Years ago one of my eighth-grade students asked me what a
Later that day his mother called me to complain. She heard the story, spoke with her pastor, and he assured her a concubine is a wife. Not a girlfriend. What sort of morality was I attempting to teach her son?
Um… it wasn’t a morality lesson. It’s a definition. The morality lesson comes from whether you think the bible’s references to concubines are
- PRESCRIPTIVE:
The patriarchs did it, so we can do it! Probably should do it. Or— - DESCRIPTIVE: Whether the patriarchs did it or not, Jesus calls us to be better than they.
(I’ll save you the guessing game: It’s nearly always the second one.)
The patriarchs had concubines. These were, as my Oxford dictionary defines ’em, “a regular female companion with whom a person has a romantic or sexual relationship.” Our English word comes from the Latin con cubaré/“to lie down with.” A patriarch would lie down with one of the women in his household, making her his concubine. Not necessarily have sex with her, as was the case with King David and his concubine Abishag.
Why do some Christians insist a concubine isn’t a girlfriend, but a wife? Simple: It’s a culture clash. One in which they presume these ancient Hebrews have the very same mindset they do. And they totally don’t.
When we read the Old Testament, we’re looking into an entirely different culture with an entirely different worldview about sex and marriage. We don’t always realize this. We figure since they followed God, and we follow God, we share worldviews. In our culture, a married man with a girlfriend on the side is an adulterer. So the God-fearing patriarchs can’t have been adulterers. Polygamists, okay; but not adulterers. And to clear ’em of the charge of adultery, “concubine” therefore can’t mean girlfriend. It’s gotta mean wife.
Adultery and patriarchy.
Thing is, how we and the ancients define adultery, are also two different things.
Under the ancient patriarchs’ system of government, the father or eldest male of a family was functionally its king. He ruled over everybody in his household. Wives, children and grandchildren and their spouses, other relatives in his care, employees, and slaves. All these people were his subjects. Not outright property, but he was their ruler.
As such, he could have sex with any of them he chose.
Wait, how on earth is that not adultery? Because in a patriarchal culture,
I realize that sounds very wrong to our culture. Well… to most folks in our culture. Every once in a while you’ll come across some guy who considers himself a patriarch, and believes he has the right to do as he pleases with all the women on his compound. And the local law enforcement will disagree, and hopefully arrest him. But the creepy thing is, that’s exactly how ancient patriarchs behaved.
Once the L
If a man wanted to have sex with his slaves, the L
But beyond these particular issues, God didn’t put a lot of prohibitions on patriarchs’ sexual activity. God was pretty libertarian about it. Far more so than conservative Christians nowadays.
Yeah, these facts tend to shock Christians. Mostly ’cause so many preachers like to say our society oughta “return to the biblical standard of marriage.” Apparently they have no clue what the biblical standards look like; they just assume it looks like old-timey courtship, engagement, and non-marital sexual activity. And whenever they read the bible, they try to interpret it in light of their 18th-century worldview. Not the worldview the patriarchs actually had.
You’ll even see these bowdlerized redefinitions leak into Christian reference materials.
ADULTERY. […] This root represents “sexual intercourse with the wife or betrothed of another man.” Our word should be compared with zaná, illicit heterosexual relations but not necessarily in violation of the marriage vow, and the noun nakriyya, a foreign woman who was generally in a lowered social position and in
Prov 5:20; 6:24 , e.g., obviously a practitioner of harlotry (cf.RSV ). […]CONCUBINE. The Hebrew equivalent of Greek pallakís and Latin pellex. A concubine was a true wife, though of secondary rank. This is indicated, for example, by the references to a concubine’s “husband,”
Jg 19.3 the “father-in-law,”Jg 19.4 “son-in-law.”Jg 19.5 Thus, the concubine was not a kept mistress, and did not cohabit with a man unless married to him. The institution itself is an offshoot of polygamy.
Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament
Now lemme pick apart some of those words the Theological Wordbook uses in its explanation of “concubine.”
“Husband”
What the writer of the Theological Wordbook did was overlay our culture’s idea of marriage into the Old Testament, with a little help from the
True, it was considered adultery for a concubine to have multiple men in her life. (Yeah, it’s a double standard.) But for men, no problem; and God never actually forbade it. He condemned David for stealing Uriah’s wife Bathsheba,
So yeah, this is the Old Testament’s worldview: Multiple wives and girlfriends. And none of it sin, for God never prohibited it. Nope, not even in the New Testament. Don’t believe me? Search your bible.
Monogamy and the New Testament.
Today our culture values
But apart from the Genesis passage, monogamy’s not the norm in the Old Testament. So why’s it the norm in the New Testament? What happened?
Simple:
The Greeks and Romans had abandoned polygyny centuries before. They now found it offensive. Instead they practiced as western pagans still practice today: Serial monogamy. They cohabitated or married; then if they didn’t care for that arrangement, they split up or divorced, found someone else, cohabitated or remarried, split up again or redivorced, and so on.
Yeah, some folks bucked that trend, and slept around. Certain prominent Romans were notorious for their orgies. But society—yes, even pagan society!—didn’t approve. Even
Because pagans didn’t approve of multiple spouses, they defined adultery as going outside the monogamous relationship. Didn’t take long before that’s also how the Jews defined it. So that’s what we see in the New Testament. Polygyny was out and monogamy was in. Every time Paul referred to wives and husbands, it was always “woman” in the singular—not plural.
Even Jesus’s teaching about divorce reflects this.
Mark 10.2-12 CSB 2 Some Pharisees came to test him, asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”3 He replied to them, “What did Moses command you?”4 They said, “Moses permitted us to write divorce papers and send her away.”5 But Jesus told them, “He wrote this command for you because of the hardness of your hearts.6 But from the beginning of creation God made them male and female.7 For this reason a man will leavea his father and mother8 and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh.9 Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”10 When they were in the house again, the disciples questioned him about this matter.11 He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her.12 Also, if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
See, in Old Testament times if a man wanted to marry another woman, he could just join her to his harem. But with no more harems, he had to first divorce his existing wife. Some
Generally the ancient pagan attitude about divorce and adultery appears to reflect God’s attitude
1 Timothy 3.2, 12 CSB - An overseer, therefore, must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, self-controlled, sensible, respectable, hospitable, able to teach…
1 Timothy 3.12 CSB - Deacons are to be husbands of one wife, managing their children and their own households competently.
Those who wanna supervise a church, and the ministers who serve under them in any and every capacity, are expected to be
And since every Christian is called to serve the church in some capacity,
So this rules out all the sexual licentiousness we see in the Old Testament. King David, as much as he might’ve been a man after God’s own heart, as talented as he might’ve been at writing psalms, wouldn’t qualify to clean bathrooms in any church.
No more polygyny. Of any kind: No more girlfriends on the side, nor collecting dozens of them. That also goes for
Being in the bible doesn’t make it endorsement.
Look, in both Old and New Testaments, God’s saints did a whole lot of dumb stuff. Contrary to popular belief, the bible isn’t about their good examples. It’s about God’s goodness. Humans screw up; God forgives us, or sorts us out. Humans follow God; he blesses us. There are good examples to follow in its books, but there’s also a whole lot of what not to do.
You’ll notice whenever we see polygyny in the scriptures, we quickly see conflict. The women don’t get along with one another: Abraham’s concubine Hagar mocks his wife Sarah. Or Jacob’s wives Rachel and Leah fight over their status. Or Samuel’s mother Hannah gets mocked by her husband’s other wife Pennina for being barren. Concubines, because they’re not wives, constantly get taken advantage of, and raped and abused.
With few exceptions, the Old Testament’s male-female relationships are lousy examples for today’s Christians to follow. They’re practices to avoid.
So it shouldn’t horrify us that a concubine is just a girlfriend, and that
Ephesians 5.21-28 CSB 21 …submitting to one another in the fear of Christ.22 Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord,23 because the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of the body.24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives are to submit to their husbands in everything.25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her26 to make her holy, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word.27 He did this to present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and blameless.28 In the same way, husbands are to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.
A man who loves his woman this way, would never settle for her being nothing more than a concubine.
