Question: you've referred to concubinage, and what does
that mean in the L.D.S. Church.
You need to remember that if you read section 132, the
1843 revelation, that revelation not only approves plural wives, it also
approves concubines.
The question is, what does that mean? well, the term "concubine" as I
understand it, and I'm not a biblical scholar and haven't researched this
carefully, but in the Old Testament you have references to wives and
concubines. My understanding is that in
the Old Testament when it used that term, whatever the original Hebrew was, it
meant that it was a wife who did not have the same social and legal status as
other wives. Topically, concubines were slave women or servants in the home who
became wives of the master of the home.
Several of Abraham's wives, he had four, and two of those
wives were concubines. They were his
servant women who became his wives. I
believe two of them had the higher social and legal status. They were not his servant women. So there was
that distinction. lt related not to the
legitimacy of the marriage, but to the social standing of the women in the
marriage.
Then in contemporary use, concubine came to mean
basically a woman who was in like a mistress, and that became a conventional
British and American understanding of the word concubine.
Then you have the revelation of 1843 approving plural
wives and concubines, and it doesn't explain what they are. So you are left to wonder what we're talking
about there, because there are no slaves.
Well, that's not true, there were black slaves in American society, but
there were no slaves in Nauvoo society that this would have applied to, so what
was it referring to? My only
understanding of this, any time the brethren referred to concubines, they never
explained what they meant. They just
said "concubines." I think that what it came to mean in Mormon
practice and in Mormon thought in the 19th century was a woman who was married
to a man without benefit of a sealing ceremony performed by a Priesthood
holder. So it referred to a woman who
became married to a man through an ordinance of what I call a "solemn
covenant of marriage." And I don't like referring to those women as
concubines because of the very negative connotations that term had and did
have, even in the 19th century. But I
think that's what George Q. Cannon and others were referring to when they said
that concubinage is a true principle of the Lord, and if necessary it's going
to occur again. It meant that if
necessary, if they for, one reason or another couldn't have a Priesthood holder
perform a ceremony of sealing for a couple, that the couple could enter into
concubinage under the authorization of God by agreement or vow of love and
fidelity between themselves and this goes to what I regard as a principle that
the structure of the Church is not necessary to ratify what God approves, and
that in terms of relationships, a relationship of love and commitment doesn't
need to have an ordinance to perform it, to have the approval of God, that that
is between the couple and their relationship and God.
Yet, in the 19th century, that was a minority
practice. Most of the polygamous
relationships that existed began with a formal ceremony in which there was a
formal officiator performing it.
There were very few of concubinage. But I've traced down a number of them. I focused on them primarily after 1890. and there were very few of those. That will have to be the last question, I'm
afraid. I don't want to take the
patience of those sitting here wondering, "will he never stop?" So
thank you again for the opportunity to speak before you. (D. Michael Quinn,
"Plural
Marriages After the 1890 Manifesto," Bluffdale, Utah,
August 11, 1991)
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