A few years ago I got around to watching The Ten Commandments(1956) with Charlton Heston. A great movie to be sure, and one that got me interested in the Biblical Moses. I was reading about ** you do not have permission to see this link ** and noticed something interesting. It listed two women as his wives. One was Zipporah, featured in the film and most popualr media. The other was an unnamed “Cushite woman”. The KJV and other older Bibles tend to refer to this woman as Ethiopian. Upon further reading I found that there was a bit of confusion as to the identify of this woman. 

12 And Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman.** you do not have permission to see this link **

There appear to be two lines of thought about this. The first is that Zipporah was this African woman which would mean that Moses was a monogamist. The other is that Moses had two wives, either at different stages in life, or possibly at the same time, making him a polygamist. I’m curious what the other readers here think of this. Was Moses a polygamist? Who was this Ethiopian woman? 

But, it doesn’t really end there and I have a lot of questions I’m hoping the historically astute can fill me in on. A fair number of prominent figures in the OT have multiple wives. Abraham, King David, and King Solomon(apparently 700 wives+300 concubines, give or take). In the Greco-Roman world polygamy was a taboo. In the Levant taking multiple wives appears to have been the norm, or at least acceptable. How common was it? When and how did polygamy become a taboo in Judaism? Was it forced on them? Did Christians embrace this idea later on or right from the start. Like Heaven and Hell, was the idea that a man should cleave unto his wife influenced by the culture of the Hellenistic World that dominated Judea during the time of Christ or more an independent development? There is a lot to unpack here.