Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] What is a concubine in English? There's a fancy word, concubine, which is most of the time used only for the description of what was going on in biblical times.
[00:00:14] And concubine has, I'm sure, a specific meaning in English language which we could look up what it means, but it's probably different from what the Torah is calling concubine. What is concubine in the Jewish tradition?
[00:00:31] In biblical times, when a man would marry a woman, this woman usually would come with a female helper or female helpers.
[00:00:42] And those female helpers were the responsibility of this woman to take care of. But because the husband was now supposed to take care of his wife, now they are becoming his responsibility as well.
[00:00:56] In Jewish law, we are very, very careful about intergender contact.
[00:01:03] We know that there are laws of yichud. A male is not allowed to stay alone in a room if the door is closed with a female. A male should not be in a house alone with a female unless they're related.
[00:01:17] If it's your relative, if it's your wife, if it's your sister, if it's your mother, I obviously it's not a problem.
[00:01:23] But if there is a female in a house, which I'm not related to by Jewish law, I'm not allowed to be in a house alone with her.
[00:01:30] And we look at it very, very strictly in Jewish tradition today as well.
[00:01:36] If I have an appointment with a woman and I have to be in, let's say in my office with someone with a female, I make sure to leave a door open. I would never close the door.
[00:01:47] You know, I make sure not to be alone in a building if somebody's coming in the evening for an appointment or something like that.
[00:01:54] And by the way, it's funny, I remember how in America when I would tell this to people some 20 years ago, non observant Jews would look at me funny, they would laugh at me, they would think that I'm pulling their leg or something. Today, after MeToo movement, it's considered a given today, people don't even think twice when I tell them something like this. But in the Jewish law, that has been the practice since the times of immemorial, since biblical times, that a man is not allowed to be alone with a woman who is not related to him. So the issue is that if a woman who you are marrying has a maid, obviously this maid is going to be in the house. And obviously there's going to be times when you'll be alone with her.
[00:02:41] And not only it creates A problem for a man to be alone with her under these circumstances. It also creates a problem for a woman because later on, if somebody will want to marry her, they will look at her. One second. You spent past two years, past five years in the house where you were next to this guy all the time. Are you going to be telling me that nothing happened there, something has changed?
[00:03:05] So this is why in the Jewish law there was such a thing as concubine, which a provision. Let's say that if you are marrying a woman that has a maid and this maid is going to be hanging around the house and next to you all the time, you have to marry her, she is going to be like your wife. There's only one distinction between her and your wife.
[00:03:27] Your wife, you have ketubah obligations, which means that your financial obligations towards her and if you get divorced and you have to pay alimony according to the Jewish law to make sure that she will not just be kicked out on the street.
[00:03:42] And you have these responsibilities towards your wife, you don't have these responsibilities towards a concubine. Why? Because concubine is the responsibility of your wife, not yours. So if, let's say you get divorced with your wife, then a concubine lives together with her and then your wife will have to take care of her, not you.
[00:04:01] So this is the only difference between a wife and a concubine. Otherwise concubine was like a wife.
[00:04:10] So our forefathers had concubines.
[00:04:13] It says that Avraham had a concubine, Hagar. And as a matter of fact, after Avraham, Abraham's wife Sarah passed away, he married his concubine full time. Now she already became his wife and he had more children from her.
[00:04:31] Same thing. It says that Jacob Yaakov, he had two wives and he had two concubines. Each one of his wives had a maid and they gave him children as well.
[00:04:43] This is what a concubine is in the Jewish law. I would be curious to find out. Actually, let's google it. What concubine is in how is it defined?
[00:04:54] Here you go. According to Google, concubine is a woman who lives with a man without being legally married to him, often in a relationship where she is considered subservient to a wife or holds a lower social status.
[00:05:09] So it's pretty accurate based on what we said.
[00:05:12] The term originated from Latin, referring to a woman who cohabits with a married man.
[00:05:20] The specific social function and status of a concubine varied greatly by culture and era.
[00:05:26] But the role typically involved intimate relationships, sometimes with the intent of producing children for a man's household.
[00:05:36] That's not far from what we have described in the Jewish law. Only someone whose mother is Jewish as a Jew.
[00:05:45] But this law started, like all Jewish laws, only from the giving of the Torah.
[00:05:50] That's why when our forefathers had children from their concubines, it didn't make them neither Jews, non Jews.
[00:05:58] Because, you know, Rebecca Rivkah is wife also. She didn't come from a Jewish home.
[00:06:05] Rachel and Leah. Rachel and Leah also didn't come from Jewish households. So they were as non Jewish as their concubines. But back then, before the Torah was given, only someone who followed the Torah was considered to be Jewish nation like we understand it today didn't exist yet.
[00:06:20] That's why the children of those concubines were Jewish. If they followed the law like it was with Bilhah and Zilpah, then they were Jewish. If they did not follow the law like it was with Hagar's son Ishmael, then they were not Jewish.
[00:06:35] So the fact that they were children of concubines did not affect their Jewish status.
