Lives of Scripture

Rachel, Laban's younger daughter, was the wife Jacob loved and worked fourteen years to marry, after being deceived into marrying her older sister Leah first (Genesis 29:16-30). While Leah bore son after son, Rachel remained barren, and her anguish is recorded starkly: 'Give me children, or else I die' (30:1) -- a cry Jacob answered with anger rather than comfort. Rachel gave her servant Bilhah to Jacob as a surrogate, as Sarah once had with Hagar, gaining sons Dan and Naphtali 'through' her (30:3-8). Eventually 'God remembered Rachel... and opened her womb,' and she bore Joseph, naming him with a prayer for yet another son (30:22-24). Fleeing her father's household years later, Rachel secretly stole her father's household idols and hid them, lying to Laban about it when he searched -- a episode Genesis records without excusing (31:19, 34-35). She died in labor with her second son on the road near Bethlehem, naming him with her last breath Ben-oni ('son of my sorrow'), though Jacob renamed him Benjamin ('son of the right hand'); Jacob buried her there and set up a pillar (35:16-20). Centuries later, Matthew 2:18 applies Jeremiah's image of 'Rachel weeping for her children' to Herod's slaughter of Bethlehem's infants, linking her grief to Christ's own perilous infancy.