Concubine-concubines
Short answer: In Scripture a concubine was a wife of secondary rank, a woman joined to a man and his household without the full status of the primary wife. She was not a girlfriend, a mistress, or a casual partner. Genesis 16 introduces the first concubine-like arrangement in the Bible: Sarai, childless, gave her Egyptian servant Hagar to Abram as a wife, and the plan produced rivalry, cruelty, and a fleeing woman whom God met in the wilderness. The Bible reports concubinage honestly without commanding it, and the narrative consistently shows its cost. The passage establishes that God sees the vulnerable, that Hagar's son Ishmael is blessed, and that Abraham's household was not held up as a moral ideal in this matter.
What the word concubine actually means
The Hebrew word often translated concubine is pilegesh, and it describes a woman in a recognized but secondary marital relationship. She was attached to a man's household, could bear children who belonged to that household, and was distinguished from the primary wife, but she was not a hired worker or a woman visited without obligation. That is why 2 Samuel 5:13-16 can list David's concubines alongside his wives and the children born to him in Jerusalem without any sense of surprise.
Understanding the term matters because modern readers carry a different set of assumptions. English speakers hear concubine and think of secrecy or a relationship outside marriage. In the ancient world the arrangement was public, legal, and economic. A concubine was part of the household structure, and the children she bore were part of the family line, not outsiders. The Bible uses the term with that meaning.
The arrangement arose in a world where women often had little independent protection, where childlessness carried social shame, and where a household's future depended on heirs. Concubinage gave a woman a place in a household and gave a family additional hope of offspring. That does not make the system God's design; it shows what Scripture is describing and what it is not approving.
Hagar: the first woman in Scripture called a wife of secondary rank
Genesis 16:1-6 does not use the word concubine, yet it describes the arrangement that would later be called one. Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children, and she had an Egyptian servant named Hagar. Sarai took Hagar and gave her to Abram as a wife. The text says Sarai did this, which places the initiative in her hands and shows that this was a household decision, not a hidden affair.
Once Hagar conceived, the relationship soured. She looked at her mistress with contempt, and Sarai complained to Abram that she was being wronged. Abram handed the matter back to Sarai, who dealt harshly with Hagar until Hagar fled into the wilderness. Every step of that sequence is painfully human: anxiety about an heir, a plan that treats a servant as a means to an end, jealousy, and cruelty.
What makes the passage remarkable is that God follows Hagar into the wilderness. He speaks to her, tells her to return, and promises her that her offspring will be multiplied. She names the Lord who spoke to her, and she is the only person in Scripture who gives God a name in that way. The woman with the least status in the household receives direct divine attention.
Why childless wives gave their servants to their husbands
Genesis 30:1-13 shows the same pattern a generation later. Rachel bore Jacob no children and said to him that if she did not have children she would die. Jacob became angry and asked whether he was in the place of God, who had withheld children from her. Then Rachel gave her servant Bilhah to Jacob, and Bilhah bore sons. Leah, when her own childbearing paused, did the same with Zilpah.
The repetition is not coincidence. In that culture childlessness was a crisis, and a sonless household faced a shaky future. A woman could use a servant as a surrogate in hope that the child would count as hers. Genesis records the practice without commending it, and the connections between these stories are tense: rivalry, naming contests, bargaining over mandrakes, and grief all follow.
Scripture tells these stories without airbrushing them. It does not present the surrogate plan as a model for marriage. It presents it as what real people did when they were afraid, and it shows what happened next. The results were family conflict that would echo for generations, not a tidy solution to the problem of barrenness.
Concubines in the law of Moses
When Israel received the law at Sinai, concubinage existed among the people and the law addressed it rather than abolishing it outright. Rules protected a concubine from being treated as disposable and regulated how a man's obligations applied when multiple wives were involved. The laws consistently moved toward protecting the woman who had less power, not toward granting the man more freedom.
This pattern is common in the Old Testament. God accommodates a cultural situation while steering his people toward greater justice within it. Jesus later taught a standard that goes back to the beginning, one man and one woman joined in a covenant, and pointed to hardness of heart as the reason Moses permitted certain practices that were never the original design.
So when a reader asks whether the Bible endorses concubinage, the honest answer is that Scripture regulates it, records it, and shows its damage, while the created ideal and the teaching of Jesus point elsewhere. Faithful Christians agree on that trajectory even when they differ on how much of the Old Testament legal material applies directly to modern marriage law.
David and Solomon: the cost of multiplying wives
2 Samuel 5:13-16 reports that David took more concubines and wives from Jerusalem and that more sons and daughters were born to him. The verse is matter-of-fact. It does not pause to condemn him, though the wider narrative of David's reign shows the price of a crowded royal household: rivalry among sons, a coup, and grief upon grief.
Solomon is the clearest example. 1 Kings 11:1-13 says he loved many foreign women and that they turned his heart to other gods, and the passage connects his many wives directly to the divided kingdom. The very blessing of wisdom and wealth that made Solomon famous became the setting for his downfall, and his many marriages were part of the machinery of that failure.
Deuteronomy had warned kings against multiplying horses, wives, and silver. Solomon did all three at full scale. The narrative does not treat his marriages as neutral political arrangements; it treats them as the door through which idolatry entered the nation. That is the Bible's consistent verdict on the accumulation of women by powerful men.
Judges 19: the darkest picture of a concubine
Judges 19:1-30 opens by placing the story in a time when there was no king in Israel, and it introduces a Levite who took for himself a concubine. What follows is one of the most horrifying chapters in Scripture: the concubine is abandoned, abused, killed, and dismembered, and her death becomes a catalyst for civil war.
The chapter is deliberately grim. The narrator does not comment or soften. The horror is the point, and the closing line of the book, that everyone did what was right in his own eyes, frames the whole period as a moral catastrophe. A woman at the bottom of the household hierarchy is the one who absorbs the violence of a society that has lost its bearings.
This is not a passage to build a marriage ethic on. It is a passage that shows what human beings do when there is no king, no accountability, and no regard for the vulnerable. Read alongside Genesis 16, it confirms that the Bible's stories about concubines are stories about power, and that God's concern is consistently for the person with the least of it.
What Jesus and the apostles assume about marriage
Jesus went back to Genesis when he was asked about marriage and divorce, teaching that from the beginning the Creator made them male and female and that the two become one flesh. He treated the creation account as the standard, and he named hardness of heart as the reason for the concession of a certificate of divorce. He did not treat concubinage as the goal of marriage.
Paul told husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her, and he told wives to respect their husbands, in a passage that assumes one husband and one wife in a covenant relationship. He also insisted that leaders in the church be the husband of one wife, a qualification that would be difficult to apply in a household built on concubinage.
None of this means the Old Testament stories are useless. They are inspired and profitable, teaching us about sin, about God's patience, and about the long consequences of choices made in fear. They simply are not the standard by which marriage is measured. The standard is Genesis 2, and Jesus reaffirms it.
What Genesis 16 teaches us about God and the overlooked
The most important thing in Genesis 16:1-6 is not the institution of concubinage. It is the God who goes looking for Hagar. She is a foreign servant, a woman used to solve someone else's problem, and when she runs she is met by the angel of the Lord in the wilderness. The text is clear that she was seen and heard.
God tells her to return and promises that her offspring will be multiplied. Ishmael is born, and later God reaffirms that he will bless him and make him a great nation, even while the covenant line runs through Isaac. God's purposes for Israel do not cancel his care for the son of the servant. The Bible is careful to record both.
For anyone who has been overlooked in a household, a church, or a system that treated them as a means to an end, this chapter is important. It does not pretend the harm did not happen. It records the flight, the fear, and the return, and it puts the words of God into the mouth of the person with no leverage. That is where Scripture's heart beats.
Biblical fidelity check
Genesis 16:1-6 establishes several things plainly. It establishes that Sarai gave Hagar to Abram as a wife, that the arrangement was Sarai's initiative, that tension arose between the two women, that Abram gave Hagar back into Sarai's authority, and that Hagar fled. It also establishes that God spoke to Hagar in the wilderness. What the passage does not do is command concubinage, present it as God's will, or describe it as anything other than a human plan carried out in distress.
A common misreading treats the chapter as a model for solving infertility, as if the Bible were offering a method. That is wrong because the text shows the outcome as conflict, not blessing, and because the rest of Scripture moves in the opposite direction, back to the one-flesh union of Genesis 2. Another misreading treats the passage as if it justified Abram completely or condemned him completely; the text does neither. It reports what happened and lets later Scripture, especially the teaching of Jesus, set the standard.
Other passages that speak to Genesis 16
Genesis 16 belongs to a larger biblical conversation about kingship, covenant, and the consequences of choices made in fear. The book of 1 Samuel traces how Israel's demand for a king and the character of its leaders shaped the nation, a theme that helps explain why royal households in Scripture so often accumulated wives and concubines. For the wider context, see 1 Samuel Bible Study Guide: Kingship, Calling, and the Heart God Sees and Kingship in the ancient Near East and 1 Samuel: A Biblical Guide. The narratives of David's succession and Solomon's reign show the cost of a household built on power, which is the subject of 1 Kings 1: David Acts as Adonijah Rebels and 1 Kings 10: Solomon's Wisdom and Wealth Tested.
Frequently asked questions
Was a concubine the same as a wife in the Bible?
No, but she was not a mistress either. A concubine was a wife of secondary rank, joined to a household with recognized status and obligations, whose children belonged to the family. Genesis 16 calls Hagar Abram's wife even though she was Sarai's servant, which shows that the relationship was marital in nature while remaining subordinate. The distinction is one of rank and legal standing, not of secrecy or casualness.
Does the Bible approve of concubinage?
Scripture records concubinage and regulates it without commanding it. Genesis 16 shows what happened when Sarai gave Hagar to Abram: jealousy, mistreatment, and flight. Solomon's many wives are explicitly linked to his idolatry in 1 Kings 11:1-13. Jesus pointed back to the creation account when he taught about marriage, which is the standard the rest of Scripture moves toward.
Why did God allow concubinage in the Old Testament at all?
God's law met Israel in a world where women had limited protection and childlessness was a crisis, and it moved to protect the vulnerable within that situation rather than ignoring them. Jesus explained that certain allowances existed because of hardness of heart, not because they matched the creation design. Faithful Christians read these passages as accommodation and patiently wait for the fuller revelation in Christ.
