 You basically have wives, concubines, and virgins were a social class, but then you also have prostitutes, another social class. All of the, and we'll include virgin here as the sort of anti-example, but all of these are about sexual relationships. And wives, you know, just had a superior status. It wasn't always more public than concubines, because concubines could be a concubine publicly, it was known. It wasn't just like a mistress, that kind of thing. But within the culture, the differentiation between a wife and a concubine was really about status within the clan, and sort of a social pecking order in terms of the prioritization of the status of children as well. So you could have a concubine that wasn't technically your wife. You didn't go through the same sort of ceremonies and that sort of thing. I mean, it was a known status. And that was permissible in a patriarchal culture. There's a little bit of confusion because there's a couple of places in Scripture. The sort of leading example is Kitora, where she is called both a wife and a concubine. This is one of Abraham's women, you know, wife or concubine. So it could be evidence that the term at one time socially overlapped. It would be difficult to determine when that particular time period was, because that gets involved into the authorship of the Pentateuch issue, which is a really big issue. But it could also refer to sort of different periods of status. She could have started out as a concubine and then for circumstances we don't know, Abraham decided to formalize the relationship in such a way that she was looked upon as a wife. And it's not really clear what, in that case, where the terminology overlaps, what precisely is going on. But there was a family distinction. There was a social distinction. It wasn't scandalous. It was scandalous if you, again, took someone who was betrothed or someone else's wife, adultery and that sort of thing, or visited a prostitute. I mean, those were social scandals. But within patriarchal culture, there were sexual relationships that could be had at different levels within the culture that was socially acceptable. Now, I'm a big believer that the Bible doesn't, the Bible does not give us a culture. The Bible presents a culture. It is what it is because the people writing it were of a certain time period and they were writing about people in that time period. The Bible doesn't mandate that we do polygamy. It didn't mandate polygamy then. It just said, well, we have polygamy. And so there's a law or two in the Torah that say, well, if a person has two wives, then you do this and that and the other thing, that kind of thing. By design, God never intended to lay down a culture for all time and eternity. There is no inspired culture. Period. Because God knew that even though the Bible isn't written to us, it would be written for people that would live long after the patriarchal period, even within the Bible as I alluded to before. Culture changes. The Bible is not about establishing a culture. And so, okay, they had polygamy. That's nice. By Jesus' day, it was like, well, this is probably, you know, you don't want to do this and nobody really does it anymore. You know, Jesus references the ideal of marriage back in Genesis. And in the beginning, you didn't have polygamy either. You have it after the fall. So we know what the ideal is. We know what Genesis is about and all that sort of thing. But there will be people that just throw up their arms. Oh boy, I can't have a high view of Scripture because it has polygamy or something else or some critic that says, oh yeah, you know, I'm going to dig you now. I'm going to bring up polygamy. Big deal. Show me the verse that says this is the culture God inspired. Where is this a rule for us? It isn't. It is that way because that's when it was produced. And oh, by the way, when God prompted people to write something, when He prepared them throughout their lives for a given time and a place and an occasion that He could foresee, that I need this person to be molded into this type of individual because he's going to be in this particular circumstance and I'm going to need him to write something down, to write a letter that needs to be written that's uncomfortable, to do X, Y, or Z. And so God providentially prepares this person through the course of their whole life. When God works with people to produce this thing we call the Bible, He never is surprised at what He gets. I mean, God never had a moment where it's like, oh, you know, the second millennium BC, what was I thinking? Why didn't I do this later? I could have expressed this in so much more detail. Boy, I wish I had a mulligan. Look, it never happens. God is never surprised at what He gets. He makes the decisions to produce Scripture when He produced it, with whom He produced it, at whatever time and circumstance and culture they were. They got the job done. God was satisfied with the result. He isn't surprised. He doesn't regret making the decision when He did. He knows what He's getting. And it was His decision to do it that way at that time with those people. Deal with it. I mean, honestly, honor God's decisions. They're His decisions. You might think there was a better way to pull this off. Talk to God someday about that. He'll shut you down pretty quickly. I mean, honor God's decisions.