Baby race

Gen 29-30

As a new Christian, when I first read the passage of Rachel being favoured by Jacob over Leah, I naturally assumed that Rachel would get all the babies first. (I have English Lit background & novelists always have a beautiful heroine who'd be witty, wise, & always gets her man, plus everything she needed in life. ) I was astounded that GOD chose to give Leah the babies first! This went against all that I'd been taught about life from the novelists!

Lesson No: 1
Man (in this case, Jacob), may practise favouritism, but God, in His kindness & mercy, favours the "weak-eyed" wife with the babies first. Not that it helped Leah to win Jacob's love, although she hoped and hoped with baby after baby.

Rachel, of course, green with jealousy, says to Jacob, "Give me children, or I'll die!" I actually felt pity for poor Jacob, to be faced with such an impossible demand. "Am I in the place of God, who has kept you from having children?" was his indignant reply.

Rachel's subsequent ploy was to give her maid Bilhah to Jacob, and so through those means, she got two babies.

Score: Leah:4, Rachel:2

Leah, seeking to keep the lead & taking a leaf from Rachel's book, gives her maid Zilpah to Jacob. Through these secondary means, she got 2 more children.

Score: Leah:6, Rachel:2

Rachel, now desperate, resorts to magic & superstition & she bargains with Leah to have Reuben's mandrakes (there was an old wives' tale that eating mandrakes could induce pregnancy). In exchange, she gave Leah the right to sleep with Jacob.

"I have hired you with my son's mandrakes," Leah tells Jacob as he returns, weary from working in the fields. I wonder what Jacob felt...

But, Rachel was to rue the day she allowed the bargain, for Leah got another son --in fact two more. And after that, a daughter. (By this time, Rachel would have deduced that eating mandrakes doesn't work).

Nevertheless, at long last, "God remembered Rachel" and she became pregnant and gave birth to Joseph.

Score: Leah: 8, Rachel: 3

As we know, Rachel later conceived again, and she gave birth to Benjamin before she died.

But Leah had won the race long before.

Moral of the story:
Man may practice favouritism, but it is God who decides whom to favour.

As a young Christian, I was also astounded to discover from reading the Word that the line of Judah, from whom Jesus descended, didn't come from the loved wife, Rachel, but from the unloved one, Leah. (God doesn't follow the usual story line of the English novelists I used to read.)

Lesson No: 2
God's ways are not man's ways.

Prayer:
Dear Father, let me not judge by what I see, but by Your Holy Spirit. Give me Your wisdom, I pray. In Jesus' Name, Amen.