriages).

G-d's known standard for moral conduct is that if two people want to have relations on a continual ongoing basis, they should do this in the context of a publicly recognized marriage, so that intimate relations do not become a "free-for-all," which would go against G-d's desire for "yishuv olam" (people making a society that is morally proper in G-d's eyes). That is the meaning of the Noahide obligation to promote "yishuv olam" - that people should be encouraged to act in ways that are morally proper according to G-d, or at least not to act in ways that are known (from the Hebrew scriptures which are authentic Divine revelation) to be abhorent to G-d (whether or not the actions are actually liable to punishment by death from the hand of Heaven).

If a married Gentile woman is going to be physically intimate with a man who is not her husband, she should abandon her connection with her present husband, leave his home (or have him leave her home), and begin a new married life. If she merely acts promiscuously and alternates between two or more partners, that type of promiscuity is abhorrent to G-d, even though He may not have made it punishable by Noahide courts.