In another echo of the Abraham and Sarah story, the barren Rachel shoves her female servant Bilhah into Jacob’s arms in order to make a child that she can claim.

And Bilhah does bear children. Dan and Naphtali.

This sparks a kind of baby-making arms race between the sisters. Leah gives Jacob her handmaid, Zilpah, who bears Gad and Asher.

Then we have the weird mandrake incident. Have you ever seen a mandrake root?

Leah trades mandrakes to Rachel for the right to sleep with Jacob. I think this kinda hints at what the typical sleeping arrangements were.

Having to pay your sister and proposition your husband to be intimate with you? That’s not humbling at all. There’s no record here of any prayer of Leah’s so perhaps what God “heard” was her frustration and humiliation in the conversations she had with Rachel and Jacob. Whatever it was, whether spoken aloud or not, God heard it.

“And God listened to Leah and she conceived and gave birth to a fifth son for Jacob.”
‭‭Genesis‬ ‭30‬:‭17‬ ‭LEB‬‬

This was Issachar. He was followed by Zebulun and then a daughter, Dinah. All borne by Leah. And I suspect that Dinah was the little princess adored by her big brothers. She gets a story later.

Leah’s tent is a noisy place full of children’s voices.

Ironic, isn’t it that Leah would probably have given her right arm to have Jacob look at her the way he looked at Rachel. And Rachel would probably have given her right arm to have had a tent full of children.

“Then God remembered Rachel and listened to her, and God opened her womb. And she conceived and gave birth to a son. And she said, “God has taken away my disgrace.” And she called his name Joseph, saying, “Yahweh has added to me another son.”
‭‭Genesis‬ ‭30‬:‭22‬-‭24‬ ‭LEB‬‬

Y’all, I’m not going to even try to get my head around how God can take this situation of jealous jockeying sisters, a man with highly questionable morals, and servant girls forced into a foursome marriage and get something good out of it. The whole thing makes me feel nauseous. But somehow the Lord manages to accomplish His purpose despite the human mess.

We have the same thing with the crucifixion of Jesus. It’s a tangled mess of the worst of humanity- selfishness, jealousy, cruelty, rejection and death. And out of that mess, Jesus triumphs. Amazing.

This chapter wraps up with a whole weird animal breeding tangent. Jacob is ready to pack up and leave but Laban knows that Jacob is good for business. A rising tide lifts all boats and Laban knows that Jacob is the one that brought in the tide. So they make a deal on herds. Jacob will work in exchange for flocks of his own. It’s rather clever really. And simple. Laban gets all the white sheep. Jacob will have the spotted and dark-fleeced ones. Super easy to tell who a sheep belongs to. Then we get another trick. Laban immediately removes all the spotted and dark sheep from the flocks so Jacob has nothing to start his breeding program with. So he… peels some sticks and puts them by the water troughs???

Plenty of sciencey people will snicker over this bit and say, “That’s not how genetics work.” Uh, no kiddin’, Einstein. But we get a hint in the next chapter that the birth of these spotted sheep was probably divinely coordinated. God knows which white sheep carry a recessive gene for dark spots. Jacob doesn’t have to know what genes even are– recessive or otherwise. He just needs to obey. Maybe it’s like Moses holding his staff over the water.

Then it’s God’s turn to play a bit of a trick on Laban. A bunch of white sheep give birth to spotted lambs. 😆 And they ultimately become the stronger flock.

Have you ever seen a Jacob’s sheep?

Just to be clear, the breed “Jacob’s Sheep” goes back at least 300 years and was named after the sheep in Genesis because of their coloring, not because of any known descent from Jacob’s actual sheep. I just thought they were fun to include here.

Laban isn’t a fan of being on the receiving end of trickery. We could say he got the short end of the peeled poplar stick. And it’s about to escalate.