Genesis 30 Study Notes

30:1-8 Rachel’s extreme unhappiness created serious tensions in the marriage. Jacob reminded her that it was God, not he, who had withheld offspring (lit “fruit of a womb”) from her. Partial relief came through the practice of surrogate motherhood as Rachel gave Jacob her maid Bilhah so she could bear children “upon [Rachel’s] knees” for me. The phrase suggests that the adoption process involved placing the newborn child on the adopting mother’s knees (50:23). When Bilhah gave birth to Dan, Rachel felt that God had vindicated her. When Bilhah conceived again and gave birth to a second son, Rachel, who had frankly struggled in her relationships with God and Leah, felt that she had finally prevailed and won. Accordingly, she named her second adoptive son Naphtali.

30:9-13 Leah, who had once used her fertility to try to win her husband’s love, now resorted to the desperate act of giving her slave to Jacob as a surrogate wife to produce additional sons, Gad and Asher. Leah signaled their adoption by being the one who named them.

30:14-21 During the late springtime harvest, Leah’s oldest son Reuben found some wild mandrakes. A plant possessing tuberous roots resembling human torsos, the mandrake was thought to enhance one’s sexual powers and fertility. Leah, still lonely and desperate for her husband’s affection, bartered some of the mandrakes with Jacob’s favorite wife Rachel for the right to sleep with Jacob for a night. Because God listened to Leah—and not because of the mandrakes—she conceived and bore a fifth son, Issachar. When Leah bore Jacob a sixth son . . . Zebulun—her last—she gave God the credit. Jacob’s only named daughter, Dinah, would play a tragic role in chap. 34.

30:22-24 For the third time in Genesis God is said to have remembered someone (cp. 8:1; 19:21), an event that always indicates the onset of a beneficial act by God. In this case he gave Rachel her firstborn son . . . Joseph, whose name (Hb yoseph) is actually a verb that expressed Rachel’s prayerful hopes—“May he [the Lord] add” another son. The Lord would give Rachel her desire, but with bitter results (35:16-19).

30:25-36 Jacob, now with a dozen children and four wives but very little else, demanded release from his responsibilities in Laban’s household so he could return to his homeland, where he would be the head of a wealthy clan. Though Jacob was poor, Laban’s wealth had increased because the Lord had blessed him through Jacob, just as the Lord had promised (28:14). Laban, who had learned by the abominable practice of divination (Lv 19:26) that God had blessed him because of Jacob, realized the great advantages of keeping Jacob around, so he offered to pay Jacob whatever wages his son-in-law would name.

Jacob asked for two things: the right to continue to shepherd Laban’s flock, and all of Laban’s sheep and goats that had rare and unusual markings. Laban readily agreed to the terms and virtually assured Jacob’s financial failure by removing from the flocks every animal that possessed the traits Jacob had specified. To guarantee that Jacob could not use them, he drove them a three-day journey—forty to fifty miles—away and put his own sons in charge of them.

30:37-43 Jacob began a six-year effort (31:41) to increase his wealth at Laban’s expense. During that time he used at least three different techniques to make the flocks produce sheep and goats he could keep: (1) he separated the strong animals from the weak, using only the strong ones for his breeding purposes; (2) he set . . . peeled branches . . . in the water channels where the sheep bred; and (3) he made the flocks face the streaked and completely dark sheep in Laban’s flocks. Though the latter two practices have no scientific value, God himself (31:7-8,42) and the angel of God (31:11-12) caused Jacob to become very rich.