I think you make some very accurate points here, but I think I came away from the articles with a different perspective.
That right there tells me that
this is nothing more than myth making to justify monogamy.
I'm not sure the articles are necessarily trying to justify 'socially imposed' monogamy but rather the author is looking at the possible motives behind why the Christians embraced these laws, and why did the Greeks and Romans create these laws in the first place. Why does something so contrary to the way God designed our nature even exist.
The question presented in the first article is, "Why
have so many cultures attempted to abolish polygyny? If our ancestors' environments were so polygynous, why is 'socially imposed' monogamy—the moral and legal prohibition of polygyny—so common in modern societies? Or more accurately, why is it so common in the West? (Polygyny remains legal and common in many non-Western societies, especially sub-Saharan African and Islamic countries)."
In the first place, many of the Germanic peoples were monogamous, way back before Christ. And those people who weren't got it from Christianity, which got it from Rome and Greece. This wasn't a decision that was made during medieval times as claimed in the article; the roots go back hundreds and thousands of years.
Even though we are a polygamous species, and that social order dominates through history, monogamy spread with Christianity like a virus; becoming ascendant as Christianity spread world wide. It was religion that spread monogamy; not the superior economics or warfighting ability of societies so organized.
In the first article he does point that out, "However, Christianity's condemnation of polygyny has never been as straightforward as anti-polygyny church leaders would have preferred, because no Biblical passages explicitly prohibit plural marriage. Indeed, leaders of breakaway Christian polygynous sects, like 16th-century German Anabaptists and 19th-century American Mormons, have always been eager to point out that several central Old Testament figures are polygynists. Abraham, for instance, had two wives simultaneously, and Solomon had 700 (plus 300 concubines)... The case for an automatic association between Christianity and monogamy is weakened further by the fact that socially imposed monogamy was first established in ancient Greece and Rome, centuries before Christianity even existed... So by the time Christianity began spreading through the Roman Empire in the first centuries AD, monogamy was already well-established. But even though Christianity did not introduce socially imposed monogamy to the West, it did fully embrace this institution, and as noted above, it was this embracement that ultimately led to monogamy's spread throughout the Western world."
But Rome wasn't monogamous like we think of it; concubines were socially accepted. As was sleeping with your slaves.
In the first article he does point out that de faco polygamy exists in monogamy only societies. And IMO no society can completely enforce a monogamy only position, de faco polygamy will always exist because that is how we were created.
So then the question becomes why do these laws even exist in the first place? The author in both these articles is trying to drill down to the root motivation for monogamy only laws. In the first article he examines the possible male motivations behind these laws and then in the second article he examines the possible female motivations behind these laws. In my earlier post I was attempting to tie together the author's proposed motivations for both the men and the women.
So then in context of the OP the concept of 'socially imposed' monogamy did not come for biblical teaching but rather it came from the Greco-Roman society. To drill further down and ask "Why did the Greco-Roman society have these laws in place if they run counter to how we were created"? The answer is possibly due to the motivations of three sections of the European population 1) the elite males wanted a larger army to conquer Europe and expand their empire 2) lower males wanted easy access to women 3) elite women wanted sole control of her husband and his resources. And all of this came at the expense of the majority of women and removing their access to men.
history is full of counter arguments to that. The monogamous Greeks and Romans got it handed to them all across the Mediterranean by the polygamous Arabs. So too did the polygamous Vikings dominate monogamous Europe for centuries. That only changed when the Viking Civilization took on Christianity, causing them to adopt both monogamy and to cease raiding.
I think you bring up a very good counter argument to his proposed motivations the elite males.
At least that is what I took away from the 2 articles.
