As with Bilhah’s offspring, Zilpah’s children are claimed and named by Leah as her own. Because she was now barren (for whatever reason), she was in the legal position to give her own maidservant to Jacob as another woman, concubine. On top of all this, Leah had stopped bearing children – perhaps because Jacob was no longer performing his legal obligations to continue to provide her with marital relations (at one point, she actually had to buy a night with him from her sister). She was no longer the mother of all of Jacob’s children – Rachel had a child now and she was the one who was truly regarded, by Jacob, as his wife. When Rachel had successfully provided Jacob with an heir, Leah felt her position was tenuous. Rachel had the perfectly acceptable legal recourse in those days to provide her husband with a surrogate, and according to the laws of the surrounding nations, any child borne by the concubine would be counted as coming from her – which is exactly why Rachel, and not Bilhah, named the boys. Both women had a crisis of identity – Rachel wasn’t a mother and Leah wasn’t really a wife in her own eyes.
What Leah knew was that her husband, although she had given him many sons, had no regard for her – Jewish tradition even states that Jacob moved to Bilhah’s tent after the death of Rachel (I don’t think he ever got over that anger from the morning after the wedding). Families desperately needed heirs, and the dyadic social identity of a woman depended on her being not only a wife, but also a mother – it simply didn’t matter if your husband loved you best, if you had no children – Rachel knew that (so did Sarah, Rebekah, Hannah and Elizabeth). In the ancient Near East, according to the laws of many of the surrounding nations, a woman had two years to bear a child to her husband and if she didn’t, she could legally be divorced. The problem lies in the fact that the Hebrew word for wife, ‘ isha,’ is also the generic word for woman (we see this same phenomenon in Greek), and so Bilhah and Zilpah were given to Jacob as women who were there for the express purpose of bearing children – otherwise known as concubines. “Now why? The text says that they are Jacob’s wives, and yet wives would retain ownership over their own children, so how can they be actual wives?” We passed on to Zilpah, and they noticed it again – “Gad is Leah’s son!” Every time a son was born I asked my boys to tell me who the sons belonged to and it worked fine until we got to Dan. I put up the white board and I was marking out the family tree of the patriarchs. So Genesis 30 is what I was teaching my boys yesterday morning. But like everything else, modern context is not Biblical context – we don’t think the same way or have the same needs and therefore we don’t live the same way we certainly don’t have the same expectations. Even though I never watched either “Big Love” or “Sister Wives,” I knew about people who lived like this and I will bet that anyone who lives in certain parts of certain western states can tell you the same thing. I had no idea about what dyadic social identity was all about, or concubinage, and although I did understand the importance of political marriages (Solomon did NOT need that many alliances, just sayin’) I was way too caught up in idea that “black Mormons” (not meaning color, but it was just what they were called in my neck of the woods) represented a sort of an ideal Biblical model for what was going on in ancient times.
One of the hardest things there is, is to contemplate the possibility that our point of view has been utterly contaminated – after all, they never taught ancient Near Eastern context in any of the churches I attended. To the modern proponents of polygamy (as opposed to Biblical polygamy, which was entirely different), our forefather Jacob is the shining example – after all, he had four wives right? Well, that’s what I thought for many years as well and it was no wonder – I was looking through a lens colored by modern movies, television shows, and ten years spent living in uber-Mormon southern Idaho. (Note: Yes, I do understand that it is actually called polygyny when a man has multiple wives, and polygamy can be either male or female but for purposes of using a familiar term to everyone I am simplifying this by calling it polygamy)
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