A Tale of Two Wives
I don’t watch much TV anymore, but there are a handful of shows that when new seasons air, I still tune in. The Crown by Netflix is one of the few series I still keep up with. The show combines a few of my favorite things: history, royalty, and good cinematography. Am I also a bit of an anglophile? Yes, though the American in me hates to admit it.
The last three seasons have shifted their focus from Queen Elizabeth’s life story to that of Diana Spencer, and her tragic life cut short. I was only two years old when Diana died, but she’s one of the early celebrity faces that I can remember, most likely due to her immense fame, that same fame that I daresay ended up killing her. I watched the episode in which she dies this past week “Dis Moi Qui” (Season 6, Ep.3), and I’ve been pondering over the legacy of her life since then.
The story of Diana is that she was a beautiful young woman who married the future King. A fairy tale by all accounts, but also a doomed one from the very beginning. Charles was a man who was already in love with another married woman, and Diana was a young girl who came from an unloved background, and was seeking to be loved and cherished by her husband. Unfortunately for Diana, love triangles never work out, and this one didn’t either.
What’s funny is that this story reminds me very strongly of another story we find in Genesis 29, the story of two wives stuck in a love triangle with their husband, the story of two sisters. The parallels between the two are interesting, and I do believe that in this situation, Leah and Diana could find a lot to commiserate over.
Jacob falls in love with Rachel the minute he meets her (Gen. 29:11-21), and this love for her doesn’t ever shake, even long after she dies, when he still favors her sons Joseph and Benjamin over his other sons. Charles was similar in this regard, he seems to have loved Camilla steadfastly from the day he met her until the present day, and was never able (or willing perhaps) to fully cut ties with Camilla and turn to his wife.
Leah and Diana have their own parallels as the “hated” wives. Although Jacob was innocently deceived into marrying Leah, Charles was similarly “deceived” into marrying Diana for the sake of family and duty, and because at that point in time it was simply not the thing for a man, especially the future King of Britain, to marry a woman like Camilla (however reasonable or unreasonable those reasons were at that time).
Nevertheless, where both Jacob and Charles erred was that instead of laying down their old flames and in Christ-like self-sacrifice serving and loving their wives, they continued their relationships with the other women. Charles picks up his affair with Camilla again after a few years, Jacob immediately marries Rachel. Interestingly, Mosaic law later ends up expressly forbidding a man from marrying two sisters, likely a nod to this earlier dysfunctional story in Genesis (Lev. 18:18). At the beginning of Creation, God clearly mandates marriage as between just one man, and just one woman. It’s no wonder that when we try to mess with this paradigm, things break down.
Diana’s story is interesting, because by all accounts she’s viewed as one of the world’s most beautiful women, to the point that her paparazzi pictures become some of the most expensive photographs ever sold. But there’s a sad lesson here that even the world’s most beautiful woman couldn’t win the affections of her own husband. In the biblical narrative, Rachel is described as beautiful and Leah is described as having “weak eyes”, we don’t know exactly what that means but at any rate she was not as beautiful as her sister, and try as she might, she never won her husband’s affections, neither through her beauty nor her wit.
But it’s the way by which these two women tried to earn the love of their husbands that really got me thinking. Diana begins to act in self-destructive and attention-grabbing ways, whereas Leah seeks to do it through childbearing. And here we do find a split in their stories–Leah seems to learn a lesson in the midst of these trials, a lesson that (at least in the show) Diana never seems to find.
A Moment and a Name
“When the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren. And Leah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Reuben, for she said, “Because the Lord has looked upon my affliction; for now my husband will love me.”
The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Ge 29:31–32.
Before we get into the meat of the passage, I do want to point out the fact that throughout most human history, women had very little in the way of self-determination. A woman’s identity was fully wrapped up in her identity as a wife, and much more importantly, as a mother to sons. Sons carried down the family line, and gave their mothers honor and value in the eyes of society at that time, in a way that nothing else could.
One thing that I do want to point out is a thread that runs through all of Scripture. Children are a gift from the Lord, and he’s the one that chooses to open or to close wombs. God has direct sovereignty over the birth of life, and that’s true for Leah as it is for many other women in the Scriptures, and for women today. We don’t understand why or how chooses to answer certain requests at different times, but Genesis 29 is the story of how God heard Leah’s cry and answered her in that moment, and how Leah ended up seeing the kindness of the Lord.
I want us to pick up on how the Lord sees Leah, before she ever uttered a prayer to him. This is a direct tieback by the author to remind us of another time the Lord saw another woman in distress–Hagar. Hagar has the special privilege of being the first person in the Genesis story to name the Lord, and she calls him “the God of seeing.” Hagar says, “Truly here I have seen him who looks after me,” (Gen. 16:13). In a callous society and culture where a woman’s only worth and value comes through her children and marital status, the King of Kings looks at a lowly Egyptian servant and an unloved wife…and he sees their distress, and he answers them! What a beautiful reminder that the Lord cares for the least of these.
The writer of Genesis says that Jacob “hated” Leah, though to what degree he hated her is unknown, since our modern definitions of hatred are different than what the word may have meant to the original audience. It’s possible Jacob really did hate her as we would define it, especially after the way he was tricked into marrying her, or it’s possible he just had a cold apathy and indifference towards her, a resentment, simply the opposite of “love”. Charles certainly seemed to have a resentment towards Diana the longer the marriage went on, and the more dysfunctional it became.
We don’t often get a chance to enter into the thoughts of the female psyche in Scripture, but this little pericope from Genesis 29:31-35 is fascinating. Leah hopes that her husband’s love can finally be won by his firstborn son, and so she names him Ruben, which means “See a son!”. A commentary I was reading through even noted that, “Reuben” (rĕʾûbēn) is a pun on yeʾĕhābanî, “[my husband] will love me.” (1)
Leah is saying here, “See, a son! Surely he’s got to love me now.” Her desires are plain for all to see. Even the word used for “love” here, according to one Hebrew dictionary, means “to desire, to breathe after anything.” (2) Poor Leah desired that Jacob would desire her in the same way that he desired Rachel. Though if we’ve learned anything through anecdotal marriage advice, it’s that the birth of children rarely fixes the problems that were already present before.
With her second son Simeon, Leah says, “Because the Lord has heard that I am hated, he has given me this son also” (vv. 33). With the birth of Simeon, Leah has realized that Ruben wasn’t enough to win Jacob’s love, so resolutely she holds on…maybe he needs a second son to convince him!
Her third son Levi then comes around, and we can see in her naming of Levi that she’s desperate at this point. “Now this time my husband will be attached to me, because I have borne him three sons.” (vv. 34) The tragedy of this story is that Jacob’s dislike of Leah seems to be so strong that not even the fact that Leah has managed to secure the family line for him can sway his attitude for her. Leah has borne three sons, she has fulfilled her duty to him as a wife, yet Jacob cannot seem to broaden his affections to include Leah.
By this point in the story, I think all of our hearts break for her. We see the injustice of the situation, but what else is there possibly left to do?
Then her fourth son is born. And Leah does something unexpected. She looks at this fourth son of hers and says,
“This time I will praise the Lord. Therefore she called his name Judah.”
(Gen. 29:35)
After the years of struggle with her sister for the love of her husband, a moment of clarity breaks into the chaos. In this moment she realizes who has blessed her and loved her all along. It wasn’t Jacob her husband. But rather a Father and a God who has seen her in her suffering and affliction, and has not left her empty handed.
And so she gives praise where praise is due, to El Roi, the God who sees.
The Mother of a King
And it is at this moment of praise that we see a beautiful redemption of a difficult story, because it is through Leah, not Rachel, that we witness the birth of a King. Wisdom as we would understand it in fairy tales would say that the King should come from a union of true love, the love of someone like Rachel and Jacob. Patriarchal wisdom in the form of primogeniture would say that the King should come from the firstborn son, like Ruben. Old Testament covenantal wisdom would say that the King should come from the line of high priests, to be a son of Levi. But the Gospel says otherwise.
The King did not come from the firstborn, or the priesthood, or “true love’s kiss” as the fairytales would say. (3) The King was born out of a moment of full surrender, of true and sincere praise to God. Out of a moment where an unloved woman recognized the God who truly saw her and cared for her. The King came out of the line of Judah. Jesus Christ is the son of David, the son of Judah, the son of Leah.
In the end, both Diana and Leah gave birth to kings. Their family lines will be remembered throughout the generations, and honor is given accordingly. Although not honored in life, Leah was honored in death by her husband and she was laid to rest with Jacob, alongside Isaac and Rebekah, Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 49:31.
Unfortunately for Diana she tried to find her peace in vain, whether it was through her own extra-marital affairs or her pursuits later on in life. It’s possible that her untimely death was even a result of the frenetic pace that she found herself in as she tried to leave the hurts of her marriage behind and move forward by her own means. Perhaps if she had lived longer she might have found that peace that surpasses all understanding in Jesus Christ, or perhaps not. Those questions are ones that none of us have the answers to, but in comparing these two women we do find one clear lesson to be learned:
It is God who brings us identity in the end, it is his love that ultimately will satisfy us. He is El Roi, the God who sees us in all our afflictions, and he is the one who answers us. Trust in him, surrender to him, and most importantly, offer up a sacrifice of praise.
“Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name.”
The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Heb 13:15.
Footnotes
(1) K. A. Mathews, Genesis 11:27–50:26, vol. 1B, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2005), 480.
(2) Wilhelm Gesenius and Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, Gesenius’ Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2003), 15.
(3) I am referencing here the Melchizedekian priesthood of Jesus Christ as seen in Hebrews 7:11-28.
