HEBREW WORD STUDY – HANDMAID – MISHPACHAH – משׁפחה  

Genesis 30:4:  “And she gave him Bilhah her handmaid to wife: and Jacob went in unto her.”

Reading Genesis 30 can really leave your head spinning as you read about all these children being born from four different women from Jacob. Let’s see you start off with Leah who has four children of her own.  Rachel is unable to have children at this time so she pawns off her handmaid, Bilhah to Jacob where she bears a couple kids, then Leah feeling that she reached her limit gets her handmaid Zilpah to sleep with Jacob who has another child then again Leah sleeps with Jacob and she has another son and a daughter and then low and behold Rachel gets pregnant and has Joesph and…wait a minute does anyone ever consider Jacob in all this mix?   I mean that old boy would have made the cover of the National Enquirer, not to mention the baby competition between Leah and Rachel.  Like a dumb ox, Jacob just keeps sleeping with all these women producing children who became the patriarchs and namesakes of the twelve tribes of Israel.  But boy the Bible makes no bones about the havoc Jacob caused sleeping with all these women, even to the point where the eldest Reuben son of Leah has an affair with his step brother’s mother and his stepmother and Rachel’s handmaid Bilhah. I figured an Oedipus complex would show up somewhere. 

There is much to say about Genesis 30 but for now, I would like to focus on the word mishpachah. Lexicons do not help much they simply call a mishpachah a maid, handmaid, slave, servant etc. The word does imply a lowly status.  In this case, however, Bilhah and Zilpah would most likely also be considered a pilegesh or concubine.  The Midrash Rabbah teaches that Bilhah and Zilpah were two younger daughters of Laban, possible stepdaughters as they started out as just a mishpachah. 

A concubine would be a legal wife but a sub-standard wife as Genesis 30:4 says that Rachel gave Bilhah her handmaid le’ishah – to wife.  She could have been a servant a mishpachah as a half sister who got sort of a promotion to a concubine or wife. According to the Talmud in Sanhedrin 21a a wife was to receive a contract of marriage a ketubah.  The marriage nissu’in was to be preceded by a kiddushin or betrothal.  The concubine had no kiddushin but did get a ketubah but without a clause for a divorce settlement.   In other words, she could be unwifed  (is that word?) simply by the husband saying you are no longer a wife.  No legal proceedings, no alimony, child support nothing, not even the child.  Where a full-fledged wife, like Leah and Rachel, would have all sorts of legal rights.  The idea being that a wife, in Hebrew culture, was a woman that a man loved, cherished and protected.  A concubine was a woman who was simply a sleeping partner usually to produce an offspring.  A concubine, like a wife, would have her own tent to raise her own family. The husband would visit the tent on designated days. The handmaids had no such rights and stayed in the tent with the wife.  Wives, however, claimed the children of handmaids as their own with the handmaid as nothing more than a surrogate.  However, if as in the case of Bilhah, she is given le’ishah – to wife, things would get complicated as to who gets called mommy. 

Handmaids were usually women who were captured during a time of war and made to be slaves to the wives of the conquering nations.  Sometimes, because of war and the naturally hazardous lifestyle of men too many men in a particular tribe would die off and there would not be enough men to go around as was the case in Laban’s tribe.  So some men were forced to marry second and third wives.  The number of wives you had was an indication of your wealth and if there were not enough wealthy men the men would take concubines and if they were too poor to afford a concubine some women ended up as handmaids.  So Jacob was probably not wealthy enough for any more wives so he picked up Bilhah and Zilpah as mishpachah since there were no men to claim them and they had to become servants to their older half-sisters

As a handmaid was considered a wife’s personal property she did not think it improper to let her husband sleep with her handmaid for the purpose of producing a child and only for that reason. However, in such intimate relationships, emotional attachments were bound to happen,  as you can see from Hagar a handmaid who eventually, according to the Talmud became a wife.

The point is I believe God gave us this mind-numbing Genesis 30 to emphasize that having more than one sexual partner was not His design, that in every case where a wife was not a man’s one and only sexual partner (as well as the other way around) serious problems arise.