Slave wives and Concubines

Slave wives
We have seen how the patriarchal stories allow slave-women to represent their mistresses in producing children for her husband. The children are counted as legitimate, seen clearly in the Jacob cycle, but more complex in the Hagar/Sarah cycle.
A law in Exodus deals with slave-wives.

Concubines.
King Solomon was famous for his army of concubines, alongside his army of wives. David had fewer, but more interesting in the story. The term for concubine was pilegesh. It is not semitic, defying analysis from a triliteral root. It is the equivalent of the Greek pallakis feminine of pallax but for the word to be a Greek loan word the text would need to be relatively late (6th century BCE, although Greek speaking visitors may have landed at Palestinian ports before that, and even traded women) , not the much earlier dates that the stories assume. This has led some to see the Aramaic phrase palga isha 'half-wife' as the origin of the Greek term to justify an earlier use of the term (e.g. Wikipedia, without justification). Until demonstrated otherwise, I regard this as tortuous and insecure. So for example, even if palga means 'half' and isha 'wife' [or is it 'woman'?] do they ever appear together meaning 'concubine'? And are the logistics (date etc) realistic to get the term across the water to Greece by 500 BCE or thereabouts? Someone has a lot of persuading to do before I believe that. A different Aramaic term for concubine was used in Daniel 5.2.

Genesis describes concubines mainly in the genealogies, probably the latest editorial section. The parallel compilation in I Chronicles names Keturah's, Abraham's "wife" in Genesis 25, as a concubine. The children of other concubines he sent away so as not to challenge Isaac. Nahor had concubines and their sons mentioned. Bilhar, Rachel's slave and therefore Jacob's slave-wife is termed a concubine after Rachel's death. Caleb has two concubines, Ephah and Manoah, named in his genealogy. We should not conclude that these references describe early marriage customs - rather that they imply differing status in clan relationships. The late writer uses a term current in his own day to make the point.

In Judges, Gideon has a concubine living in Shechem; and separately a Levite had a Benjaminite concubine who became estranged and returned to her father (Judges 19). Here
the pilegesh presents a mixed message. When a mob attacked, she was put out and raped, during which she died. The fact that this happened caused offence which was remedied by war. The offence was a property infringement (like vandalism) rather than one involving women's rights. It was described as the time when there was no law, before the monarchy, when everyone did what was right in their own eyes. The reality may have been the lawless period after the return from exile, before authorities were in place, when Greek girls came into Palestinian ports and entered insecure sexual relations. As stories of the fictional old times were being told and written down, these inhabited the stories as anachronisms.

The huge harems of the Persian empire, represented in the story of Esther, are read back into earlier royal stories. Solomon, the legendary king of all Israel and Judah, had 700 wives and 300 concubines, and other monarchs mimiced this on a smaller scale. For a royal prince to have sex with his father's concubines was an attempted coup: Absalom started his attempt at the throne of his father David this way (2 Sam 16.21 cf 15.16). Reuben slept with Zilpah, Jacob's concubine "and all Israel heard". Of course, all Israel was very much an anachronism - it did not exist then.
Post under construction.