Victimhood - Genesis 29:31-35

29:31-35 - The interesting part about Jacob having two wives and clearly favors one over the other, he still is knocking up the less loved wife pretty consistently, so he’s still having a lot of sex with her. Verse 31 is hard for me to get behind because there’s a lot of implications that I don’t like, but overall, I can see why the writer might make these conclusions based on the history. The verse says that “when the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb: but Rachel was barren.” Ultimately, fertility isn’t something that anyone can really control, meaning both Leah and Rachel could have reasonably been expected to have fertility that was consistent with other women at the time. The fact that Leah was super fertile and that Rachel was not was completely beyond the control of either woman. I don’t like that characteristics like fertility, which can’t be controlled, are being attributed to how much a man loves the women, which can’t be controlled either. It would be like saying, “God gave Leah a plentiful harvest because she had brown hair, but because Rachel was left handed, her plants didn’t grow.”

Fertility is a very painful subject for so many women, that I don’t like to think that God would subject Rachel to the pain of barrenness just because Jacob loved her, which again, she couldn’t control his feelings. God wouldn’t withhold a good job from me just because a man loved me, like it doesn’t make any sense, but in the context of this account being written as a story to explain God as a being for the understanding of a certain ancient group of people, I can see how barrenness and fertility might be tied to someone’s suffering or love.

It doesn’t say when Leah became pregnant, if it was in that first week or afterward, but she “bare a son, and she called his name Reuben: for she said, Surely the Lord hath looked upon my affliction; now therefore my husband will love me.” Some scholars suggest that this first baby is Leah’s way of making the focus about her desire for her husband’s love, whereas some note that this is Leah putting the focus on God who cared for her in her unloved condition. Surely it made sense to Leah, as it makes sense to most women, that by giving Jacob not only the first child, but a male child, that would have been enough for him to love her. It’s also interesting to note that she doesn’t ask for Jacob to love her more than Rachel, but just for him to love her at all. She’s not possessive, she doesn’t ask for everything, just something.

Unfortunately for Leah, giving Jacob his first baby boy doesn’t earn her the love she wants to badly, and I get it. Laban as her dad sucked, now her husband sucks, she’s so unloved, and I relate to that on such a personal level that I really consider Leah to be an inspiration for how she handles it. Leah becomes pregnant again, so obviously Jacob is willing to continue to have sex with her. This second baby again shows Leah’s emphasis on her solid relationship with God and her desire for a relationship with her husband. She has a second baby boy and names him Simeon, “because the Lord hath heard that I was hated.”

I’ve heard many scholars excuse this word “hated” to mean simply “loved less,” or “not as highly favored,” but I think it means exactly what it says, I think that Jacob is still resentful of being tricked into marrying Leah in the first place, maybe he has to care for her and he doesn’t want to, maybe she takes time away from him being with Rachel, maybe he blames Leah for what happened with the wedding, instead of Laban, as surely Leah had no say in the matter just like Rachel probably didn’t have a say either. This is probably only after a few years, he’s deep into service to Laban again and Laban is probably constantly screwing him, he has more responsibility than he wanted, Rachel is probably upset that she can’t become pregnant and causing him grief about that. All this is to say that Jacob’s feelings towards Leah have not improved.

Leah has a third son and is convinced this is the time that Jacob will love her. I honestly don’t understand why women think this way, first off, most men don’t like or want kids, so giving them something that they don’t want or like isn’t going to make them treat you better, and giving them multiple of that same thing surely isn’t going to do anything but make things worse. I’ve literally heard women say, “I want to have another baby, because then he’ll love me,” and I knew the second that I heard that that it wasn’t true, and it was sad. Sad for the woman who was so miserable, sad for the baby that was going to have a horrible life, and sad for the guy because no one who’s happy abandons their family. This third baby boy is named Levi because “now this time will my husband be joined unto me, because I have born him three sons.”

Finally, here’s the switch, instead of just seeing God as rewarding her for poor circumstances, with her fourth baby boy she says “Now will I praise the Lord,” and called the baby Judah. There is a major transformation for Leah here where she clearly changes her mindset from that of victim to self-actualization. Her relationship with God isn’t just relying on him because she’s sad, but engaging in a positive relationship because she’s grateful and happy. Now I might just be reading too much into this here, but it’s worth my speculation.

One thing that I heard about Leah’s boys is that even though she was in depressing circumstances through no fault of her own, she still became the mother of half of the tribes of Israel and especially both priesthood lines, Levi and Judah. She’s special and blessed and surely she wasn’t entrusted to be the mother of those sacred lines because she was a victim, but because she had a personal relationship with God that empowered her to teach her children about that God.