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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > April 1990

Rachel and Leah

Sibling tragedy or the triumph of piety and compassion?

By Samuel Dresner

Familial tension in the Bible is typically sibling rivalry, rather than Oedipal conflict. We are hard put to find examples of a struggle between parents and children in Genesis, although the popularity of the Greek myth would lead us to expect to find this as the prototype for all family stress. Instead, Scripture offers us example after example of the rivalry of brothers—Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. And of sisters. Distressing though these episodes of sibling tension are, the most tragic example of sibling antagonism is between Rachel and Leah. (To review the familiar—but […]

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Footnotes

1.

Biblical quotations and verse citations are from the New Jewish Publication Society (NJPS) translation (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985). Where the phrasing in this article differs from the NJPS, the translation is the author’s.

2.

Midrash is collective term for term for Jewish non-literal scriptural exegesis

3.

The Zohar is the classic work of Jewish mysticism.

4.

The Book of Jubilees, an apocryphal Jewish work, gives us a different picture of Jacob’s relation to Leah. “And Leah his wife died in the fourth year of the second week of the forty-fifth jubilee, and he buried her in the double cave near Rebecca his mother, to the left of Sarah, his father’s mother. And all her sons and his sons came to mourn over Leah his wife with him, and to comfort him regarding her… For he love her exceedingly after Rachel her sister died; for she was perfect and upright in all her ways and honored Jacob, and all the days that she lived with him he did not hear from her mouth a harsh word, for she was gentle and peaceable and upright and honorable. And he remembered all her deeds which she had done during her life, and he lamented her exceedingly; for he loved her with all his heart and with all his soul” (Jubilees 36:21–24),”

5.

The Hebrew is “va-ye-e-hav gam et rahel mileah.” The interpretation turns on the “mem” in “mi-leah.”

Endnotes

1.

Nahmanides, Gur Arye; Tikuney Zohar 40.

2.

Catherine Chalier, Les Matriarches (Paris: Cerf, 1986), p. 156.

3.

Moshe Teitelbaum, Yismah Moshe (Berlin: Pardes, 1928), vol. 1, pp. 75–76. Parashat Vayetze.

4.

Babylonian Talmud, Baba Batra 123a: Genesis Rabbah, ed. H. Freedman (London: Soncino, 1939), vol. 2, p. 653 (71:2)

5.

Freedman, Genesis Rabbah, vol. 2, p. 650 (70:19).

6.

Torah Shlema, ed. Menachem Kasher (New York: Shulsin ger; 1951) vol. 5, p. 1198. When Dinah was born, the biblical text reads, “Afterwards, she bore a daughter” and not, as for all of Leah’s other births, “she conceived and bore …” The explanation for this change is that Leah did not conceive a daughter but a son. This is the force of “afterwards,” understood to mean: after she conceived a son, she bore a daughter. See Torah Temima, ed. Baruch Epstein (Tel Aviv: Am Olam, 1951), vol. 1, p. 279, to Genesis 30:21

7.

Eliyahu Dessler, Mikhtav me-Eliyahu (Jerusalem, 1963).

8.

Chauncey Depew, “Woman,” in Champlin Orations, vol. 4 (New York, 1910), p. 3.

9.

Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, Complete Works vol. 6, (New York: Sprowl, 1899), p. 72.

10.

Babylonian Talmud, Baba Batra 123a.

11.

Midrash Tanhuma on the verse in Genesis 29:10.

12.

Levi Yitzhak, Kedushat Levi (Jerusalem, 1958), p. 25b

13.

Genesis Rabbah 71.

14.

Genesis Rabbah 73. Genesis Rabbah 71. Ketav Sopher.

15.

Zohar vol. 1, p. 225b; 168b; vol. p. 29b.

16.

Dante, Purgatorio 27. 103.

17.

H. Hibbard, Michelangelo (New York: Vendome, 1978), p. 174. While the Zohar sees Leah representing the “hidden world” and Rachel the “public world,” Dante, and Michelangelo following him, portray them as the opposite, Leah symbolizing the “active life” and Rachel the “contemplative life.”

18.

Chalier, Les Matriarches, p. 158.

19.

Levi Yitzhak, Kedushat Levi, p. 53.