Genesis Vol 3.pdf - College Press

THE SON OF THE BONDWOMAN 16:l-16
Archeological discoveries have fully substantiated the
details of this incident which occurred some eighteen or
twenty centuries prior to the beginning of the Christian
era. The practice of a slave woman bearing a child for
a childless wife is strange indeed from the point of view
of the Western world. But that this was a common prac-
tice in the patriarchal world is evident from two sources
especially, namely, the Code of Hammurabi and the Nuzi
tablets. Excavations at Nuzi (or Nuzu), an ancient
city of northern Mesopotamia east of the Tigris-the site
is now near Kirkuk in Iraq-have uncovered thousands of
clay tablets in cuneiform script most of which date back
to the 15th and 16th centuries before Christ, at the time
when the town was under Hurrian (Ilorite) domination.
From Par. 146 of the Code of Hammurabi we learn that
a priestess of certain rank who was free to marry but not
to bear children, gave her husband a slave girl in order to
provide him with a son. We learn that if the concubine
should then have tried to arrogate unto herself a social
status of equality with her mistress, the wife should have
downgraded her to her former standing as a slave. The
wife, however, did not have the right to sell her to others,
Speiser (ABG, 120) : “This law is applicable to the case
before us in that (a) the childless wife must herself pro-
vide a concubine, (b) the successful substitute must not
forget her place. But these provisions are restricted to
certain priestesses for whom motherhood was ruled out.
No such limitations applied to Sarah.’’ Her case is covered
fully, however, in one of the published texts from Nuzi.
Here we have an account of a socially prominent family
(of no special religious commitments) in which the wife
who is childless is required to provide a slave girl as concu-
bine in order that the husband may have an heir. The
wife, however, will have legal rights to the offspring.
Moreover, if the formerly childless couple should later have
a child of their own, they could not thrust out the child
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