Genesis 30:22-24 Then God remembered Rachel; he listened to her and enabled her to conceive. She became pregnant and gave birth to a son and said, “God has taken away my disgrace.” She named him Joseph, and said, “May the Lord add to me another son.” (NIV)
Jacob and Esau were friends again. And that was wonderful. But there was still one other rivalry in the family.
Rivalry, a definition:
A rivalry is when you are always looking sideways at someone else. You look over to see how fast they run so you can run faster. You look over to see what food they make so the food you cook will be tastier. You look over to see what books they are reading so the books you read will be longer and have bigger words. And because you are always looking sideways, you miss what is right in front of you — the beautiful world and all the glorious things God has given you. And so it is impossible to win a rivalry. You can only step out of it or let it balloon. And if a rivalry continues for months and years and decades, it will rot the happiness right out of you until you are like a hollow log, empty all the way through.
Leah and Rachel were rivals. But that wasn’t always true. Before they were rivals, they were sisters. And when they were little, they played together as sisters, and braided each other’s hair, and sang and jumped rope together, and did chores together, and shared inside jokes. But everything changed when Jacob appeared at the well.
I have told you how much Jacob loved Rachel, and how sad he was when he was tricked into marrying Leah instead. But Leah was also sad to be married to someone who didn’t love her. And she was even sadder when Jacob married Rachel, too. And this is where the rivalry began.
Now, we need to pause here, because it probably seems very strange to you that Jacob was married to two people at the same time. And you’d be right to feel that way, because it is strange. It’s called polygamy, and polygamy has a very complicated history. But what is very clear in this family (like most families in the Bible who tried polygamy) is that polygamy created a lot of problems.
Because when Jacob married Rachel after already marrying Leah, it became hard for the sisters to be sisters while also being wives to the same person. So instead, they became rivals, looking sideways at each other. Leah looked over and saw how Jacob always wanted to sit with Rachel at the table, and how he liked her food best of all, and shared jokes with her. And Rachel looked over and saw how Leah was pregnant while Rachel’s stomach stayed perfectly flat and completely empty.
When Leah had her baby, she was excited, but not just because it was her own precious little child. She thought that by having a baby, she would become Jacob’s favorite wife. So she named her first baby Ruben, which means, “See, a son!” (which is pretty much like saying to Rachel, “nah nah, nah nah boo boo. I had a baby before you.”) Leah announced the baby’s name, then looked over and saw how Rachel turned all red in the face, and how her hand brushed over her own empty abdomen, then balled into a fist. And when Rachel ran out of the tent crying, Leah felt a little bad, but she was a little bit glad because she thought she had won the rivalry.
But then Jacob went running out of the tent after Rachel, leaving Leah all alone in her bloody sheets with the baby. Leah’s face turned red, too. She hadn’t won after all. So she made a plan. She would have as many babies as she could so that Jacob would like her the best, because who doesn’t like armfuls of babies?
And that’s exactly what she did. Leah had another baby, and she named him Simeon, which means “one who hears,” because, she said, “God heard that I am not loved, so he gave me this baby.” And she looked over at Rachel, but she saw that Jacob still liked Rachel’s food more, and sat by her at dinner, and held her hand during evening walks. So she had another baby, and she named him Levi, which means “attached,” because, she said, “Now my husband will be attached to me.” But when she looked over, she saw that Jacob still loved Rachel the most. So she decided to have another baby, and she named him Judah, which means something like “praise,” because, she said, “I will praise the Lord for giving me so many children.” But still, Jacob loved Rachel more. And Leah’s happiness was rotting right out of her.
But Rachel was just as miserable. She saw how Leah’s four boys’ cheeks pushed their eyes into the sweetest squints when they smiled at their mother, and how they played and wrestled and laughed, and how they loved their mother more than anyone else in the world. And she turned to Jacob and shouted, “My life isn’t worth anything unless I have a baby. Give me children or I will die!”
And then Rachel did something very sad. She gave Jacob her maid and said, “Make her have a baby, and I’ll say the baby is mine.” And Jacob, like his grandfather before him, said, “Okay.” And the maid did have a baby, and then another one. And Rachel took the babies and said, “These are mine now.” And she called them Dan, which means “God has ended my curse!” and Naphtali, which means something like “I struggled with my sister and now I won!” And she held the babies like trophies.
When Leah saw what Rachel had done, she decided to send her own maid and told Jacob to make her pregnant, too. And her maid had two babies also, which Leah counted as her own. And then, Leah had a few more babies herself, just for good measure. Which is exactly what Rachel couldn’t do.
And so you see how the rivalry made the two sisters forget that they were sisters. Leah only saw how Jacob loved Rachel the most. And Rachel only saw how Leah was surrounded by beautiful, big-eyed children. “If only I could have one baby of my very own,” she thought, “then at last I can be happy.”
And Rachel finally got what she’d wanted. She became pregnant. She pushed the baby out of her body, and he came with ten perfect fingers and ten beautiful toes and pink cheeks and chubby thighs, and he was the most beautiful thing Rachel had ever seen. She gazed deeply into his perfect eyes for a moment, but then she looked over at Leah, sitting on the other side of the fire, surrounded by children. And Rachel said, “I will name him Joseph,” which means, “God, please give me another baby.”
And she got what she wanted and became pregnant again. And after the child came, she kept bleeding and bleeding until there was nothing left. Her body hollowed. Her skin grew white and her voice weak. She was dying. Rachel looked all around her. Jacob was there, and Joseph and, to her surprise, so was Leah. She had always been there. And Rachel realized for the first time how much their rivalry had taken from her. Her marriage. Her children. Her sister. And now her life. She touched the baby’s face with frail fingers. “Call him Benoni,” she said, which means “son of sorrow.”
A tear appeared in her eye as she faded away, like she were falling asleep. But she was not asleep. She was gone. Rachel died. But the rivalry lived on, passed from mother to child like a disease. And the children of Rachel and Leah entered the world through the veil of their mothers’ sorrow. And when they were born, they were born already in tribes. And they would fight and feud and fall apart. And Rachel died feeling the weight of this tragedy.
But that was only part of the children’s inheritance. Read the stories that come before this one, and you will find love, and generosity, and sacrifice, and bravery, and determination, and reconciliation. And you will find God also. And you will see that he has big plans for this family. They were going to build his city. And he was not going to simply let them fail. No matter how far apart they drifted, no matter where their jealousy and selfishness carried them, no matter the distance they were scattered, God would find a way to gather them back together in a place they could all call home.
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