Issachar Was the Price Rachel Paid for Leah's Mandrakes

Reuben was walking through his father's field during the harvest when he found something growing near the root of a plant his father's donkey was tied to. He pulled up the root, found the donkey dead beside it, and carried what he had found home to his mother. He was a good son. He did not keep the plant for himself.

His mother was Leah. The plant was dudaim, known in English as mandrakes, a root believed in the ancient world to aid conception. Rachel saw it and wanted it. She asked Leah for the plant. Leah agreed to give it, but the price she set was unusual: Rachel would allow Jacob to spend that night in Leah's tent rather than Rachel's.

Rachel accepted. The Ginzberg tradition, drawing on midrashic sources from across the first millennium CE, says this bargain cost her more than she realized. An angel appeared to Jacob and told him plainly: Rachel would bear only two sons, because she had rejected her husband's company and chosen other things in its place. Leah, who had desired Jacob's presence not out of any selfish desire but for the sake of bringing children into the world, would bear six sons.

Rachel paid with her fruitfulness for a handful of roots she could have given to the Temple priest. According to the Testament of Issachar tradition, she did not even eat the mandrakes. She placed them in the house of God and gave them to the priest. She wanted them, bargained for them, and then offered them up. The desire was there. The restraint was there. But the damage was already done.

Midrash Rabbah, compiled in fifth-century Palestine, approached the mandrake story from a different angle. The verse from Song of Songs (7:14) -- the mandrakes have emitted fragrance -- was read as a description of the young men of Israel who had not tasted sin, the daughters who had cleaved to their husbands and known no other. The mandrakes became a symbol of fidelity, of the clean-hearted who drew near to God.

The irony is heavy. The same root that entered tradition as a symbol of sexual purity was the instrument of a transaction between two sisters over a shared husband, a transaction that an angel pronounced, in retrospect, a mistake on Rachel's part.

And Issachar, who was born from this exchange, knew it. His own account in the Testament tradition names himself plainly: he was the reward Rachel gave to Leah for the mandrakes. His name was the price of the bargain. He carried that origin into his life by turning away from the very kind of calculating desire that had produced him, becoming a man of the field, a worker in the earth, someone who wanted nothing surplus to his needs and gave everything else away.

The Ginzberg collection preserves what Rachel also gained from the mandrake affair. Her prayer was eventually answered. God heard her cry. She bore Joseph, then Benjamin. The angel said she would bear only two sons. She bore two sons. The prophecy and the fulfillment were the same event, not a consolation prize but a completed promise. The mandrakes did not help her conceive. Prayer did.

Reuben, who brought the mandrakes home because he was a good son who did not keep things for himself, is not blamed by the tradition for any of what followed. He found something growing in his father's field, pulled it up, and the world shifted. The donkey died. Rachel bargained. Issachar was born. The trajectory of a tribe began with a boy who just wanted to give his mother something nice.

The rabbis did not miss the lesson. The good intention and the unintended consequence arrive together. What you offer freely, and what the world does with it, are not always the same story.

The Testament tradition, which preserves Issachar's own voice speaking to his sons from his deathbed, shows a man who had thought carefully about where he came from and what it had made him. He was conceived in a transaction. He lived in defiance of transactions. He worked the earth and kept nothing above what he needed and gave the rest to the Temple and to the poor. Whether he knew exactly how the mandrakes and the bargain and the angel's prophecy had shaped the tribe he founded is not recorded. But his instructions to his children read like the conclusions of a man who had spent his life working out a problem he understood from the inside.

The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, a text preserved in multiple ancient versions dating to at least the second century BCE, places Issachar's speech in a sequence with his brothers'. Each patriarch examines his own life for the lessons it contains. Issachar's lesson is simple. Work the land. Want little. Give much. The tribe produced by a night purchased with plants became, in the tradition's telling, the tribe that cared least for purchased things.