Rachel

Rachel was the younger daughter of Laban the Aramean and the sister of Leah (Genesis 29:16; 31:20). Laban was the brother of Jacob's mother, Rebekah, so Rachel was a cousin of Jacob, who married her (Genesis 29:10, 12, 28). She was the mother of Joseph and Benjamin (Genesis 35:24). Her name means "ewe."

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Marriage at Haran

Sent by his mother to escape Esau's anger (Genesis 27:42-45), Jacob met Rachel at a well near Haran when she came with her father's sheep, and he rolled the stone from the well, watered the sheep, kissed her and wept aloud (Genesis 29:4, 9-11). Haran lay about 10 miles north of the Syrian border, on the upper Balikh River, in the region Genesis calls Paddan-aram (Genesis 28:2). Genesis notes that "Leah had weak eyes, but Rachel was shapely and beautiful" (Genesis 29:17). Because Jacob loved Rachel, he offered to serve Laban seven years for her, and the years "seemed but a few days because of his love for her" (Genesis 29:18-20). After the wedding feast Laban gave Leah to Jacob instead, explaining, "It is not our custom here to give the younger daughter in marriage before the older" (Genesis 29:22-26). After the week's celebration Laban gave him Rachel as well, with Bilhah as her maidservant, for another seven years of work (Genesis 29:27-29). Jacob "loved Rachel more than Leah," and he later counted "fourteen years for your two daughters" (Genesis 29:30; 31:41). His years of service took the place of a bride-price for both sisters.

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Barrenness and sons

When the LORD saw that Leah was unloved, He opened her womb, "but Rachel was barren," and Leah bore Reuben, Simeon, Levi and Judah (Genesis 29:31-35). Envying her sister, Rachel said to Jacob, "Give me children, or I will die!" and he answered in anger, "Am I in the place of God, who has withheld children from you?" (Genesis 30:1-2). She gave him her maidservant Bilhah, "so that through her I too can build a family," the same hope Sarah, also barren, had voiced about her own maidservant (Genesis 30:3-4; 16:2). Bilhah bore Dan and Naphtali, whom Rachel named and looked on as her own (Genesis 30:5-8). One of the Nuzi tablets (near modern Kirkuk in Iraq, about 1440 to 1340 BC), an adoption contract, likewise provides that a barren wife was to give her husband a slave girl, though it is the only example of this custom found at Nuzi. Rachel later traded Leah a night with Jacob for mandrakes that Leah's son Reuben had found (Genesis 30:14-16). The mandrake, or "love apple," was widely believed to cure barrenness in women. Then "God remembered Rachel," and she bore a son and named him Joseph, saying, "May the LORD add to me another son" (Genesis 30:22-24).

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Leaving Laban and the household gods

When God told Jacob to return home, Rachel and Leah agreed, complaining of their father: "Not only has he sold us, but he has certainly squandered what was paid for us" (Genesis 31:13-16). Jacob then set out for Canaan with his wives, children and flocks (Genesis 31:17-18); the full account is under Jacob leaves for Canaan.

While Laban was away shearing his sheep, Rachel stole her father's household idols, the teraphim, without Jacob's knowledge (Genesis 31:19, 32). When Laban overtook them and demanded his gods, Jacob swore that whoever had them "shall not live" (Genesis 31:23, 30-32). Rachel had hidden them in her camel's saddlebag and sat on them, telling her father she could not rise because she was having her period (Genesis 31:34-35). Why she took them is uncertain. A widely accepted reading ties possession of the household gods to rights of inheritance. John H. Walton, general editor of the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary, points to Nuzi texts in which the principal heir received the family gods and concludes that her interest in them "has more to do with family and inheritance than with the issue of worshiping other gods." Moshe Greenberg, who taught Bible at the University of Pennsylvania and the Hebrew University, doubted this reading in a 1962 article, holding that the gods marked leadership of the family rather than a title to inheritance. Jacob later had his household give up their foreign gods and buried them near Shechem (Genesis 35:2-4).

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Death on the road to Ephrath

As the family set out from Bethel, still some distance from Ephrath, Rachel went into a difficult labor (Genesis 35:16). The midwife told her she was having another son, and with her last breath she named him Ben-oni, "son of my suffering," but his father called him Benjamin, "son of the right hand" (Genesis 35:17-18). She died and was buried on the way to Ephrath, which Genesis identifies as Bethlehem, and Jacob set up a pillar on her grave that marks "Rachel's tomb to this day" (Genesis 35:19-20). Jacob later told Joseph that "Rachel died along the way" and that he had buried her beside the road to Ephrath (Genesis 48:3, 7). He buried her where she died, not in the ancestral family tomb at Machpelah, where Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Leah were buried (Genesis 49:31).

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Her sons and later Scripture

Genesis counts Rachel's sons and grandsons as "fourteen in all," among them Joseph's sons Manasseh and Ephraim, whom Jacob claimed as his own (Genesis 46:19-22; 48:5). Jacob loved Joseph more than his other sons and kept Benjamin from going with his brothers, afraid "that harm might befall him" (Genesis 37:3; 42:4). Jacob's pillar on the grave was still a landmark in Samuel's time. Saul, son of the Benjamite Kish and king of Israel from 1050 to 1010 BC, was told he would find two men "at Rachel's tomb in Zelzah on the border of Benjamin" (1 Samuel 9:1-2; 10:2). In Ruth 4:11 the elders ask that the LORD make a bride "like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel." In Jeremiah the LORD speaks of a voice in Ramah, "Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more," and the LORD answers that "your children will return from the land of the enemy" (Jeremiah 31:15-16). Rachel's weeping looks forward: "what was spoken through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled" (Matthew 2:17-18). Jeremiah himself was later found in chains at Ramah among captives bound for the Babylonian exile (Jeremiah 40:1).

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Where was Rachel buried?

Genesis places the grave on the way to Bethlehem (Genesis 35:19; 48:7), but 1 Samuel 10:2 puts Rachel's tomb "on the border of Benjamin." Many scholars read the two passages as placing the grave in different places. Some place it to the north, in the territory of Benjamin, and reject the traditional site. The Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible suggests instead that this could mean Benjamin's southern border just south of Jerusalem, while granting that the traditional site "may not be authentic" because it seems too far south of that border.

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The tomb in later tradition

The traditional site lies just north of Bethlehem, four miles south of Jerusalem. Early Christian writers such as Eusebius mention the tombstone near Bethlehem, and the oldest Jewish description of the tomb is the tenth-century Guide to Jerusalem.