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A handmaiden (nowadays less commonly handmaid or maidservant) is a personal maid or female servant. [1] The term is also used metaphorically for something whose primary role is to serve or assist.) [ 1 ] Depending on culture or historical period, a handmaiden may be of enslaved status or may be simply an employee.
Zilpah – Leah's handmaid who becomes a wife of Jacob and bears him two sons Gad and Asher. Genesis [200] Zipporah – wife of Moses, daughter of Jethro. Exodus [201] Zuleika – Potiphar's wife and Asenath's mother. Asenath married Joseph, so she is the grandmother of Ephraim and Manasseh (Tribe of Joseph). She is given no name in the Bible ...
Zilpah was given to Leah as a handmaid by Leah's father, Laban, upon Leah's marriage to Jacob (see Genesis 29:24, 46:18). According to the early rabbinical commentary Pirke De-Rabbi Eliezer , Zilpah and Bilhah , the handmaids of Leah and Rachel , respectively, were actually daughters of Laban and one or more of his concubines. [ 3 ]
Genesis 29:29 describes her as Laban's handmaiden (שִׁפְחָה), who was given to Rachel to be her handmaid on Rachel's marriage to Jacob. When Rachel failed to have children, Rachel gave Bilhah to Jacob like a wife to bear him children. [2] Bilhah gave birth to two sons, whom Rachel claimed as her own and named Dan and Naphtali. [3]
The Handmaid's Tale is a futuristic dystopian novel [6] by Canadian author Margaret Atwood published in 1985. [7] It is set in a near-future New England in a patriarchal, totalitarian theonomic state known as the Republic of Gilead, which has overthrown the United States government. [8]
Leah [a] (/ ˈ l iː ə /) appears in the Hebrew Bible as one of the two wives of the Biblical patriarch Jacob. Leah was Jacob's first wife, and the older sister of his second (and favored) wife Rachel. She is the mother of Jacob's first son Reuben.
The term handmaid had been chosen in 1971 as a reference to Mary, the mother of Jesus, who, in most English translations of the Bible, described herself as "the handmaid of the Lord" or a woman who is close to God. [13] The community teaches that husbands are the head of the household as well as the spiritual head of their wives.
Dinah opens the story by recounting for readers the union of her mother Leah and father Jacob, as well as the expansion of the family to include Leah's sister Rachel, and the handmaids Zilpah and Bilhah. Leah is depicted as capable but testy, Rachel as something of a belle, but kind and creative, Zilpah as eccentric and spiritual, and Bilhah as ...