And Bilhah, Rachel's handmaid, conceived and bore Jacob a son during the years when, having married Leah and Rachel, he was serving Laban for his daughters in the land of the children of the East and their families were growing. That birth falls in the interval between the morning after his dream at Bethel and his departure from Haran to return to Canaan. It belongs to the record of the channels through which the Promised Seed would come. It belongs also to the account of Jacob's trials and victories through which he was changed from the supplanter into one of God's people.
The account shows God's care for Jacob despite his selfishness and unfaithfulness. Yet the verse falls within Jacob's checkered and unsatisfactory experiences, marked by selfish plotting and suffering, in which his overreaching was met with overreaching as God's providence brought retribution. It belongs to Jacob's plural and polygamous marriages, in which he fathered children by Bilhah and others outside the original order of marriage established in Eden in Genesis 2, which is a plain violation of the marriage institution. That patriarchal violation does not make marriage less sacred or destroy its sacred character, just as a violation of the Sabbath would not destroy the Sabbath.
Marriage was made for man before the fall, its sanctity is not derived from the Decalogue, and the seventh commandment guards its sacredness as the fourth commandment guards the Sabbath. Jacob's polygamous household shows that polygamy brings very great unhappiness into every family where it enters. It was never anything but evil and wrong, even though it was allowed among God's people through the whole Old Testament period and was tolerated by Moses because of the hardness of their hearts, after it received a terrible rebuke when it first entered the church of God, while the true standard that ought never to have been departed from is the original order of marriage in Eden.
Together with Zilpah, Bilhah bore four sons who were recognized as free and equal with Jacob's other sons, shared equally in their father's property, and became heads of tribes in Israel. Their standing shows that their mothers' status as handmaids did not make the children chattel, that the women themselves were not chattel slaves but free persons under a form of allegiance like members of nomadic tribes, and that their status did not fit the conditions of chattel slavery.
And Bilhah, Rachel's handmaid, conceived and bore Jacob a son during the years when, having married Leah and Rachel, he was serving Laban for his daughters in the land of the children of the East and their families were growing. That birth falls in the interval between the morning after his dream at Bethel and his departure from Haran to return to Canaan. It belongs to the record of the channels through which the Promised Seed would come. It belongs also to the account of Jacob's trials and victories through which he was changed from the supplanter into one of God's people.
The account shows God's care for Jacob despite his selfishness and unfaithfulness. Yet the verse falls within Jacob's checkered and unsatisfactory experiences, marked by selfish plotting and suffering, in which his overreaching was met with overreaching as God's providence brought retribution. It belongs to Jacob's plural and polygamous marriages, in which he fathered children by Bilhah and others outside the original order of marriage established in Eden in Genesis 2, which is a plain violation of the marriage institution. That patriarchal violation does not make marriage less sacred or destroy its sacred character, just as a violation of the Sabbath would not destroy the Sabbath.
Marriage was made for man before the fall, its sanctity is not derived from the Decalogue, and the seventh commandment guards its sacredness as the fourth commandment guards the Sabbath. Jacob's polygamous household shows that polygamy brings very great unhappiness into every family where it enters. It was never anything but evil and wrong, even though it was allowed among God's people through the whole Old Testament period and was tolerated by Moses because of the hardness of their hearts, after it received a terrible rebuke when it first entered the church of God, while the true standard that ought never to have been departed from is the original order of marriage in Eden.
Together with Zilpah, Bilhah bore four sons who were recognized as free and equal with Jacob's other sons, shared equally in their father's property, and became heads of tribes in Israel. Their standing shows that their mothers' status as handmaids did not make the children chattel, that the women themselves were not chattel slaves but free persons under a form of allegiance like members of nomadic tribes, and that their status did not fit the conditions of chattel slavery.