Notes 35: Jacob's marriages (29:18-30)

SYNOPSIS: Jacob offered to work for Laban for seven years in exchange for Rachel's hand in marriage, to which Laban readily agreed. When the time came, Laban duped Jacob into marrying Leah instead. A disgruntled Jacob received the explanation that the younger daughter could not marry before her older sister, but no problem as he could have them both. After waiting a week for the sake of decorum, Jacob got his Rachel and gave Leah the cold shoulder. Jacob continued to work for another seven years.

• Text of the passage in Nawat

On one level, this passage exemplifies a kind of anecdote which would no doubt have delighted audiences throughout many generations as oral folk literature, and it has the trappings. Jacob enters into an agreement to work for Laban for seven years to earn the money expected as a gift from the groom's family to that of the bride upon the consummation of a marriage. Jacob loves Rachel; the seven years are as seven days to him on account of his enamourment. But the morning after the marriage ceremony, Jacob awakes to discover that he has married the wrong daughter! Now he must work for another seven years to pay for Rachel (although he seems to have obtained her on credit this time; Laban only asks him to wait a week, and that is for the sake of appearances).

From Jacob's perspective it is a story of deception: Laban tricked him into marrying the less desirable daughter too, and paying for both, when Jacob really only wanted one, Rachel. The particular way in which Laban pulls off the deception is by having one daughter (the older) masquerade as the other (the younger): Jacob is under the impression that it is Rachel he is marrying throughout the ceremony, and afterwards he still believes he is with Rachel in the tent at night; only in the morning, in the light of day, is the deception revealed and by that time it is too late to reverse it!

No commentator has missed the dramatic irony of this stroke, which is a virtual mirror image of the deception of Isaac by Jacob himself immediately prior to his departure for Padan-Aram. There, Jacob had been the impostor, impersonating his brother Esau to dupe his father; here, Leah is the "false bride" (from Jacob's viewpoint), and it is Jacob who is duped, believing that the woman presented to him is her sister Rachel, and to her he gives his vow (there, the right of the firstborn; here, of first wife). Jacob supplanted his older brother; Leah, her younger sister. There, the deception was possible because of Isaac's failing eyesight; here, one assumes it is because Leah wears a veil as bride at the wedding and it is dark in the tent at night. Rebecca's and Jacob's ruse is discovered when it is too late to do anything about it, and so is Laban's and Leah's. And the justification? lo ye‛ase khen bimqoménu latet hattz'‛ira lifne habb'khira 'Here it is not our custom to put the younger daughter before the older'!! Such perfect comeuppances are rare indeed outside of fairy tales and the occasional Dickensian novel.

On several other levels, this doesn't seem to be what is going on at all. Esau is denied the blessing and the birthright, but Jacob gets Rachel in the end, he merely has to take Leah too as part of the combo (and pay her price): an inconvenience yes, a setback perhaps, but hardly a calamitous loss, for Jacob does get two wives out of the deal (not to mention their respective handmaidens), paid for at the going rate (seven years per wife), and this arrangement eventually yields a crop of twelve sons (and one daughter) so he can hardly complain! Indeed, given the lack of a monogamy clause back in the day, it would be wrong to view Jacob as wronged in the same manner as a man forced to marry the wrong girl in today's civilised world, in which, to be able to marry the right girl subsequently and stay on the right side of the law, he would be required to incur divorce costs and probably alimony. Leah, in contrast, is just an extra milk cow added to the herd. One wonders, therefore, what light this jaunty anecdotes really put Leah and Laban in from the cultural perspective of the original audience. Probably, Jacob got off too lightly to make this a true comeuppance.

Incidentally, while it is true that we today do not practise polygamy as the patriarchs did and therefore tend to react differently to such reports, EH points out that for a man to be married to two sisters at the same time was even prohibited in the Torah (Lev. 18:18), and would therefore also have sounded odd to the earliest audiences of Genesis (who might have said: lo ye‛ase khen bimqoménu). Such discord between the reported behaviour of the patriarchs and Torah legislation bears witness to the earlier date, certainly of the customs reflected in the patriarchal narrative, and perhaps of the formulation of [these components of] that narrative itself. In other words, even at the time of the composition of the Torah, the patriarchs were already seen as belonging to a bygone age with distinct laws and customs from those of the Pentateuch's authors and audience, and therefore not expected to comply with the latter's code of conduct, any more than they do with those of our day, perhaps.

We might also talk about Leah's and Rachel's point of view about all this, if only there was one: neither of them says a word in the entire anecdote, whose only characters with lines are Laban and Jacob. And as a matter of fact the commentaries also seem strangely taciturn about all these issues, beyond the rather standardized observations: everybody agrees that Leah had to have been wearing a veil at the wedding, for example. Speiser seems much more concerned about establishing whether the passage is to be assigned to P, E or J (he goes with J), a matter which has apparently vexed commentators for generations.

29:26 lo ye‛ase khen bimqoménu latet hattz'‛ira lifne habb'khira
On the irony in these words (from the perspective of the story's audience), see my initial comments above.

29:27 sh'vúa‛ zot
The noun shavúa‛ means 'week'. Here it refers to the week of festivities on the occasion of a wedding. It is in the construct state: not 'this week' but 'this [bride's] festivities'.