history question

[Warmbee]

I hope this isn't an inappropriate topic, but what exactly was the difference between a wife and a concubine? I was teaching a bible study last night and she asked me, and I had NO IDEA If someone could please explain for me....

[Ron]

If being married to Two Wives is Bigamy, and having multiple wives is Polygamy,
what is being married to one wife called?


"Monotony!"




My wife is gonna kill me!

[Praxeas]

Originally Posted by Warmbee

I hope this isn't an inappropriate topic, but what exactly was the difference between a wife and a concubine? I was teaching a bible study last night and she asked me, and I had NO IDEA If someone could please explain for me....

Concubines were second class wives. They did not enjoy all the benefits as a wife. They were mostly used to produce more offspring

[Digging4Truth]

Wikipedia said...

Concubinage refers to the state of a woman or youth in an ongoing, quasi-matrimonial relationship with a man of higher social status. Typically, the man has an official wife in addition to one or more concubines. Concubines have limited rights of support as against the man, and their offspring are publicly acknowledged as the man's children, albeit of lower status than children born by the official wife or wives.

In modern usage, the term concubine often denotes the status of a quasi-wife who is not legally married to a man with whom she lives. The man (but not the woman) may or may not be in an ongoing legal marriage with another person. For example, in a California court case involving inheritance, Rosales v. Battle, a Mexican court had decided that the plaintiff had been the concubine of the deceased, on the grounds that they "had maintained a relationship publicly comparable to a marriage for about four or five years and had always behaved as though they were married, even though they had not contracted legal matrimony."

[Carpenter]

Isn't it kind of interesting how the 10 commandments said not to commit adultry yet in most every biblical time in the OT after that lots of fellas, especially those we call spiritual were pretty guilty of such and no one made a big deal of it...

[Praxeas]

Originally Posted by Carpenter

Isn't it kind of interesting how the 10 commandments said not to commit adultry yet in most every biblical time in the OT after that lots of fellas, especially those we call spiritual were pretty guilty of such and no one made a big deal of it...

Adultery I think was most having relations with someone that was already married. David and Bathsheba is an example. So they did not consider it Adultery if a man had more than one wife. It would have been a reproach or rape or sexual immoral for a man to just have sex with a woman and then send her away (see Absalom, Tamar and Amnon)

[Carpenter]

Originally Posted by Praxeas

Adultery I think was most having relations with someone that was already married. David and Bathsheba is an example. So they did not consider it Adultery if a man had more than one wife. It would have been a reproach or rape or sexual immoral for a man to just have sex with a woman and then send her away (see Absalom, Tamar and Amnon)

Oh, ok, I get it.

I was reading last night with my daughter about the building of the Tabernacle and I saw some pretty interesting parallels between contemporary culture and the mindset of the Israelites...


Like for example the covering everything with Gold and the proximity of the idol that Arron built, and the Egyptian culture the peolple were steeped in.

Man, I wish I had more time to lay it out...

[Warmbee]

Thanks. I ended up asking my pastor last night and he said they are similar to the harim(sp?) in egypt....