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, post number 4 of 8, continued the discussion of possible explanations for the general questions and discusses some implications of the story.
Preview of this post.
This post, post number 5 of 8, presents a discussion of God’s part in this story.
- God’s part in this story
- Bigamy
The investigation of this story from a perspective that teaches a moral lesson begins with the seemingly imprimatur of God to Jacob’s bigamy[1]. However they participated, actively or passively, the fact remains that these two sisters were both wives of Jacob and it was a bigamous relationship. It is not enough to say that involvement with multiple women was a customary practice for men in the ancient Near East. Such a practice has an inner meaning that rejects what the Bible teaches that God wanted for marriage. For the Patriarchs of Judaism, the God of Genesis appears to want a man to have only one wife at a time who is his full partner in life[2]. The relationship of Jacob, Rachel and Leah appears to be outside of this model. Handmaidens or surrogates may be seedbeds, but they were not wives in the sense that Sarah was Abraham’s wife or Rebecca was Isaac’s wife. Sarah and Rebecca were full partners in their marriages, their opinions mattered and were listened to. There is a difference in station between them and their handmaidens. Certainly, neither Rachel nor Leah could have banished the other to the desert in the way Sarah banished Hagar, or the way either of them could have banished their own handmaidens.
The explanation discussed above is that the three participants agreed that marriage between Jacob and Leah was the best way to fulfill the terms of the Covenant and all three sacrificed their own desires for this responsibility. As has been the case in other situations, God and man have been willing to break rules, such as the Ground Rules, if the continued existence of the experiment or the covenant is at stake. As discussed in other essays, God actively intervened to save the entire experiment in cases such as Exodus where God’s non-intervention would have doomed the fleeing slaves to either immediate death upon being caught by Pharaoh’s army or death of the religion through assimilation into Egyptian society if they were captured and returned to Egypt as slaves[3]. God actively violated a Ground Rule and overrode the free will of the Egyptian army. God did not intervene or punish and thus passively violated a Ground rule by allowing Rebecca, Isaac and Jacob to override the free will of Esau, again to preserve the covenant (Jacob was the better choice than Esau). The Rachel/Leah situation is similar. If Rachel was barren or at least had great difficulty conceiving, or if she were to die in child birth after only one or two children (which, in fact, actually turned out to be the case), the future of the Jewish Nation would be very much in doubt as Jacob was the only one who could carry on the covenant God made with Abraham and Isaac. In the case of a threat to the continued existence of the experiment, it is logical to assume that God would actively violate a basic ground rule. If God would actively violate a basic ground rule to save the experiment, He would certainly passively violate a lesser rule to avoid losing the entire covenant and perhaps the entire experiment. Thus, it would be logical for God to permit bigamy even though, under normal circumstances, He would want monogamy.
Still further, following up the thought that Rachel may have been barren or at least someone who would have great difficulty conceiving, perhaps God allowed Jacob to marry both so the Covenant could be honored and the line of Abraham and Isaac would be continued and then to reward Jacob with a marriage to Rachel without endangering Leah or her children to a fatherless life. Thus, the apparent bigamy of Jacob was really God’s desire to ensure a continuation of the Abraham/Isaac line while also allowing Jacob to marry the woman he loved.
Preview of the next post.
The next post, post number 6 of 8, continues the discussion of God’s part in this story with a discussion which includes a suggestion that a barren woman can still be a “wife”.
[1] While some argue that the laws of bigamy had not yet been given and polygamy was legal (see, Klein, Guide, 388-89 (polygamy for Jews was not outlawed until the rabbinic ban for Ashkenazic Jews in the eleventh century and polygamy was not prohibited for Sephardic Jews living in Muslim territories until 1950)), or that since Jacob, Leah, and Rachel were not living in the area of the Promised Land, the laws only applied to those living in the Promised Land and hence did not apply (and then this justification is extended to Rachel’s death outside the Promised Land so Jacob would not technically be a bigamist in the territory of the Promised Land). However, the Patriarchs are often held to such laws. This then raises the question of whether Jacob and Leah were legitimately married. One application of the law is that both parties consent to the marriage. In the case of a hoax, Jacob was not consenting (he thought he was cohabiting with Rachel), thereby de-legitimizing his “marriage” to Leah. On the other hand, if he knew he was cohabiting with Leah, then his marriage to Leah was legitimate, which made his marriage to Rachel illegitimate. Either way, one wonders how God would allow this arrangement to produce legitimate children from one or both of those women.
[2] This lesson is re-iterated in the “Song of Songs” which hearkens back to God’s prototypical design in the Garden of Eden of one man and one woman, in marriage, a relationship God designed to be mutually exclusive. The protagonists in the “Song of Songs” seek a higher level to which their relationship might ascend if only they could be exclusively each other’s. That is what led the female’s request, “Put me like a seal over your heart” (8:6 ). This seems to indicate that a monogamous marriage was the desired form rather than a bigamous marriage.
[3] As is also discussed elsewhere, God even intervened in Abraham’s life to save Sarah for Abraham. Had God not intervened, it is possible that Sarah would have remained a wife of the Pharaoh and thus not been available to Abraham to produce Isaac. As such, the experiment would have ended before it began.