On Love and Justice
The story of Jacob’s love for Rachel is one of the most romantic in the Torah. Yet it is full of hidden depths and ambiguities, reversals and unexpected turns. It begins, as do other Torah narratives of man-meets-future-wife, with a scene at a well. The shepherds have gathered there to water their flocks, but the well is covered with a large stone which they will not remove until all the local shepherds have arrived. The text does not tell us why. It may be that the stone is too large to be moved except by all the shepherds together, or it may be a local custom to ensure a fair distribution of the water. At that moment, however, Rachel arrives. Jacob knows – the shepherds have told him – that she is the daughter of his uncle Laban with whom he has come to seek refuge. Immediately, Jacob moves into action:
Now while he was still speaking with them, Rachel came with her father’s sheep, for she was a shepherdess. And it came to pass, when Jacob saw Rachel the daughter of Laban his mother’s brother, and the sheep of Laban his mother’s brother, that Jacob went near and rolled the stone from the well’s mouth, and watered the flock of Laban his mother’s brother. Then Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted up his voice and wept. (29:9–11)
We notice the sharp contrast with the earlier scene at which Abraham’s servant sought a wife for his master’s son at a well. Here it is Jacob, not the woman, who is active. Rolling the stone off the well is a feat of considerable strength, as well as a daring defiance of local custom, not attributes we have hitherto associated with the quiet son of Isaac. Evidently, Jacob is seized with strong emotion. He kisses Rachel; he weeps. The text at least raises the possibility that he has performed his act of bravado to impress her with both his strength and his kindness. It may be love at first sight.
For several verses we are kept in suspense. The subject changes to Laban, and Jacob’s desire to stay with him for a while. After a month, Laban asks Jacob what he would like his wages to be in return for the work he expects from him. Only now does the text make clear what we suspected at the outset. Jacob has indeed fallen in love with Rachel:
Laban had two daughters: the name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah was tender-eyed, but Rachel was of beautiful form and beautiful appearance. Jacob loved Rachel, and said, “I will serve you seven years for Rachel your younger daughter.” Laban said, “It is better that I give her to you than that I should give her to another man: stay with me.” (29:16–19)
The word rakot, translated as “tender” may mean “weak, sensitive, clouded.” It could also mean “attractive,” but the implied contrast with Rachel who was doubly beautiful, in form and appearance, makes this unlikely.
Jacob has fallen in love with Rachel because she is beautiful: so the text implies. This is highly significant. We are told that Sarah and Rebecca were also beautiful, but in both cases the text says so in the context of a temporary location among strangers. Abraham has travelled to Egypt, Isaac to the land of the Philistines, because of famine. They ask their wives to say that they are their sisters, because both fear that otherwise they will be killed so that their wives can be taken into the royal harem. It is as if, hearing that Sarah and Rebecca are beautiful, we see them through Egyptian or Philistine eyes. This is the first time physical beauty is associated with love and a reason for marriage.
Jacob is following his eyes, not generally considered a good thing in Tanakh. Eve followed her eyes in desiring the forbidden fruit (3:6). Samuel, seeing the sons of Jesse, among whom God has told him is Israel’s future king, initially chooses Eliav, who looks the part. He is told by God that he has judged wrongly: “Do not consider his appearance or height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (I Samuel 16:7).
Yet Jacob is deeply in love. The Torah tells us this in one of its most beautiful lines:
Jacob served seven years for Rachel; and they seemed to him but a few days, because of the love he had for her. (29:20)
He is oblivious to both labour and time. Not before and not afterward do we find in the Torah such romantic passion. The years pass and the moment for which Jacob has been waiting arrives:
Jacob said unto Laban, “Give me my wife, for my days are fulfilled, that I may go in unto her.” (29:21)
Laban gathered together all the men of the place, and made a feast.
It came to pass in the evening, that he took Leah his daughter, and brought her to him; and he went in to her. Laban gave to his daughter Leah, Zilpah his maid as a handmaid. It came to pass, that in the morning, behold, it was Leah: and he said to Laban, “What is this you have done to me? Did not I serve you for Rachel? Why have you deceived me?” But Laban said, “It is not done in our place to give the younger before the firstborn.” (29:22–26)
It is an astonishing reversal. Jacob has been tricked. Laban has taken advantage of night and the cover of darkness to substitute Leah for Rachel. He has also made it impossible for Jacob to backtrack. He had invited “all the men of the place” to be witnesses to the marriage celebration. They could not have known that in fact he had promised that the bride would be Rachel. They would have assumed, Laban implies, that it would be Leah, since the local custom is that the elder is married first. Besides which, had Laban in fact promised Rachel? His answer, seven years earlier, when Jacob had first asked for Rachel, was curiously evasive and oblique: “It is better that I give her to you than that I should give her to another man: stay with me” (29:19). It may be that he had already formed the intention to deceive.
So Jacob, trusting Laban, marries what in his eyes is the wrong woman. Eventually, as we go on to read, he marries Rachel as well, but the damage has been done. The result is lingering tragedy. Rachel has beauty; Leah has children, six boys, half the twelve tribes of Israel. Each wife is a source of pain to the other: Rachel because she lacks children, Leah because she feels herself unloved. The tragedy continues into the next generation when the other children first envy, then come to hate, Jacob’s favourite son Joseph, child of his beloved Rachel.
The details of the story are clear. What is unclear is its message. Is it to show us the cunning and calculating nature of Laban? Certainly the text supports this reading, but Laban is a secondary character in this drama of Jacob and his two wives.
Is it to provide justification for a later law in the book of Leviticus: “Do not take a woman as a rival wife to her sister, uncovering her nakedness while her sister is still alive” (18:18)? This too is possible. Law and narrative are often connected in the Torah. As for the problem that the sages believed the patriarchs kept the Torah before it was given, and here Jacob is acting against the law, Nahmanides answers that the patriarchs kept the Torah only when they were in Israel, not, as here, in exile.1.Ramban, commentary to Bereshit 26:5.
Is it that Jacob is being punished, or corrected, for following his eyes and judging his future wife by her appearance instead of putting character first? The text, as we have seen, is suggestive of this, but other than these hints, there is nothing to make this reading the most likely.
If we listen carefully to the text another possibility presents itself. The word Jacob uses to Laban, “Why did you deceive me [rimitani]?” is the very word Isaac used to describe Jacob’s behaviour in taking Esau’s blessing: “Your brother came in deceit [mirma]” (27:35).
The word Laban uses to describe the younger sibling is tze’ira, the word that appears in Rebecca’s oracle about Jacob and Esau: “the elder will serve the younger [tza’ir]” (25:23).
Even the sentence Laban uses to justify the deception – “It is not done in our place, to give the younger before the firstborn” – is deeply ironic. Did Laban know that this, in effect, was what Jacob had done in another place? The irony may be unintentional. Laban may not have known, but we, the readers, do. And so surely did Jacob himself.
If these hints are signalling how the passage should be read, then the narrative is an example, unparalleled in its drama, of the single most fundamental moral axiom of the torah, midda keneged midda, measure for measure.2.Shabbat 105b.
What we do will be done to us. “He who sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed” (Genesis 9:6) as God says in the covenant with Noah. Those who deceive will be deceived. That is what happens to Jacob.
One midrash is explicit:
“In the morning, and behold it was Leah.” – He said to her, “Deceiver, daughter of a deceiver, did I not call you Rachel last night, and you answered me?” She replied, “Is there a master without students? Did your father not call you Esau and you answered him?”3.Bereshit Raba 70:17.
Here it is Leah who makes the connection. In general, the midrash did not take this route. Midrash emphasizes the virtues of the patriarchs and the vices of others. The latter is not hard to do in this case, for Laban is anything but a noble character concerned with justice. He is a devious man concerned with his own advantage. But the story is too precise a mirror image of the scene in chapter 27 where Jacob pretends to be Esau, taking his blessing by taking his place, for the connection to be accidental. As we have seen, the Torah gives us three linguistic cues that take us back to that earlier episode. What we do to others will one day be done to us. In a later age, Hillel once saw a skull floating on the water and said: “Because you drowned others, they drowned you, and those who drowned you will themselves eventually be drowned” (Avot 2:7).
There may be a yet deeper principle at stake. The verb “to love” does not appear often in Genesis. The emotions of its characters are often hidden from us, so that when they are revealed, they have great literary force. So it is notable that the word “love” appears three times in relation to Jacob’s feelings for Rachel: “Jacob loved Rachel” (29:18). The seven years seemed like a few days “because of the love he had for her” (29:20). Jacob “loved Rachel more than Leah” (29:30). We will later discover the same about Jacob’s feelings for Rachel’s son Joseph: three times the text speaks of his love for him, one of which is, as with Rachel, comparative: just as he loved Rachel more than Leah, so he “loved Joseph more than any of his other sons” (37:3).
Love is an emotion; love is a virtue; love is the ultimate bond between soul and soul. But without justice, love alone is insufficient to sustain the world, insufficient even to maintain peace within a family. Jacob’s love for Rachel, and later Joseph, is the cause of conflict between his two wives and their sons, and Jacob paid heavily for it. How heavily he did so he makes clear many years later, speaking to Pharaoh in Egypt where his long lost son is now a man of power. “Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life” (47:9), he says. There is no other statement quite like this in Genesis and it is all the more striking given the fact that Jacob had just been reunited with Joseph, whom he once thought he would never see again. Love is not enough, for it leaves the less loved feeling unloved, and the result is conflict and sometimes tragedy.
If this is so, then it has immense significance for the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Christian writers often drew a contrast between the New Testament “God of love” and the Old Testament “God of justice.” This cannot be right, for Christianity holds that they are the same God. What is more, when the New Testament refers to the imperative of love, it does so by quoting two verses from the Torah itself, “Love your neighbour as yourself” and “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and might,” as central to Judaism as they are to Christianity.
What the story of Jacob, his wives and their children tells us is that love alone is not enough. There must be justice, fairness, a regard for how your sentiments impact on others. In the end it was Leah, the less loved, who gave Israel its holy tribe, Levi, and its kings, descendants of Judah.
Weaving together these two strands of love (Jacob’s intense feelings for Rachel) and justice (the deceiver deceived), the story of Jacob, Rachel and Leah turns out to be an essential prelude to the book of Exodus and the covenant between God and Israel, based on love and justice. For without justice, love is blind; and without love, justice is impersonal and cold. Jacob’s family needed both, and so do we.