Leah Bio

Leah was the older sister to Rachel, the woman that Jacob (the man who they both
wanted to marry) wanted to marry. Jacob saw Rachel on the day when he arrived to work for her
father. He wanted her to be his wife. He worked seven years, as per the agreement between him
and Laban (the father of Rachel and Leah). At the end of those years, the wedding was held. The
bride's face was not shown until after the wedding, however, and it turned out that he had been
tricked and married to Leah instead. Her father, Laban, said that it would be wrong to have the
younger daughter be married before the oldest, so Jacob had to agree to seven more years of
work so that he could marry Rachel. He did marry Rachel after those seven years, leaving Leah
feeling "unloved" because he obviously preferred her sister. The bible says that God felt sorry for
her, because she felt unloved, and opened her womb. She bore six sons (Reuben, Simeon, Levi,
Judah, Issachar, and Zebulon) and one daughter (Dinah).
I definitely feel sorry for her. I feel that even though she was not supposed to marry
Jacob, she still should have been treated fairly, and he should have appreciated her rather than
complaining about being married to her, even though it was a trick. Instead, he got angry and
decided to work hard for seven more years to marry a different woman. To make it even worse,
that woman was her little sister. I understand that she felt unloved and like she wasn't being
treated well, because she really wasn't. On the other hand, from what I've read, she doesn't seem
too determined to stay with Jacob. She does what she is told and feels bad because of it. I think
Leah inflicted some of this punishment on herself, for not doing anything about the situation,
even if that's all she could do.

Leah lived in Mesopotamia as well as Canaan. She and her sister were originally from
Mesopotamia but moved to Canaan with Jacob.
Biblical scholars say that her name means cow, which relates to her fertility, because back
when she lived, cows were a symbol of fertility. She relates to cows in that way, because she had
four sons quickly after marrying Jacob. After those sons, she had her maid give birth and she had
three more children; two sons and a daughter.
Another thing that scholars say is that "the trickster was tricked" meaning that since
Jacob replaced his brother with the rights of the oldest son, he was the "trickster". They say that
him being tricked into marrying Leah rather than Rachel is ironic, because he is the younger son,
Jacob, pretending to be the older, Esau, and marries the older daughter, Leah, who pretends to be
the younger daughter, Rachel. I think that this is very ironic as well, and looking at it like that
suggests that he almost deserved to be tricked the way he was. The only thing that suggests that
it wasn't truly fair, per say, is that he worked very hard to get what he wanted in the end, which
was Rachel.

Works Cited
Meyers, Carol L., Toni Craven, and Ross Shepard Kraemer. Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of
Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical
Books, and the New Testament. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Print.
Newsom, Carol A., and Sharon H. Ringe. The Women's Bible Commentary. London: SPCK,
1992. Print.