The history · 1st century · Josephus · Judea

“The ancient practice among us”

In the same century the Gospels describe, the Jewish historian Josephus states plainly that plural marriage was the ancestral custom of the Jews, and records King Herod keeping nine wives at once.

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  • “For it is the ancient practice among us to have many wives at the same time.”

    Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews · 17.1.2-3 (Whiston translation)

    Stated while listing Herod's nine simultaneous wives.

Put it in context

Josephus was a Jerusalem priest writing for a Roman audience. He states the custom without defense or embarrassment, as a plain fact of Jewish law and life.

So in the world Jesus taught in, two legal orders stood side by side: Roman citizens bound to one wife by Roman law, and Jews whose own law permitted more. The New Testament's silence sits inside that world, not ours.

What is disputed

What Josephus means by ancestral custom, how far his account of Herod is shaped by his own apologetic aims, and the count of Herod's wives (figures of nine and ten both circulate from different passages) are all matters where the citation has to be exact.

How I read this record

This is my conclusion from the source, not part of the quotation.

Josephus shows that plural marriage was a known and legally intelligible Jewish practice in the first century. That does not turn New Testament silence into permission, but it does place the silence in a world where the practice was not unknown.

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