The Baby Race

I like this story. I always have. It concerns two women who had been placed in a practically impossible situation and just had to deal with it. The women weren’t always exactly exemplary, though one was pretty close. They were excusable, I think, because of the situation they were in as well as because God’s law had not yet been given. They did the best they could with what they had to work with.

Not all the commentators seem to agree with me, though, as to the story’s likeability. Sexist as it may be, I think their dislike stems from the fact that every commentary I looked at was written by a man. Two of them could not seem to believe that such a subject was worthy of inclusion in God’s history, and seemed to be looking for reasons such a seemingly preposterous inclusion was made. I think it’s simple: God doesn’t think the way man does, and He wanted the story included. I’m glad He did. Like I said, I like this story.

Contrary to what some Bible story books will tell you, Jacob did not have to wait an additional seven years to marry Rachel. He married her a week after Leah had been heavily veiled and placed in the wedding party as the bride. Jacob hadn’t been trying to be a polygamist. But polygamy was accepted as normal, ordinary, and okay in those days. Laban got his cross-eyed daughter nobody else wanted married off, and seven more years of labor from his now favorite son-in-law. He didn’t even have to give his daughters a dowry.

If those who say Jacob was seventy-seven when he fled from his angry brother was right, then it’s a very good thing that Jacob didn’t have to work an additional seven years before marrying Rachel, though he had to afterward. He was, by now, eighty-four years old. This past New Year’s Eve I lost my father, about seven weeks shy of his eighty-fifth birthday. He was, at that time, infirm to the point that he had all but lost his power of speech. But it was, if the commentators are right, and I have no reason to assume they aren’t, it is at this same age that Jacob’s real life began. And right away, the race was on.

Laban himself must have been quite old. If you remember, he was involved in the negotiations with Eliezer, Abraham’s servant, for the hand of Rebekah in marriage to Isaac. I always pictured him older than Rebekah, though I suppose there’s no real reason to think this. Sons were always considered more valuable than daughters in those days, and Laban would still have been reckoned to have some authority over her, even if he was a few years younger. But be that as it may, he was of the same generation as Jacob’s mother, who had to wait twenty years to give birth to her sons. And if Jacob was seventy-seven by the time he reached Laban, and Laban was maybe twenty years old when his sister married Isaac, he must have been about a hundred and seventeen years old at this point. For him to have had daughters of marriageable age, he must have had many wives, and wives far younger than himself. One commentator even said something I have often thought: Jacob proposed working seven years for Rachel because when he met Rachel, she was only a child, not old enough to marry. I believe this fits with what we see of Laban’s character.

Laban’s cross-eyed daughter nobody else wanted was someone far greater than anyone, even Jacob had any idea of. When Laban foisted her off on Jacob, Jacob had no idea what he was getting. And the next seven years, while Jacob was working off what he was said to owe to Laban, did not show Jacob just who Leah really was. But even then, she was a woman of prayer.

Jacob wasn’t paying Leah any attention. He only had eyes for Rachel. Oh, he visited her tent every now and again—after all he was her husband and he had that right, didn’t he? But it was Rachel who got all the affection.

Leah wasn’t the only one to notice. The Bible tells us that God noticed, and to make Leah’s life a little more bearable, He gave her Jacob’s first son. She named him Rueben, which means, “See, a son!” In those days, having children was so important that a woman who did not have them was a pariah. And by this time, probably only nine months after the wedding, Rachel had not become pregnant at all. There doesn’t seem to need to be any further need to comment on why Leah would name her son such a thing, but there is. She said more than this. She wasn’t just telling the world, “Look here, all you people who think so little of me, I have a son!” though surely that was part of it. She recognized that God had seen her. The one who was had something wrong with her eyes (okay, maybe she wasn’t exactly cross-eyed, but there was some kind of problem), the one whose father had to resort to tricks to get her a husband—in holding her own son in her arms she was holding living proof that God Himself had seen her. Maybe she herself couldn’t see very well, but God had seen her.

She also said something else. “Jacob’s gotta love me now!” After all, she had a son, and Rachel didn’t even have a daughter. But he didn’t.

Immediately, though, she was pregnant again, and had another son. She named this son Simeon, which means “hearing.” First, she had said that God saw her, and now she said He heard her.

“Now, my husband will love me,” she said again. But he didn’t.

He did, however, still visit her tent, and she became pregnant again right away. Her third son’s name was Levi, which means “joined.” Surely now Jacob would be joined to her. Surely now he would love her.

What I think is certain is that the meaning of the names Leah was naming her children couldn’t have escaped Jacob. But women were not considered important by men in those days, and he had the wife he loved. He had to have known that she was using her naming of her children as a way of pleading with him to give her the love she needed and had a right to, but he didn’t understand the need. If he had, he would have understood the evil inherent in polygamy. But he didn’t. And not even three sons could turn Jacob’s heart toward her.

When she had her fourth son, probably nine months after the third, she gave up, at least temporarily. Instead of giving him a name that signified her gnawing need for her husband, she named him Judah, meaning praise. She praised God. She could have easily thought that she must have been wrong the first three times, that maybe God hadn’t seen or heard her, since her husband was never joined to her in heart. She could have become bitter, since she had plenty to be bitter about. But instead, apparently, she decided to praise God for what He had given her.

And then something happened that scared Leah absolutely to bits.

As thankful as Leah was to be having children, and even more so to be having boys, since boys were considered more important, I suspect she was turning them over to a servant to nurse, just like the wealthy Roman women would do much later, so that nursing would not interfere with her fertility. As soon after the birth of each baby as she realized that his addition would not yet gain her Jacob's heart, she wanted to be pregnant again so that maybe the next one would win her her husband. Up until now, some three and a half years into the seven, it had been working, at least halfway. She wasn't getting Jacob, but she was getting pregnant again quickly, and having one son after another.

But this time, after Judah was born, she must have begun to menstruate, to her tremendous and absolute horror. Four sons hadn’t been enough to win Jacob's heart. She couldn’t stop now!

The reason this scared her so much was something that was happening during the same time that she had been having her four sons.

It wasn’t lost on Rachel that Leah was having children and she wasn’t. She wasn’t just blissfully enjoying Jacob’s undying affection. What woman would, when her husband was having children with another woman? Instead, she envied Leah, and said to Jacob, “Give me children, or I’ll die!”

I am not unsympathetic to Rachel in this. All my life all I really wanted was to get married and have children. I got married at twenty-two and not long afterward began trying to become pregnant. My first son was born when I was twenty-five. In the meantime, I learned to understand very well the feeling behind Rachel’s vehement statement, exaggeration though it was.

Jacob told her it wasn’t his fault—God was the One Who had not allowed her to have children. So Rachel decided to take a page out of Sarah’s book and “help” God give her what she thought she should have. She told Jacob to take her slave girl, Bilhah, and have children by her, who would be considered hers.

Jacob should have told her it was ridiculous and he wasn’t going to hear of it. After all, his mother Rebekah had such a servant herself, a woman named Deborah. Isaac and Rebekah had been married twenty years before he and his brother had been born, and there was no suggestion of Isaac having children by Deborah. Jacob and Rachel, by comparison, had only been married a very little while. But Jacob didn’t say any of this. He did what she said, and pretty soon, Bilhah had a son, too.

Because Bilhah’s son was considered Rachel’s (an arrangement I imagine Bilhah was none too happy with), Rachel got to name him. She named him Dan, which means judgment, saying that God had judged her. She meant that God had judged between her and her sister and had given her vindication. Whether or not she was right about this is a more open question.

Now Sarah had been content with only one son of Hagar, but Rachel was not content with Bilhah having only one son for her. Before long there was another. Rachel named him Naphtali, which means “my wrestling.” She said she had been involved in a great wrestling match with her sister, and she was winning.

That’s what Leah thought, too. She hadn’t become pregnant again since Judah. Judah couldn’t have been more than a few months old, but still, she feared the worst—that he would be her last son, and Bilhah might have more than her. If that happened, she would never be able to win Jacob’s love. She asked Jacob to take her maid, Zilpah, too, so she could get more children.

One of the commentaries I looked at had an interesting theory about Bilhah and Zilpah that I’d never thought about before, but that made sense to me. He said that it had been conjectured that the two maids may have been Laban’s daughters by a concubine, or by two concubines and as such were considered servants. I thought that made sense for two reasons. First, it seems within the none too righteous character of Laban to have done such a thing, and second, Jacob wasn’t supposed to be marrying or having children by women outside his clan, and this would put these two ladies squarely within it. It also makes their story all the more tragic, or at least doesn’t diminish the tragedy. Their humanity was never recognized. They were merely used.

Once again, Jacob went along with it. I guess he figured he might as well, since he did it for Rachel.

Leah named Zilpah’s first son Gad. This meant “troop.” She figured she was going to get a whole army of children out of Zilpah. Once again, she was wrong.

Zilpah had one more son, and only one more son. Leah, the eternal optimist, named him Asher, meaning happy or blessed. She said that other women would call her blessed for her now six sons. It was certainly true that they would, in that day and age, but not so certain that it was actually true that she was.

Little Rueben, only four or five years old by this time, accidentally brought about the next development in the story. He was out in a field on a beautiful spring day, picking flowers or sweet-smelling wild fruits for his mother. They were called mandrakes. Nobody knows anymore what they actually were, or anyway most of the commentators said that. One said they were a kind of melon. But one thing is known about them that Reuben, when he was picking them, could not have known: women of the time thought they were good for increasing fertility. They were the ancient equivalent of IVF. And when Rachel saw her little nephew put these awesome things in his mother’s hand, she knew one thing: she had to have them. And she simply asked her sister to give them to her.

But for Leah, it wasn’t so simple. How dare Rachel ask her for anything, especially for a gift placed in her hands from her little boy, when Rachel already had the one thing for which Leah had longed for years: the love of her husband? And she told Rachel so, rather vehemently.

“Okay,” Rachel said, suddenly realizing that Jacob was her bargaining chip. You can have him tonight if you’ll give me the mandrakes.” She probably figured that the mandrakes would work just as well the next night as this one, and she probably didn’t care as much about having Jacob as Leah did.

Leah wasn’t about to let her bargain just be idle talk. She had bought a night with the man she longed for more than anything else in the world, and she caught him on the way in from tending her father’s sheep, and told him about the arrangement, to which Jacob had no argument whatsoever. And that night, Leah became pregnant for the fifth time.

Once again, she had a little boy, and named him Issachar, meaning “hire,” or “reward.” You’d think she was talking about the mandrakes, but according to her, she wasn’t. She thought God was paying her back for giving her maid to her husband, which shows a not so tremendous understanding of God. The Bible says she had him because God had heard her prayer. But the Bible had not yet been written, and she only knew so much.

After this, Leah was back to her old baby-every-nine-months self. She soon had another son, and named him Zebulun. She was also back to her optimistic, pleading naming, which she had not done since Levi. Zebulun meant “dwelling.” Now Jacob would dwell with her, she thought. He didn’t, though—not any more than he had before.
She had another baby right after Zebulun, her seventh in seven years. All her worry had been for nothing. There was something very surprising about this baby, however, something different from all ten of the babies who had been born before: this baby was a girl, as far as we know, the only daughter Jacob ever had. One of the commentators suggested that Jacob did have other daughters, but they are not named because girls just weren’t considered important. But I doubt this, because all of these babies were born within the space of seven years. Sure, there were different mothers, but still, there was hardly time for there to have been any more, I don’t think. Certainly Leah couldn’t have had any other daughters in that time, and it is clear that Rachel wasn’t having children at all. As far as the two concubines, Jacob didn’t seem to show a lot of interest in them. I don’t think there were any other girls. Leah named this little girl Dinah, which means “judgment.” One of the commentators noticed that the name was similar to Dan’s, and had the same meaning. He suggested that Leah was referencing that somehow. If she was, perhaps she was trying to say that she, too, had been vindicated.

Dinah wasn’t the last child Jacob had before his seven year servitude was finally up. There was one more, and the surprise was who had him. The Bible says that God remembered Rachel, and at last allowed her to have a son. She named him Joseph. One of the commentators, Matthew Henry, said something very interesting about his name that I’d never heard before. Rachel said two things when she had Joseph: first, that God had taken away her reproach, and second, that God was going to one day add another son to this one. Joseph would not be her only child ever. What the Mr. Henry said was that his name came from both of these things, from the words Asaph and Jasaph, the first referring to subtracting or taking away, and the other referring to addition. It was as though she were naming her baby “Subdition.” The rest of the commentators all said that the name meant “adding,” and maybe that’s all it does mean, but I kind of liked this, anyway.

And now the seven years were up, and the baby race was over. Who can say which sister won? The prize, obviously, was Jacob’s undying love and affection. My father, a minister, used to say that in Jacob’s old age, Leah was more a wife to him than Rachel had been, and he was probably right. But we aren’t ready for that part of the story yet. For now, I guess it would appear that Rachel won. She was no longer barren, and she had Jacob.

But Leah had Judah, the fourth of her six sons. And Judah was the long, long ago ancestor of the most important Child ever born—Jesus. She would have no idea in this life how she was blessed, but oh, she was!

Now, if you’re adding, you can easily see that I only named eleven sons, and everybody knows that Jacob had twelve. But the twelfth was born later, after the race, and I’ll get to him in another posting.

The reason I say that all this happened within seven years was because of what happened next, which the Bible clearly says happened after the birth of Joseph. But that’s the next story.