Genesis 30:14 Commentary and Bible Study

There is constant bickering in the home: any and every excuse for a quarrel. There cannot be peace and harmony in a family when there are still unresolved tensions. With these still in place, everything that happens becomes a trigger to further unpleasantness. But this family was structurally unable to change because of polygamy. God’s design of one man and one woman is the only arrangement that can work, because it alone allows exclusive loyalty and belonging: one flesh. The bitterness between them is intense. All the words that pass between them that are recorded in Scripture are only a testimony to their hostility to each other.Leah has suffered one disappointment after another. All her schemes to gain Jacob’s love have come to nothing. She is still not favoured. Reuben, the oldest, comes home from the field with some mandrake [man, dragon] plants, named because the root systems resemble miniature human forms. Aalders says that they were also known as love apples, and ‘it was believed that the fruit of this plant was a stimulant to sexual desire or served as an aphrodisiac … [Rachel] probably hoped they would help her to become pregnant.’ Leah agrees to exchange these plants for time with Jacob, and so they end up bartering with each other for access to their husband, for it seems that he still favoured Rachel, and perhaps spent little time with Leah. But their exchange over this cannot take place without deep resentment showing itself again. Rachel takes the mandrakes, and Leah has the right to spend that night with Jacob. He is informed of this as he comes home from his day’s work, for Leah goes out to meet him before he can make his way to Rachel. Leah prays, but not for forgiveness or for peace in the family; she prays for the success of her scheme. Nevertheless God pities her and in his mercy again gives her another child. This time it is a child of her own, Issachar, meaning ‘hire’, or ‘he is wages’. This child’s name becomes a sad testimony to this angry exchange between the two wives which will remembered throughout all Israel’s history.Zebulun, Leah’s last son, means ‘dwelling’, because, she said, ‘now will my husband dwell with me’. She is still naming her sons according to the craving of her heart. Again, this name suggests that relations were not what they should have been between her and Jacob. Finally, she has a daughter, Dinah, ‘judged’, who was to have her own sadness.