This Is What Life Was Like for Concubines in the Old Testament

How was the real life of a concubine in biblical times? It is true that when reading the Old Testament, we notice that concubinage was a custom considered normal in the ancient world. It was a tolerated practice in that era due to the hardness of the human heart, but beloved brothers, that something is a cultural custom does not mean it is free from pain. Behind the word concubine hides a life of suffering, anguish, and a profound emotional breakdown that the Bible does not hide. To understand this, we must first answer the fundamental question: who exactly was a concubine in the light of the Bible? In the original Hebrew language of the Old Testament, the word used is pilegesh. This word does not mean prostitute nor secret lover. A pilegesh was a legally recognized wife, but of second category. To understand her ordeal, we must look at the extra-biblical data of the time. In the ancient Middle East, the main marriage was sealed with a contract and, most importantly, with the payment of a dowry called mohar.

This dowry functioned as a life insurance for the woman. If the husband died or repudiated her, she had financial resources to survive. The concubine, on the other hand, had no dowry, no contract to protect her, nor legal backing from her family of origin. In the vast majority of cases, these women did not choose that life. They were women bought for money due to the extreme poverty of their parents, maidservants born in the house of their masters, or captive slaves taken as booty after a bloody war. Lacking this life insurance, the existence of the concubine was marked by constant and suffocating stress. Living under the same roof with the main wife generated a heavy atmosphere saturated with bad mood that poisoned the home. The daily competition kept them in a state of severe anxiety. Their greatest concern was to survive. They knew perfectly well that if the lord of the house died or got tired of them, both they and their children would be left completely helpless, thrown out into the street, and exposed to absolute misery.

Beloved brothers, the origin of this practice did not come from the heart of God. The Lord established his perfect design in Genesis chapter 2, verse 24, where a man shall join to his wife in the singular, to be one flesh. Israel absorbed polygamy and concubinage from the pagan peoples around them. Extra-biblical historical documents, such as the famous Code of Hammurabi, written in Babylon centuries before Moses, or the Nuzi tablets reveal how this system worked. In these idolatrous cultures, civil law dictated that if a high-class wife was barren, she had the legal obligation to give a slave to her husband to give him heirs. But the slave would never have the same rights. In addition, pagan kings accumulated immense harems as a symbol of military power. When this legal and pagan coldness entered the families of Israel, it unleashed an emotional curse. The first time the Bible exposes us to the destructive impact of this custom is in the life of Abraham, the father of the faith. God had given him the unbreakable promise to make him a great nation, but the years passed inexorably, and his wife Sarah remained barren.

Driven by human desperation and social pressure, Sarah decided to resort exactly to the pagan custom of the neighboring nations. The text of Genesis chapter 16, verses 2 and 3 reveals the beginning of the disaster. Let us note what the biblical account says. Then Sarai said to Abraham, “You see that the Lord has made me barren. I beg you, therefore, to go to my servant. Perhaps I will have children by her.” And Abraham listened to the plea of Sarai, and Sarai, Abraham’s wife, took Hagar, her Egyptian servant, after 10 years that Abraham had dwelt in the land of Canaan, and gave her as wife to Abraham, her husband. Beloved brothers, let us observe the crudeness of this scene. Hagar had no voice or vote. She was a property bought in Egypt. From one moment to the next, regardless of her feelings, she was handed over as a secondary wife. However, at the moment Hagar becomes pregnant, the power dynamic within that camp breaks violently. Let us read Genesis chapter 16, verse 4. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress. Bad mood and toxic jealousy took possession of Abraham’s tents.

The atmosphere became suffocating. Sarah’s hostility was so implacable, and the treatment so harsh, that anxiety completely consumed Hagar. The stress of living under that daily mistreatment was so destructive that the servant, while pregnant and vulnerable, fled to the desert seeking to escape her emotional hell. But the ordeal of this woman reached its breaking point years later, after the birth of Isaac, the son of the divine promise. The conflict exploded without return. Genesis chapter 21 narrates that during the weaning feast, Sarah saw Ishmael, the son of Hagar, mocking Isaac. Moved by fierce jealousy and the instinct to protect the inheritance, Sarah dictated an irrevocable sentence in Genesis chapter 21, verse 10. “Cast out this servant and her son, for the son of this servant shall not inherit with my son Isaac.” Verse 11 tells us that this saying seemed very grievous to Abraham. The concern and pain tore his heart. For Ishmael was also his blood. But the next morning, he had to obey. He took some bread and a bottle of water and sent Hagar away.

This woman was discarded from the only security she knew, expelled from the camp she had served. As she entered alone into the vast and arid desert of Beersheba, the anxiety she felt was paralyzing. Genesis chapter 21, verses 15 and 16 narrates the most heartbreaking moment. When the water was finished, seeing that her son was about to die of thirst under the relentless sun, the emotional stress and trauma completely broke her. She left the boy under a bush. She moved away to the distance of a bowshot so as not to see him agonize, and lifted up her voice weeping inconsolably. Thus ended the value of a concubine in that human culture, used as a simple womb for a purpose, and then abandoned to her fate in the immensity of death. Dear brothers, this pattern of suffering and use of women worsened alarmingly in the next generation of the patriarchs. In Genesis chapters 29 and 30, we see Jacob trapped in a polygamous marriage full of deceptions with two sisters, Rachel and Leah. Rachel was the beloved wife, but her womb was closed. Leah was the despised wife, but God granted her to be immensely fertile.

This rivalry transformed the home into a true battlefield. Genesis chapter 30, verse 1, describes a Rachel consumed by envy and an anxiety that choked her, shouting at her husband, “Give me children, or I die.” Unable to conceive, Rachel made a cold decision dictated by the human custom of the time. She gave her own servant Bilhah as concubine to Jacob. Her only objective was that Bilhah would give birth upon her knees so that she could legally appropriate those children, stealing their motherhood. Seeing this, Leah did not stay behind in this fierce competition. In Genesis chapter 30, verse 9, noticing that she had stopped giving birth temporarily, she also took her own servant Zilpah and gave her to Jacob as concubine. Beloved brothers, let us stop to analyze the profound emotional abyss of Bilhah and Zilpah. They were treated literally as human incubators, simple biological tools in a war of jealousy between two well-off sisters. The bad mood in that camp was chronic. Arguments and comparisons were the bread of every day. The level of stress that these two concubines endured was terrifying.

They lived under the enormous worry of having to lie with their master by obligation, to give birth to children in pain so that they would immediately be snatched from their arms and claimed by Rachel and Leah. They had no identity of their own, nor voice in the upbringing of their own babies. They existed solely to feed the ego and satisfy the sickly competition of their mistresses. It is shocking to recognize, in the light of the scriptures, that a large part of the foundations of the 12 tribes of Israel were built upon the humiliation, the silence, and the profound anxiety of these two marginalized women. Dear brothers, before entering the darkest period of Israel’s history, we must ask ourselves a crucial question. When God raised Moses and gave him the commandments, what did the law say about this painful human custom? It is fundamental to understand that God, knowing the hardness of the human heart and the profound pagan influence that Israel brought from Egypt, established strict laws to curb abuse and protect these vulnerable women. The Lord did not institute concubinage, but regulated the practice temporarily to prevent the woman from being treated as a beast of burden or a disposable object.

In Exodus chapter 21:7-11, the law of Moses establishes revolutionary norms for the time about the maidservant who was taken as wife. If a man took a maidservant as concubine and then got tired of her, the law strictly forbade selling her to a foreign people. That was considered a betrayal. In addition, if the man took another wife, verse 10 is blunt in saying, “If he takes another wife for himself, he shall not diminish her food, nor her clothing, nor her conjugal duty.” And if the man failed in these three basic things, the woman was immediately free without having to pay a single cent. However, despite these divine legal protections, the emotional burden continued to be overwhelming. The letter of the law protected them from dying of hunger, but it could not heal the soul. The stress of feeling inferior to the main wives, the constant anxiety of losing the favor of their lord, and the daily bad mood in divided homes continued to devour the peace of these women. The law put a physical brake, but the heart of man remained corrupt.

And this was brutally exposed when Israel turned its back on the law of God, advancing in biblical history. We enter the dark period of the judges. In this period, the entire nation trampled the law of Moses. And the book of Judges chapter 21:25 summarizes it with a terrifying phrase, “In those days, there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” It is precisely under this spiritual anarchy where the concubine system showed its bloodiest face. The first devastating case we find in the family of one of Israel’s deliverers, Gideon. The text of Judges chapter 8:30 tells us that Gideon had 70 sons, for he had many wives. But verse 31 adds a detail that would unleash a national tragedy. Also, his concubine, who was in Shechem, gave him a son and named him Abimelech. Let us note the absolute marginalization. This woman did not even live in the house of her lord. She was relegated to Shechem, a city with strong pagan influence. The level of rejection that this concubine felt was transmitted directly to her son.

Abimelech grew up surrounded by constant bad mood and deep resentment. Observing from afar how his 70 legitimate half-brothers enjoyed the wealth and honor of his father, while he and his mother were treated as second-class citizens, the anxiety to obtain power and the psychological stress of social humiliation led Abimelech to commit an atrocity. Judges chapter 9 relates how Abimelech traveled to Shechem, manipulated his mother’s relatives, hired perverse and vagabond men, and murdered his 70 legitimate brothers upon one stone. The practice of taking concubines and generating families divided into social classes provoked the shedding of innocent blood and unleashed a horrible civil war. Beloved brothers, if the case of Abimelech shows us the political collapse, Judges chapter 19 reserves the most spine-chilling account about the total and absolute lack of protection for women. This passage exposes the moral abyss to which the people had descended by forgetting the law of God. The story tells of a Levite, a man dedicated to religious service, who traveled with his concubine.

As night fell, they decide to stay in Gibeah, a city belonging to the tribe of Benjamin. An old man welcomes them into his house, but the apparent security lasted very little. The biblical account describes that the men of the city, called sons of Belial, perverse men dominated by satanic evil, surrounded the house and began to beat the door with violence, demanding to abuse the Levite. It is at this critical point where the system shows its greatest cruelty. To save his own life, the Levite makes a decision that chills our blood. Judges chapter 19:25 relates with a heartbreaking tone, “But those men would not listen to him. So the man took his concubine and brought her out to them. And they entered to her and abused her all night until the morning and left her when the dawn was breaking.” Dear brothers, let us stop at this abyss of evil. She was handed over as a human shield by the very man who, ironically, represented the spiritual leadership of the nation and who, under the law of Moses, had the sacred duty to protect her.

The trauma, the physical terror, and the psychological stress that this woman endured during all those hours of darkness in the streets of Gibeah represent the greatest humiliation recorded in the scriptures. In the morning, in a state of agony and total collapse, she managed to drag herself back to the house. The Bible narrates that she fell with her hands on the threshold of the door, and there she breathed her last breath. The concern of her husband for her was so completely null that when he went out in the morning, he stumbled upon her body and ordered her with demonic coldness, “Get up and let us go.” Only to discover that she was dead. The insensitivity of the Levite before the suffering of his concubine awakened the horror of the nation and triggered a war where the tribe of Benjamin was almost exterminated. Sin, lust, and abuse, beloved brothers, never go unpunished by the severe judgment of Jehovah. Now, leaving behind the bloody anarchy of the judges, biblical history takes us to the times of the monarchy. We might think that within the safe walls of a royal palace, the life of these women would improve.

But the reality was even darker. The suffering of the concubines mixed with high politics, betrayals, and death. The first desolate case of the monarchy we find in the life of Rizpah, who was concubine of the first king of Israel, Saul. After the tragic death of the monarch on the battlefield, the legal system of the time left her completely vulnerable, without dowry, without husband, and without protection. In the second book of Samuel chapter 3:7, we see how the powerful and feared general Abner takes her by force. He did not do it out of affection, but simply to send a message of power to the heir of Saul and demonstrate that he had absolute control of the throne. Rizpah was objectified, used as a simple political pawn. The constant bad mood in that court, full of power intrigues and death threats, generated profound anxiety and humiliation in the life of this woman. But her greatest and most horrifying tragedy occurs years later in the second book of Samuel chapter 21. There were 3 years of famine in Israel, and King David, upon consulting Jehovah, discovers that the cause was the blood unjustly shed by Saul against the Gibeonites.

To appease this blood debt and stop the divine judgment on the land, David takes seven descendants of Saul and hands them over to the Gibeonites to be hanged on the mountain. Among those seven men were Armoni and Mephibosheth, the two only sons of Rizpah. The text of 2 Samuel chapter 21:10 gives us the most overwhelming and extreme picture of pain of a mother in the entire Bible. Rizpah took sackcloth of rough cloth, spread it on a rock, and stayed there from the beginning of the harvest until rain fell from heaven upon them. She spent entire months living in the open, refusing to abandon the corpses of her sons. The level of physical stress and mental collapse of this woman is unimaginable. She spent the dark nights chasing away the beasts of the field and the burning days scaring away the birds of prey so that they would not tear apart the decomposing bodies. Now this structural curse also reached the house of the man according to the heart of God. King David ignored the direct command of Deuteronomy chapter 17:17, which strictly forbade the king to multiply his wives.

The high price of this disobedience was paid by 10 innocent women during the terrible rebellion of Absalom. In the second book of Samuel chapter 15:16, we see a decision dictated by panic. Then the king went out with all his family after him, and the king left 10 women concubines to keep the house, while the main family, the royal wives, and the valiant warriors fled to the safety of the desert. They were abandoned to their fate in Jerusalem. The level of concern they felt upon seeing the immense wooden doors close and hearing the advance of the rebel usurper army was paralyzing. The stress of feeling completely defenseless before a military coup consumed them inside. Absalom, following the perverse and diabolical advice of Ahithophel, set up a tent on the roof of the palace and went into the 10 concubines of his father in the sight of all Israel. They were systematically outraged to humiliate David and demonstrate public domination. The shame, the disgust, and the extreme pain they suffered under that tent marked one of the greatest and darkest tragedies of the Bible.

When the rebellion is crushed and David victoriously recovers the throne, the text of the Second Book of Samuel chapter 20 verse 3 gives us a chilling outcome for these 10 women. And when David came to his house in Jerusalem, the king took the 10 women concubines whom he had left to keep the house and put them in seclusion and gave them food, but he never again went into them. But they remained shut up until they died in perpetual widowhood. Beloved brothers, imagine this. Those women were widows in life, locked in a house under surveillance for the rest of their days. They were fed physically but discarded emotionally, dragging a chronic stress from the public trauma, living in a state of profound hopelessness and perpetual anxiety at being deprived of their freedom and any family purpose. This shows us how destructive it is to depart from the perfect order of God. The system of concubinage only brought confinement, a bitter bad mood, and continuous weeping even in the palace of the most beloved king of Israel.

Beloved brothers, if the tragic confinement of the 10 concubines of David fills us with profound sadness, the absolute climax of the spiritual, moral, and emotional disaster of this practice, we find it in the life of his son and successor. It is in the reign of King Solomon where we see the total collapse of God’s design and the maximum objectification of women. In the first book of Kings chapter 11 verse 3, we read, “And he had 700 wives queens and 300 concubines, and his wives turned away his heart.” 1,000 women living under the same palace system. To truly dimension the emotional abyss of this suffocating scenario, we must observe the cruel division of classes that the Bible and history expose. While the main wife, the daughter of the Pharaoh of Egypt, enjoyed an exclusive sumptuous palace built solely for her, the 300 concubines were relegated to the absolute bottom of the royal hierarchy. They were third category citizens within their own home, trapped in stone enclosures. Bad mood and envy ruled the endless hallways upon seeing the enormous privileges of the noble blood queens in contrast to their own misery.

The concern for their survival was daily, knowing perfectly well that in the eyes of the king, they were worth much less than the political alliances formed with the princesses of Egypt, Moab, or Ammon. Solomon himself reveals to us in the book of Ecclesiastes chapter 2 verse 8 how he perceived these women at the peak of his vanity and earthly power. He wrote with total coldness, “I gathered great quantities of silver and gold, the treasure of many kings and provinces. I hired excellent singers, both men and women, and I had many beautiful concubines. I had everything a man can desire.” Beloved brothers, let us note the gravity of this text in the light of the word. The concubines were grouped in the same category as silver and gold. They were reduced to simple material possessions, accumulated delights to satisfy the ego of man. Being stripped of their humanity, erased from their identity, and treated as a simple object of exhibition generated in these women a level of brutal psychological stress. To this is added the overwhelming and cold logistical reality of the court.

The fourth chapter of First Kings describes the monumental daily provision of food to sustain the machinery of the king’s house. 30 cors of fine flour, dozens of fat oxen, 100 sheep, servants, and fowl. The concubines formed part of this immense and depersonalized institution. They were trapped in a golden prison, surrounded by material abundance but sunk in total affective misery. Living as a simple maintenance expense within the palace records fed a state of severe anxiety, knowing that they depended entirely on a monarch who could never dedicate them time, attention, or real affection. The outcome of this emotional oppression was catastrophic for the entire nation. The biblical text specifies that when Solomon grew old, his wives inclined his heart after foreign gods. The concubines and foreign wives, desperate to find spiritual refuge, sense of belonging, and an identity that the confinement of the palace denied them, clung desperately to the cults of their native lands. They demanded their own altars and the king, overwhelmed by the immense stress of maintaining political and social control over 1,000 frustrated women, ended up yielding to idolatry.

He built high places right in front of the holy city of Jerusalem for Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Sidonians, and for Milcom, the abominable idol of the Ammonites. The system of concubines not only destroyed the mental health of hundreds of women reduced to palace slavery, but was the exact trigger that rotted the heart of the wisest king on earth, causing Jehovah to pronounce sentence and split the kingdom of Israel into two confronting nations. Dear brothers, throughout this profound biblical study, we have traveled through the tents of Abraham in the desert, the divided camp of Jacob, the anarchy and blood in the times of the judges, and the dark hallways of the palaces of David and Solomon. The conclusion, in the light of the infallible word of God, is undeniable. The system of concubines was a purely human invention. It was a structure of domination absorbed from pagan peoples, born of the hardness of the heart that completely deviated from the perfect, loving, and holy design of God established in Eden.

In the beginning, the Lord created one man and one woman so that they would be one flesh, united in a covenant of equality, dignity, respect, and genuine love. Every time the human being tried to alter this sacred design for lust, arrogance, power, or political convenience, the result was always the same: pain, death, and destruction; homes fractured by hatred, empires divided by idolatry, and thousands of women subjected to a life of perpetual stress, suffocating anxiety, and constant bad mood amid contempt and abandonment. The story of the concubines in the scriptures is not simply a recount of kings and ancient luxuries. It is a solemn, severe, and valid warning about the devastating consequences of departing from the perfect will of the creator and treating our fellow beings as objects instead of souls created in the image of God. With this, beloved brothers, we reach the end of this biblical study. If this video has been a blessing to your lives, I invite you to give it a like since this helps YouTube recommend it to more people who also need to hear and learn from the teachings of the word of God. Likewise, do not forget to subscribe to the channel and activate the notification bell so that YouTube notifies you every time we publish a new video. With these words, I say goodbye for today. God bless you.

To further elaborate on the historical and theological implications of this practice, we must consider the broader cultural context of the ancient Near East. The status of a pilegesh was deeply intertwined with the socio-economic structures of the time. While modern readers may view the biblical narratives through a lens of individual rights, the ancient world operated on a system of kinship and household preservation. A man’s household was his primary source of identity and legacy. In this context, concubinage served as a mechanism to ensure the survival of the lineage, particularly when the primary wife was unable to produce heirs. However, as we have seen in the stories of Hagar, Bilhah, and Zilpah, this “solution” to barrenness frequently resulted in domestic chaos and emotional trauma. The Bible does not shy away from showing that even the “heroes of faith” suffered the consequences of following cultural trends over divine commands.

The theological reflection on these narratives reveals a consistent pattern: when humanity attempts to “help” God through worldly methods, the outcome is inevitably flawed. Abraham and Sarah’s decision to involve Hagar was a lack of faith in God’s timing. Jacob’s entanglement with his wives’ servants was a result of a deceptive marriage and a household fueled by competition. In the era of the Kings, the multiplication of wives and concubines became a symbol of earthly pride rather than spiritual devotion. Solomon, despite his wisdom, fell into the trap of thinking that human resources and political alliances could provide a security that only God offers. The silence of the concubines throughout these stories is perhaps the loudest testimony to their suffering. They are often spoken of as property or tools, yet the text records their tears, their flight into the desert, and their eventual isolation. These details serve as a reminder that God sees the marginalized and the brokenhearted, even when the society around them does not.

In conclusion, the biblical record of concubinage serves as a mirror to the human condition—our tendency to conform to the world around us and the painful fruit of those choices. It highlights the beauty and necessity of God’s original design for marriage, which honors the dignity of both man and woman. As we study these difficult passages, we are called to value every human soul as an image-bearer of the Creator and to seek the restoration of all things in Christ, who treats his church not as a second-category servant, but as a beloved bride. May we learn from the shadows of the past to walk in the light of God’s truth today.