Verse 33 refers to the women’s “captivity.” In what way could marriage be seen as being led into captivity? Why is Yahweh declaring this injunction against polygamy to protect the women? In what way is this protection needed “because of their tenderness”? This description suggests that something in women’s situation causes them to submit to some kind of captivity. Furthermore, the relationship causing their suffering is whoredom, not legal sexual unions.
As already noted, this situation has arisen after the accumulation of wealth with its accompanying contact with other villages, exchange of goods, and inevitable exchange of ideas and concepts. At the time the Lehites left Jerusalem, the social norm was monogamy, reinforced by the Deuteronomic reform. Therefore, the Lehites were culturally predisposed toward monogamy. Why, then, would Lehi need to prohibit polygamy?
No such commandment is recorded by any of the known prophets on the brass plates. One reason for the Lehite flight from Jerusalem is to preserve a “righteous branch” (v. 25) of Yahweh’s people. The need to preserve a pure lineage—pure, that is, from apostasy—suggests that Lehi quickly perceived that neighboring communities would pose alternative practices and was taking steps to safeguard against that eventuality. No prohibition would be required unless he had reason to suspect a temptation.
John E. Clark and Michael Blake see personal ambition as fueling the development of “institutionalized social inequality and political privilege” in Mesoamerica. They call “aggrandizers” those who succeed in climbing the social and political ladder by their “successful deployment of resources and labor”:… “An aggrandizer first accumulates deployable resources by the sweat of his brow, and through the efforts of his wife (wives) and children. The more wives and children the better.” I suggest that just this situation explains why Jacob’s discourse specifically pairs the problem of increasing social hierarchy through wealth with the issue of polygamy. In this point in time the two are inextricably intertwined in Jacob’s society. Both are social issues stemming from the nascent trade of the local “aggrandizers.”
Clark and Blake further note: “The conversion of external resources into social leverage locally requires (near) exclusive access to outside goods, material, or information. This also allows the aggrandizer to operate partially outside the sanctioning norms of his local group, where local norms are more ambiguous and easier to manipulate.” The Mesoamerican picture of developing social distinctions is precisely the type of threat that the early Nephite community is facing. There is pressure for social hierarchies and that pressure is related to multiple wives. The increase in wealth is tied to outside trade, or the same access to external resources Clark and Blake describe. Assuming that Nephite wealth was built on the trade of manufactured items with neighboring communities and assuming that these neighbors would have practiced polygamy, Nephite traders would have immediately seen the advantages of adopting their neighbors’ successful means of enhancing production, then displaying the results in their “costly apparel.” Because these men would be following the regional marriage customs, their unions would have been seen as legal in that context but as “whoredom” because it violated Israelite law by seeking exogamous wives and because it violated Lehi’s specific injunction about plural wives.
I also conjecture that Nephite polygyny involved elite men’s arranging diplomatic marriages to assure commercial or political alliances. Patriarchal societies tend to be patrilocal—that is, the woman leaves her father’s home and moves to the husband’s home. Furthermore, given degrees of kinship within which marriage is prohibited, such societies tend to seek women from other communities. While this practice would bring women into the city of Nephi, it would mean that Nephite daughters and sisters would become wives in other communities. Under these circumstances, an unwilling or frightened “daughter of my people” might easily lament her marriage as a form of captivity in a strange locale.
Such women who are given in marriage in foreign communities are those whose “chastity” Yahweh is protecting. Therefore, the relationship being created cannot have legal sanction in Nephite society or their chastity would not need protection. Polygamy would be such a relationship: accepted as marriage according to regional law but not according to Nephite law.
Furthermore, perhaps a component of whoredom is implied by sending women away to exogamous communities, thus contracting marriages with unbelievers. The women would lament their forced entry into political unions not sanctioned by Yahweh’s command to Lehi. Their children, who would not be brought up under Mosaic law, would be subject to spiritual destruction.
Positioning this Book of Mormon situation in the context of the developing social-economic situation of Middle Preclassic Mesoamerica explains both the problem of “costly apparel” and the early issue of polygamy. It particularly explains why Jacob addressed both of them in the same discourse.