The law for kings

Saul has a wife and a concubine. David has several wives, and Nathan’s rebuke over Bathsheba names the theft of Uriah’s wife and Uriah’s death. In that same speech, Nathan says God gave David his master’s house and wives. Those facts do not make every part of David’s household exemplary, but they make it difficult to read the royal law as a ban that David violated simply by having a second wife. Solomon is the clear contrast: wives tied to foreign nations turn his heart exactly as the law warned.1

The Temple Scroll from Qumran applies this royal command strictly: its king may not take another wife while the first lives. The Damascus Document makes a related creation-based argument against taking two wives “in their lifetimes.” These Jewish texts predate Christianity, so the restrictive argument was already being made before later Roman and church rules. They do not settle the rule for every Israelite: the Temple Scroll speaks directly about the king, the Damascus wording is debated, and Qumran was a sectarian community rather than all of Second Temple Judaism. The source record keeps those limits beside the evidence.

Deuteronomy gives Israel’s king a real limit and later shows Solomon crossing it. I do not read the verse as a universal ban on every second wife. That conclusion rests on the royal addressee, the repeated language of accumulation, Nathan’s speech about David, and Solomon’s fulfillment of the warning. The missing numerical threshold keeps the traditional reading a serious alternative.