Strange Story: Esther 2 – What Happened to the Concubines and Their Sons?

The girls that were still in the year of skin treatments and therefore, had not taken their turn to go to the king, were sent home when Esther was chosen. We would call that the “no harm, no foul” rule.

After a girl went to be with the king, she was taken to the hall of concubines, for that was she was for the rest of her life. There her life was easy but also frustrating.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SONS OF THE KING’S CONCUBINES?

In Israel, and I presume in the rest of the Ancient Near East, the sons of a concubine did not receive an inheritance and were considered of lower status than the sons of a wife.

In the case of Abraham and the sons of his concubines, Hagar and Keturah, he gave them gifts while he was still alive and sent them away. I am hopeful that this was the custom in all those countries and that honorable men followed it.

Since they did not receive any land, they had to start a business or work as a day laborer. Consider being raised in a secondary palace of the king, having everything provided, then being sent away with a “gift” from the king, but told you were on your own. Even if that gift was enough to start a small business, these young men did not know how to work or how to run a business. They were trained by their mothers who had never started a business before and likely had never seen one started. The king’s tutors would have focused only on the sons of his wives. When they got out on their own, these young men were easy targets for swindlers.

What’s more, it was hard for such a man to find a wife. His father had sent him away and refused to fulfill his fatherly role of finding him a wife. He had no land. He had very little offer. The only kind of father who would agree to giving such a man his daughter was a man who was also in a dire situation, without resources and without hope.

Without a wife and family, these young men had no stability in their lives. Once they ended up with no money at all and were forced to become day laborers, it is likely that they would turn to robbery, violence and even murder.

If my understanding is correct, we can imagine kings with many concubines, such as Xerxes and Solomon, trying to not get their concubines pregnant because it would eventually add to the level of crime in the city. They probably did not care if they had a bunch of disgruntled women in a secondary palace somewhere, but crime increasing in the city streets had to be avoided. Xerxes would have used the head eunuch in charge of the concubines to determine the timing for when a concubine could be sent to spend the night with the king without producing a pregnancy.

In the case of Esther, we are told that she had 7 hand maidens assigned to her, and that they were chosen from the king’s palace. We are not told about the others, but it is not a stretch to think that all of them had at least one maid who was chosen from the king’s servants. In this way, the maids could keep the eunuchs informed of things that the eunuchs did not see. The virgin’s monthly cycle was likely one of them.

As the head eunuch decided whom to send to the king next, I think he chose based in part on what time of the month it was for those on his “short list.” He did not want to send anyone who was having a flow of blood, or anyone who was primed to get pregnant.

So you see that it was quite possible for a king to have lots of concubines and seldom get one of them pregnant.

Some of them may have been dancers in the king’s troupe of dancers. I say this because, if one of the dancers pleased the king more than the others, he would invite her to stay the night with him and then she was not just a dancer, she was a concubine and was moved to the hall of concubines. She would likely continue performing with the other dancers, but she resided with the other concubines. She would have more purpose and more things to do than the other concubines, but there were still frustrations.

All these things are reasons why the nobility did not want their daughters to be part of this “beauty contest” and so they likely arranged marriages for their daughters a bit earlier than usual to avoid these things happening to their daughters.