Notes 36. Jacob's children (29:31 - 30:13)

SYNOPSIS: In his infinite wisdom, God compensated Leah by letting her conceive while Rachel couldn't get pregnant. Leah had four sons and gave them meaningful names (Reuben 'Look! A son!', Simeon 'God heard me', Levi 'attachment'?, Judah 'gratitude'). Exasperated, Rachel finally tells Jacob to at least make her maid Bilhah pregnant, and Jacob obliges, producing two sons whose names also mean something (Dan 'judgment' and Naphtali 'victory'). Not to be outdone, Leah sends Jacob to bed with her maid Zilpah too, and two more sons ensue (Gad 'lucky' and Asher 'fortunate').

• Text of the passage in Nawat

Just to make it perfectly clear: the tribal names Reuben etc. etc. which are here and in the rest of Genesis personified as sons of Jacob aka Israel are of unknown etymology and origin. The explanations of their names which this passage provides are not real origins or "meanings" but playful folk etymologies at their most flippant. No doubt these pertained to oral tradition and had been oft repeated, and perhaps that line of transmission from times of old gave the explanations some sort of pedigree as folk tradition. The important issue here is that the explanations are a posteriori to the names themselves, rather than a priori. Reuben was not named Reuben because Leah actually said something like "Look! A son!" (r'u ven) or "He has looked upon my affliction!" (ra'a b'‛onyi) so she called him r'uven; the tribe's name was r'uven (real origin unknown) which gave rise to (in this case, two competing) folk "theories" to explain why Leah supposedly decided to give that name to her first son. And so for all the names in the passage:

Leah
Reuben (r'uven): (1) r'u ven "Look! A son!" (2) ra'a [Y.] b'‛onyi "[The Lord] has looked upon my affliction!"
Simeon (shim‛on): shama‛ [Y.] "[The Lord] has heard."
Levi (lewi): yillawe [ishi elay] "[My husband] will be joined [to me]."
Judah (y'huda): ode [et Y.] "I thank [the Lord]".

Bilhah
Dan (dan): danánni [elohim] "[God] has judged me."
Naphtali (naftali): niftálti [‛im axoti] "I have prevailed [over my sister]."

Zilpah
Gad (gad): [ba] gad "Luck [has come]!"
Asher (asher): b'oshri ki issh'rúni [banot] "What fortune! [Daughters (i.e. women)] will deem me fortunate!"   

The first four sons (Reuben, Simeon, Levi and Judah) are born of Jacob's first wife Leah. Rachel, Jacob's favourite, was barren during this period. After venting her personal frustration over this to which Jacob responds that there is nothing he can do: hatáxat elohim anókhi 'Can I take the place of God?' (30:1-2), Rachel matter-of-factly suggests that Jacob use her maidservant Bilhah as a surrogate mother in her representation so that Rachel may (legally) provide Jacob with offspring, referring to the same custom already invoked earlier in Genesis in the case of Sarah and Hagar, and Jacob agrees, impregnating Bilhah twice and so begetting two more sons, Dan and Naphtali. When Leah sees that she is no longer conceiving, she resorts to the same arrangement with her servant Zilpah and gets Jacob to produce two more male offspring, Gad and Asher. According to the narrative, it is in all cases the legal mother (Rachel or Leah) who names the sons given birth to by their maids.

An interpretation of Israel's (presumed) tribal history based on this "genealogical" account was offered in CB p. 49, as follows:

Israel was formed by the confederation of various tribes - in the first instance, Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Bilhah and Zilpah; which became by various changes the Twelve Tribes. During this time Israel was involved in various relations, peaceful and hostile, with the Syrians of Haran, Edom, and the Canaanites.
In early times Reuben was the leading tribe, but lost its leadership. In a conflict with the Canaanites a tribe named Dinah was annihilated, and the tribes of Simeon and Levi were reduced to mere remnants. The tribe of Judah was largely formed out of Canaanite or Edomite elements; its clans in early times were Er, Onan, and Shelah; but Er and Onan were destroyed, and afterwards replaced by Perez and Zerah. The tribe of Joseph was divided in later times into Ephraim and Manasseh. In earlier times Manasseh, later on Ephraim was the more important of these two.

And see also my commentary and quote on the beginning of this chapter (Notes 34). It must be said that almost as much speculation has gone into the above "tribal history" as went into the folk etymologies of the names cited in our passage.

On the other hand, if we take the account of the birth of Jacob's children at face value in the framework of the surface narrative, we may consider pertinent Speiser's comment (EAS p. 231-2):

On the whole, the naming of a child was never a casual matter... And because name and person were viewed as interrelated, the explanations are symbolical; a correct, or even plausible, linguistic derivation would be purely coincidental, since the play on the name was the significant thing - aetiology rather than etymology.

In other words, (a) the naming of a child was viewed as important and names could not be assigned arbitrarily, but must allude to some significant circumstances and (b) after the fact, a person's name was seen as a significant attribute of that person, not something quite random as names are usually thought of in modern societies today but "magically" interrelated with some aspect of their lives. The two aspects of the significance of names, the a priori and the a posteriori, are both illustrated in the story of Jacob's name, already seen: on the one hand (a priori), he was named ya‛aqov at birth because he was born grasping his brother's heel (aqev); on the other hand (a posteriori), he turned out to be a trickster and so his name was (or is represented as having been) prophetic (cf. Esau's exclamation in 27:36: wayya‛q'véni ze fa‛amáyim... 'That's twice he has tricked me!'). It is not implied that when Jacob was born Isaac and Rebecca knew prophetically what his future would be (the trickster aspect), they had a different motivation, but a motivation nonetheless, for naming him thus (the heel-grabbing aspect), but that independently-motivated naming was still destined to be prophetic: and that is the mysterious, magical side of names implicit in these very ancient folk traditions.

Thus there are two readings, or two layers of reading, of the naming of the twelve sons (only the first eight of whom are covered by this passage): the personal (in the immediate narrative framework of the patriarchal family saga) and the tribal, but in actual fact, here in Genesis it is only the personal layer that is of direct concern in the text; the tribal facet will be developed elsewhere later (in Deuteronomy, as pointed out by Speiser, ibidem). In this sense, it is perhaps a mistake to divert out attention to the tribal "historical" analogue of what we are reading, which is nothing of the sort per se; we should therefore go back to reading the passage as what it purports to be at this place in the text at least: an account of the birth of Jacob's sons (and one daughter) with Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah.

30:3 w'teled ‛al birkay w'ibbane... mimménnah
The technical terms (as we may think of them) used to refer to the surrogacy arrangement employ two figures of speech, In one (w'teled ‛al birkay) the surrogate mother is said to give birth on the legal mother's knees. In the second (w'ibbane mimménna), the legal mother says that she is built from the surrogate mother. The exact details of how these specialist terms originated are slightly obscure. The expression used to refer to the coitus between the husband and the surrogate is the same one that is popular throughout Genesis to denote sexual intercourse between men and women whatever the social and legal circumstances may happen to be: b-w-' el lit. 'to come to'. Similar terms were used by Sarah when alluding to the relationship with Hagar.