The Book of Mormon repudiates polygamy. The good brother, Jacob, denounces it: “Hearken to the word of the Lord: For there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none . . . In Joseph Smith’s youth the impulse was condemned, though it exploded later into the remarkable plural marriage system, a system that was to serve for three generations as the identifying badge of his religious system.
