RE: So tell me, what did Solomon do with all his concubines?
We can have a hint of what he did by understanding what Concubines were for in the ancient Biblical world.
In the Bible, a concubine was a woman acquired by a man as a secondary wife. Her purpose was to provide a male heir in the case of a barren wife, to provide more children in general to enhance the family’s workforce and wealth, and to satisfy the man’s sexual desires. A concubine was endowed with rights and protections by Hebrew law but was not equal in status to a wife.
A woman living as a concubine was more common in Israel during the patriarchal period of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob than in later periods, but it still happened among the wealthy and especially the royal like King David and King Solomon.
Although God provided rights and protections for concubines in the Law of Moses, God did not introduce or approve of this marital model. The Hebrew word for concubine, Piylegesh, isn’t even of Hebrew origin. It’s “a non-Semitic loanword borrowed to refer to a phenomenon not indigenous to Israel,” according to Baker’s Dictionary of Biblical Theology.
David L. Baker, theologian and seminary professor, said this:
“In the ancient Near East, it was acceptable for a married man to have a secondary wife or concubine, so long as he had the resources to support a large family. Apart from working in the home and providing sexual companionship, a major role for a concubine would be to produce children, to increase the work force in a household.
“Polygamy and concubinage were also allowed in ancient Israel and seem to be have been quite common in the patriarchal period (age of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), but after that most marriages of commoners were monogamous.”
I want to hear about the enuchs..the many, many enuchs...