How the Sons of Jacob Found Their Wives

Most people read the story of the twelve tribes and imagine twelve simple men. They forget the women. Forget that each of those tribes began with a particular woman, chosen in particular circumstances, under the shadow of a particular betrayal.

The year Joseph was sold into Egypt was the same year all his brothers took wives. This was not a coincidence. Before Joseph was thrown into the pit, Jacob had arranged marriages for all his sons. But once Joseph disappeared, the father withdrew entirely into his grief, and the brothers realized no one was going to do this for them. Judah was the eldest still standing in favor, and his brothers turned to him: you marry first, then we will follow. This is recorded in the Legends of the Jews, compiled by Louis Ginzberg from hundreds of midrashic sources in 1909.

Judah went to Adullam, his friend Hirah's city, and there he saw the daughter of a Canaanite merchant named Shua. He married her quickly, without consulting Jacob. The Ginzberg collection contains over 2,400 texts drawn from this tradition, and many of them trace the long consequences of small choices. Judah's quick marriage was a consequence of a bigger failure: he had saved Joseph from death but had not saved him from slavery. He had begun a good deed and left it unfinished, and this, the ancient teachers taught, was its own kind of transgression. Two of his sons by this woman would die. Then the woman herself.

The other brothers fanned out. Reuben took a Canaanite woman. Simeon first married Dinah, his own sister, because after the massacre at Shechem she had refused to leave the city, saying she could not carry her shame back home. Simeon swore he would marry her so her shame would not stand alone, and he kept his word. When she died in Egypt, he carried her body back to the land of Canaan for burial. He is one of the few figures in these old stories who kept every promise he made to a woman.

There is a story tucked inside this catalog of marriages that most readers pass over. When Dinah had been defiled at Shechem, she bore a daughter. The brothers wanted to kill the infant, a living mark of the family's disgrace. Jacob would not allow it. Instead he took a piece of tin, inscribed the Divine Name upon it, and hung it around the baby's neck. Then he placed her under a thornbush and left her there. An angel carried the child to Egypt. Potiphar, whose wife would later accuse Joseph, adopted her as his own, for his wife was barren. The girl's name was Asenath.

Years later, when Joseph traveled the land of Egypt as viceroy, young women threw gifts at him as he passed, hoping he would lift his eyes toward them. Asenath had nothing to give. She took the tin amulet from her neck, the one Jacob had inscribed before she was old enough to know her own name, and she threw it. Joseph caught it, read it, and understood who she was. She was not Egyptian. She was the daughter of Dinah. She was connected to the house of Jacob through her mother, and so Joseph took her as his wife, and so the two families, the one destroyed by Shechem and the one sold into Egypt, became one.

Among all the marriages listed in this portion of the Legends of the Jews, one is hard to forget: Asher's second wife Hadorah had been previously married to Malchiel, another grandson of Shem, and she brought with her to Asher's house a three-year-old daughter named Serah. This child came into Jacob's household as a small stranger, and there she grew up, walking, the text says, in the way of pious children. God gave her beauty, wisdom, and long life. In later tradition, Serah bat Asher is the woman who tells Jacob that Joseph is alive, the woman who reveals to Moses where Joseph's bones are buried, and the woman who, according to some accounts, never died at all.

The list of marriages reads like a census, but it is really a map of the world that Joseph was sold into. Judah's unfinished rescue of his brother set off a chain of events that arranged Asenath at the right well at the right moment. The amulet Jacob inscribed for a child he could not protect became the key that identified a bride. The orphan Serah, brought into Jacob's house by accident through a second marriage, became the family's memory, the one who lived long enough to carry the whole story forward.

The midrashic tradition surrounding Serah spans dozens of texts. She appears again at the Exodus, again at the crossing of the sea, again in the days of David. What looks like a genealogical footnote is actually a thread that runs through centuries. The women in these marriages were not background figures. They were the ones who survived.