Bilhah (Person)

Bilhah was the female servant Laban gave to his daughter Rachel when she married Jacob (Genesis 29:29). Rachel could not have children, so she gave Bilhah to Jacob as a concubine, a woman who lived with a man like a wife but had a lower position. Rachel accepted Bilhah’s two sons as her own. She named them Dan and Naphtali (30:3–8; 35:25; 46:25).

Ancient marriage contracts from Nuzi and elsewhere in the ancient Near East show that a wife who could not have children might give her servant to her husband so that the family could have an heir. These documents come from about the same time period as the events in Genesis 29. Later, Jacob’s son Reuben had sexual relations with Bilhah (35:22). This was incest, a sexual relationship between close family members.