Bible Women: Leah and Rachel, Two Sisters’ Bitter Rivalry and Hate

And it came to pass, that in the morning, behold, it was Leah: and he said to Laban, What is this thou hast done unto me? did not I serve with thee for Rachel? wherefore then hast thou beguiled me? Gen 29:25 

Jacob on the Road to Godliness

By all appearances the injustice Jacob suffered at the hands of his uncle Laban was huge.

‘wherefore then hast thou beguiled me?’

No one can imagine these words coming from Jacob. But they are his, and he had just come from conning his brother out of his blessings.

But now he hardly has time to sit down than he meets his match in his uncle Laban.

He loved Rachel. When he saw her for the first time he ‘lifted up his voice, and wept.’ And probably that was a bad omen. For the rest of his life at his uncle’s place was nothing short of tears.

He had just put in seven years hard labour as dowry for his love, only for his father in law to con him. And then as if to add salt to injury, Laban asked Jacob to put in another seven years labour now for his rightful fiancée. It almost sounds like being charged twice for the same service.

But Jacob’s love for Rachel was so strong that those years seemed as nothing.

God had mellowed him. In another era Jacob should’ve fought for his rights like a man, but he didn’t. Besides he was in a fix. He had slept the whole night with Leah without realizing she wasn’t Rachel. And by all accounts he was now married to her.

There is a warning familiar to shoppers which says, ‘Goods once sold cannot be returned.’ Jacob had made his bed and now he must sleep in it.

People accuse God wrongly for lacking a sense of humour. But we err to think him angry and serious looking all the time. ‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.’ So even God laughs.

Laban is the face of a consummate worldly man. He looks not on another man’s affairs but on his own. He simply called a feast of men. And in that feast the fate of his daughters was sealed (Gen 29:22).  

When Traditions Become Prisons

I suppose that was the tradition at the time. So Leah sleeps with a man the whole night without raising her voice. And the man doesn’t talk either until morning when the truth harshly dawns on him.

Few girls would wish to have Laban for their father, and even less, for a man to have him as his father in law.

So Laban gives Jacob another offer which he knew he couldn’t refuse. Perhaps he might, if Leah had been more beautiful, but she wasn’t.

And from that moment a hungry father in law sentences his own daughters to misery throughout their lives.

But Leah Sought her Refuge in God

Feeling the coldness of her husband, Leah finds consolation in her God and the names she gives her children.

Reuben: ‘the LORD hath looked upon my affliction.’

Simeon: ‘Because the LORD hath heard that I was hated.’

Levi: ‘Now this time will my husband be joined unto me.’

Judah: ‘Now will I praise the LORD.’

Issachar: ‘God hath given me my hire, because I have given my maiden to my husband.’

Zebulun: ‘God hath endued me with a good dowry; now will my husband dwell with me.’  

The names of her children reek of rejection. They are a permanent memory to the arduous years of hate and struggle which she endured.

Jacob’s special love was Rachel. And a man will keep the whole village awake at night while he sings about his newfound beauty’s charms. He will murmur her name as he works, eats and sleeps.

I think we do well to imagine (as poets usually do) that this was the scenario which Leah was condemned to see every day with her own eyes.

And her only consolation was that God had made her extra fertile while her sister Rachel’s womb went ominously silent. 

The Two Sisters: A Comparison in Temperaments

Leah, ugly, and dejected, turns out in the end as humble, content and at peace with herself and her God. ‘Now will I praise the LORD’!

What she lacked in physical beauty she made up for her inner beauty. It defiantly shines through and through amid all her trials.

She had patience, she had perseverance, and she evokes an almost divinely serene and halcyon poise, all the virtues which were sorely lacking in her younger choleric sister - ‘Give me children, or else I die.’

The psalmist has made, I think, a very fitting description of an angry person’s countenance: ‘When thou with rebukes dost correct man for iniquity, thou makest his beauty to consume away like a moth’. For Rachel, I fear she might’ve come very close to this resemblance in her perpetual thanklessness.

But what a contrast and final end: Rachel dies earlier, and ironically, she dies in childbirth.

For Rachel her every day was a dawn which never quite lengthened into the full day. Her determination to catch up with her sister never quite wavered until the end (Joseph, meaning ‘The LORD shall add to me another son.’). So she dies in the end almost a bitter woman.

In Jacob We Have a Type of all Believers

But God had been at work all along.

For it is a very different Jacob we meet in the end than the one we met at the beginning. The old has passed away, and behold, the new has come.

He suffers terrible injustices but he holds his peace, trusting his pains to God instead. By the time he leaves his employment, and sets back on his journey home, Jacob is at peace even with his chief enemy, that is his brother Esau.

‘When a man's ways please the LORD, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him’ (Pro 16:7). 

Jacob in the end dies and is buried next to Leah, so in death, he at last dwells with her as was her prayer in life.

Thus too are the many trials for a believer in this life. But throughout it all God proves faithful. The world is not our home. We are but pilgrims and sojourners here. Be strong therefore in the Lord until the end.

Confirming the souls of the disciples, and exhorting them to continue in the faith, and that we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God. Act 14:22  

And ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake: but he that endureth to the end shall be saved. Mat 10:22 

Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. 2Ti 3:12   

Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? Luk 24:26