1. Give me sons, for if you don’t I’m a dead woman. It is a general principle of biblical narrative that a character’s first recorded speech has particular defining force as characterization. Surprisingly, although Rachel has been part of the story for nearly two decades of narrated time, this is the first piece of dialogue assigned to her. It is a sudden revelation of her simmering frustration and her impulsivity: in fact, she speaks with an impetuousness reminiscent of her brother-in-law Esau, who also announced to Jacob that he was on the point of death if Jacob did not immediately give him what he wanted.

2. Am I instead of God. Through Jacob’s words, the writer shrewdly invokes a fateful deflection of the annunciation type-scene. According to the convention of the annunciation story, the barren wife should go to an oracle or be visited by a divine messenger or a man of God to be told that she will give birth to a son. Rachel instead importunes her husband, who properly responds that he cannot play the role of God in the bestowal of fertility, or in the annunciation narrative. Rachel is then forced to fall back on the strategy of surrogate maternity, like Sarai with Hagar. One should note that she demands “sons,” not a son. Eventually, she will have two sons, but will die in giving birth to the second one. Perhaps her rash words here, “Give me sons, for if you don’t, I’m a dead woman,” are meant to foreshadow her premature death.

3. give birth on my knees. Placing the newborn on someone’s knees was a gesture of adoption.

built up through her. As with Sarai in chapter 16, the verb, ʾibaneh, puns on ben, “son.”

6. God granted my cause. The verb dan suggests vindication of a legal plea, and is offered as the etymology of the name Dan.

8. grapplings. The Hebrew naftulim plays on Naphtali. It is noteworthy that Rachel chooses an image of wrestling for her relationship with her sister that marks a correspondence to the relationship of Jacob, the “heel-grabber,” with his older sibling.

11. Good luck has come. The translation follows a long-established practice in separating the enigmatic single word of the Masoretic Text, bagad, into baʾ gad.

13. What good fortune! For the girls have acclaimed me fortunate. Asher’s name is derived from ʾosher, “good fortune,” and the entire naming is thus closely parallel to the naming of Gad. This noun ʾosher produces a common biblical verb ʾisher, the basic meaning of which is to call out to a lucky person, ’ashrei, “happy is he” (or, here, “happy is she”).

14. mandrakes. As in other, later cultures, these plants with tomato-shaped fruit were used for medicinal purposes and were thought to be aphrodisiac, and also to have the virtue of promoting fertility, which seems to be what Rachel has in mind. The aphrodisiac association is reinforced in the Hebrew by a similarity of sound (exploited in the Song of Songs) between dudaʾim, “mandrakes,” and dodim, “lovemaking.”

15. Is it not enough that you have taken my husband. The narrator has mentioned Rachel’s jealousy of Leah, and Rachel has referred to “grappling” with her sister, but this is the first actual dialogue between the sisters. It vividly etches the bitterness between the two, on the part of the unloved Leah as well as of the barren Rachel. In still another correspondence with the story of Jacob and Esau, one sibling barters a privilege for a plant product, though here the one who sells off the privilege is the younger, not the elder.

16. With me you will come to bed . . . And he lay with her that night. In his transactions with these two imperious, embittered women, Jacob seems chiefly acquiescent, perhaps resigned. When Rachel instructs him to consort with her slavegirl, he immediately complies, as he does here when Leah tells him it is she who is to share his bed this night. In neither instance is there any report of response on his part in dialogue. The fact that Leah uses this particular idiom for sexual intercourse (literally, “to me you will come”), ordinarily used for intercourse with a woman the man has not previously enjoyed, is a strong indication that Jacob has been sexually boycotting Leah. That could be precisely what she is referring to when she says to Rachel, “You have taken my husband.”

18. God has given my wages. In this case, as again with the birth of Joseph, there is a double pun in the naming-speech. The word for “wages” (or, “reward”) is sakhar, which also means a fee paid for hiring something. Leah uses this same root when she tells Jacob (verse 16) that she has “clearly hired” him (sakhor sekhartikha). Thus Issachar’s name is derived from both the circumstances of his conception and his mother’s sense of receiving a reward in his birth. All this suggests that the naming etymologies may not have figured so literally in the ancient Hebrew imagination as moderns tend to imagine: the name is taken as a trigger of sound associations, releasing not absolute meaning but possible meaning, and in some instances, a cluster of complementary or even contradictory meanings.

20. a goodly gift . . . my husband will exalt me. The naming of Zebulun illustrates how free the phonetic associations can be in the naming-speeches. Zebulun and zebed (“gift”) share only the first two consonants. The verb for “exalt” (this meaning is no more than an educated guess), zabal, then exhibits a fuller phonetic correspondence to Zebulun and evidently represents an alternative etymology of the name.

This time my husband will exalt me. Having born Jacob half a dozen sons, half of the sanctified tribal grouping of twelve, Leah indulges one last time in the poignant illusion that her husband will now love her.

21. and she called her name Dinah. The absence of a naming etymology for Dinah is by no means an indication, as has often been claimed, that this verse derives from a different source. There is no naming-speech for Dinah because she is a daughter and will not be the eponymous founder of a tribe.

22–23. After the long years of frustrated hopes and prayers (the latter intimated by God’s “hearing” Rachel), the gift of fertility is represented in a rapid-fire chain of uninterrupted verbs: remembered, heard, opened, conceived, bore.

23. taken away my shame. “Taken away,” ʾasaf, is proposed as an etymology of Yosef, Joseph.

24. May the LORD add me another son. “Add,” yosef, Rachel’s second etymology, is a perfect homonym in Hebrew for Joseph (and hence the odd name used among American Puritans, Increase). Leah’s double etymology for Issachar had referred in sequence to conception and birth. Rachel’s double etymology refers to birth and, prospectively, to a future son. She remains true to the character of her initial speech to Jacob, where she demanded of him not a son but sons. She will be granted the second son she seeks, but at the cost of her life.

26. for whom I have served you . . . for you know the service that I have done you. Jacob’s speech repeatedly insists on the service (ʿavodah) he has performed for Laban, the same word used in the agreement about the double bride-price. He has worked seven years before marrying the two sisters and, given Leah’s seven childbirths with a few years’ hiatus between the fourth and fifth sons, several years beyond the second seven he owed Laban as Rachel’s bride-price.

27. If, pray, I have found favor in your eyes. This formula of deference is normally followed by a request. If the text is reliable here, Laban begins with the deferential flourish and then, having mentioned how he has been blessed through Jacob, lets his voice trail off. A second formula for the introduction of speech (“and he said”) is inserted, and only then does he proceed to his request: “Name me your wages.” Could the thought of the prosperity he has enjoyed through Jacob’s supervision of his flocks lead to this self-interruption, a kind of hesitation before he asks Jacob to name the separation pay that he knows he owes his nephew?

I have prospered. Everywhere else in the Bible, the verb niḥesh means “to divine,” but that makes little sense here, and so there is plausibility in the proposal of comparative semiticists that this particular usage reflects an Akkadian cognate meaning “to prosper.”

30. Once more in a bargaining situation, Jacob does not respond immediately to the request to name his wages but lays out the general justice of his material claims on Laban, something Laban himself has already conceded.

31. You need give me nothing. In a classic bargainer’s ploy, Jacob begins by making it sound as though Laban will owe him nothing. As he goes on to name his terms, it seems as though he is asking for next to nothing: most sheep are white, not dark-colored; most goats are black, not speckled; and, Laban, by first removing all the animals with the recessive traits from the flocks, will appear to have reduced to nil Jacob’s chances of acquiring any substantial number of livestock. One should note that, as in the stealing of the blessing, Jacob is embarked on a plan of deception that involves goats.

35–36. And he removed . . . the spotted and speckled . . . And he put three days’ journey between himself and Jacob. Laban, taking Jacob at his word, seeks to eliminate any possibility of crossbreeding between the unicolored animals and the others by putting a long distance between the spotted ones and the main herds.

that had white on it. The Hebrew “white,” lavan, is identical with the name Laban. As Nahum Sarna puts it, Jacob is beating Laban at his own game—or, with his own name-color.

38. he stood the rods he had peeled in the troughs . . . opposite the flocks, which went into heat. The mechanism of Jacob’s ingenious scheme has long perplexed commentators. At least on the surface, it appears to involve the age-old belief that sensory impressions at the moment of conception affect the embryo—here, the peeled rods, with their strips of white against the dark bark, would impart the trait of spots or brindle markings to the offspring conceived. (The same effect would then be achieved for the sheep by making them face the flocks of speckled goats during their own mating time.) Yehuda Feliks, an authority on biblical flora and fauna, has proposed that the peeled rods are only a dodge, a gesture to popular belief, while Jacob is actually practicing sound principles of animal breeding. Using a Mendelian table, Feliks argues that the recessive traits would have shown up in 25 percent of the animals born in the first breeding season, 12.5 percent in the second season, and 6.25 percent in the third season. Jacob is, moreover, careful to encourage the breeding only of the more vigorous animals, which, according to Feliks, would be more likely to be heterozygotes, bearing the recessive genes. It is noteworthy that Jacob makes no mention of the peeled rods when in the next chapter he tells his wives how he acquired the flocks.