Genesis 29:31 Commentary and Bible Study

What a sad thing! Leah, in comparison to Rachel, is hated by her husband. This is the uppermost thought in her mind, and it turns her life into a misery. She becomes driven by competition with her sister, and desperate and sinful measures are later resorted to by both of them in their fierce contest with each other to win their husband’s affection. God has compassion on Leah to comfort her on account of this sorrow, and grants her a child. Moses says that God was aware of the sorrow she felt. Does he pity us because we suffer as righteous people? No, he knows we are sinners and we bring much of our misery on ourselves. Leah had connived at her father’s act of deception and it was not surprising that Jacob who had always wanted to marry Rachel should have blamed Leah in part for what had happened. She had tried to direct his love to her against his will. It is not possible to interfere with the deepest feelings of other people without resentment building up. Nevertheless, God has compassion on her. He is the God of peace and does not enjoy the suffering of his people. The Spirit of God is called the Comforter just because he delights to bring consolation to the children of God. What are our griefs and sorrows to the infinite, eternal God? His concerns are so much higher than our concerns, and his ways than our ways, and yet he stoops to pity us, even in self-inflicted sorrows.But Leah is obsessed with her own situation. She calls her first child Reuben, meaning ‘See, a son’. She has prayed but thinks not so much of the child, as of what his birth secures for her. ‘Look, Jacob, a son’. Tragically, this son is most of all a means of provoking her husband’s love and gratitude towards her. ‘Now therefore my husband will love me.’ It is tragic because love cannot be bought; it must flow freely. The harder she tries to win Jacob’s love by these means, the more she realises his love is towards Rachel.It does not work, of course, because in naming her second child, Simeon, she shows she is still aware that she is hated. Reuben’s birth has done nothing to change Jacob’s feelings for her. Yet she cannot give up using the only means she knows how. Simeon means ‘heard’, or Alfred Jones says ‘heard with acceptance’. What has Lord heard? Not her prayer, but the way Jacob hates her. The first child did not succeed in winning his love. Lack of love is tragic in any marriage. Husband and wife have a duty to love each other. ‘Love is a choice’, said one Puritan. But so many complain that their relationship has faded, and the magic of love has gone out of it. Love must be rekindled by doing acts of love and kindness to the other.Again she conceives and bears Levi, meaning ‘adhesion’, ‘attachment’, ‘joined’. This also is about Jacob’s love, or lack of it. We feel for sons named unfortunately, and these sons are all given names which testify to their mother’s unloved state. The hostility between the mothers afterwards played itself out in the next generation.Finally, Judah is born, whose name means ‘praise’. Leah does believe and pray to God about this whole situation. This child receives a name which for the first time seems to take her mind of her problem and give thanks to God.