The Jacob-Rachel-Leah Story
It is recommended that the series “A New Way to View The Women of the Bible,” “Women are Equal to Men,” and “Jacob and Esau Birthrights and Blessings” be read before reading the posts in this series.
Review of the previous post.
The previous post 2, post number of 8, discussed several possible explanations for the questions raised about the story.
Preview of this post.
This post, post number 3 of 8, continues the discussion of possible explanations for the general questions and begins a discussion of Leah’s part in the story.
II Possible explanations
(2) Leah’s part
It would seem that Leah was a pawn in this. Why would she willingly go along with such a plan? She could have refused and accepted her lot in life as many other women at that time did.
It has already been discussed that it is feasible that Leah went along with the plan for the greater good of the nation. However, another view is that if she were not wed to Jacob, she might have been sent to Esau[1], also, Leah was getting older and thus less marriageable. If Leah had actually been promised to Esau, to avoid marrying Esau, a switch of Leah for Rachel would take her off the market. This plan would fit well with the fertility plan discussed above. Further, if Leah had been promised to Esau and Leah and Jacob had “gotten together,” Leah would no longer have been a virgin, and Esau might have rejected her. This would have caused great embarrassment, so Rachel, Leah, Jacob and perhaps Laban devised this plan to take Leah “off the market” by saying that Leah had to be married first before Rachel and thus was switched for Rachel on Jacob’s wedding day. These explanations seem to be more reasonable than Jacob being surprised to find he had married Leah when he thought he was marrying Rachel. After all, Jacob had lived with the two of them for seven years; you would think he would know which was which, even in the dark and/or under a veil[2].
It should be observed that the Bible barely gives Leah note. She is given almost no dialogue (as few as two lines). The Bible provides such a sparse description of Leah, that it is nearly impossible to know Leah’s thoughts, motivations, character, and reactions, for sure based upon the text alone.
Given the sparse description of Leah by the Bible, one has to wonder if she wasn’t viewed by the authors and considered by Jacob solely for her fertility. That is, Leah’s only purpose was as a seedbed for Jacob. Many wives at this time were viewed strictly as seedbeds and homemakers and thus were given slight, if any, interest beyond those limited functions. Could Leah have been such a person? If so, it would explain the minimal treatment given to her by the Bible. Perhaps that is why Dinah is nearly totally overlooked in all the stories concerning her, including Jacob’s arrangement of his family at the banks of the Jabbok river prior to his encounter with Esau where there is no mention of Dinah in any of the listings and the entire story of Jacob’s encounter at Shechem where the story concerns Dinah yet she (and Leah, her mother) is given absolutely no dialogue. This lack of attention to Leah and Dinah seems to indicate that Dinah had no value because she was a daughter of a seedbed, and seedbeds were only important for their sons, and the sons of those seedbeds were important, not the daughters. Such a view of Leah would also be consistent with the above-discussed plan by the three main actors in this story.
However, if Leah is strictly a seedbed, how did she become a matriarch of Judaism? She was doing nothing more than other women at that time: fulfilling a strictly limited role of a seedbed. If she is to be a matriarch, then more is required, much more. Luck plus biology does not seem to be enough to make Leah a matriarch equivalent with such heroines as Sarah and Rebecca, or even elevated above such heroines as Tamar and Rahab. It appears that Leah was simply lucky enough to be fertile (biology, which is common to females) with a man who is the only link in the chain of the covenant (Jacob). Maybe this is why the Rabbis have spent so much time and effort in developing Midrash about Leah – they are actually looking for reasons to elevate her to matriarch status for the simple reason that she is the mother of the two extant tribes of the religion, which include the tribes of kings, priests and even the Messiah. The Midrash has tried to find such additional traits in the intricacies of the text and thus raise many questions about who Leah was. Sue to the paucity of text concerning Leah, it is believed that such additional character traits can best be found in questions and a discussion about such questions. As such, this essay will conclude with a long list of discussion questions for the reader to answer and discuss.
For this reason, the body of this essay will cover some aspects, and the main emphasis for Leah will be in the Discussion Questions Section since Leah is best analyze by means of questions.
Preview of the next post.
The next post, post number 4 of 8, continues the discussion of possible explanations for the general questions and discusses some implications of the story.
[1] S. Dresner, Rachel (Minneapolis: Augsbury Fortress, 1984) p. 50.
[2] There is some midrash which claims that Rachel and Leah devised the switch to spare Leah the humiliation of remaining unmarried while her younger sister married (to this end, the midrash suggests that Rachel and Jacob had devised a secret code which would tell Jacob that he was with Rachel, and Rachel told Leah of the code). There is even some midrash which proposes that Rachel hid beneath the bed and answered Jacob so he would think she was the one in bed with him. However, even under these views, it is difficult to imagine that Jacob would be fooled for the entire night of sleeping in very close proximity and in sexual intimacy with Leah that she was not Rachel, especially since he had lived with these two women for seven years.