Leah Answered Jacob in Rachel's Voice the Whole Wedding Night

Click for full size

The Terms Jacob Wrote Down

Jacob had lived in Haran long enough to know how business was done there, so he named his price three times over. Seven years of work for Rachel. For your daughter Rachel. For the younger one. In that town a man could fetch a woman off the street, call her Rachel, and dare you to prove otherwise.

He was eighty-four years old. Twelve tribes were supposed to come out of him and not one of them had been born.

When the seven years were up he did not dress it in manners. "Give me my wife," he said to Laban, in front of the household, in language no careful man uses about a woman. A careful man with time left can afford to be delicate.

Laban Bought the Whole Town

Laban called the men of Haran together before the feast.

They knew what their water had been like before, he reminded them. Wells low, the town measuring out cupfuls. Then this righteous stranger came and the wells ran sweet and had gone on running sweet for seven years. Did they want another seven? Then help him put Leah in the bridal chamber tonight, and let no man in the room tell Jacob a thing.

They told him to do as he liked. That was not enough for Laban. He went around the room collecting a pledge from every man, something each of them would hate to lose, so that talking would cost them. Then he took the pledges out and spent them on wine and oil and meat for his daughter's wedding.

All that day the guests sang in front of Jacob while he moved among them, timbrels going, the same two words over and over. Hi Leah. Hi Leah. He heard a wedding chant in a dialect he had never fully learned, and he smiled at them, and they sang it again into his face.

The Lamps Went Out

At dusk the lamps in the bridal chamber went dark one after another until nothing in the house was burning.

Jacob asked what they were doing. The guests were offended, or did a good imitation of it. Did he take them for people with no shame? Perhaps in Canaan they left the lights up. Haran was not Canaan.

He believed them. Believing them cost nothing. The other thing would have cost him everything, because the other thing was that his father-in-law had put the veil on the wrong daughter and walked her through a room of witnesses who had all been paid that afternoon.

The bride came in. The door shut.

In the dark Jacob said the name. "Rachel." A voice answered him. He said it again later and the voice answered again, and it answered every time he said it, all night, until the window turned grey.

Deceiver, Daughter of a Deceiver

Morning put a face on the voice. Leah was lying beside him in her sister's clothes.

"You deceiver," Jacob said. "Daughter of a deceiver. I called Rachel all night and you answered me."

Leah did not get up and she did not cry. "Is there a teacher anywhere with no students?" she said. "I learned it from you. When your father was blind in his tent and called out for Esau, whose voice answered him? You said, here I am."

He had no reply. Seven years of care, and the trick that finally took him was his own, run on a blind man, with a dish of food in his hands.

Laban had the rest ready. The younger before the elder was not done in his country, he explained, as though this were law and not arithmetic. Finish the bridal week with Leah. Then take Rachel, and work another seven years for her. Jacob finished the week. One celebration was not to be folded into another.

What Leah Did With the Rest of It

Jacob loved Rachel. The whole camp knew it, Leah first of all, and Leah bore Reuben, then Simeon, then Levi, then Judah, while her sister's tent stayed empty.

The sons were not sentiment. Leah had worked the thing out plainly. Jacob would go home to Canaan sooner or later, and Laban could not hold back daughters who had borne him children. A childless wife he could hold. A childless wife he could keep behind and marry off to one of the uncircumcised men of the town, and nobody would come for her.

So she counted births the way a person counts the distance to a border.

One evening she walked out to the edge of the field to meet Jacob coming in from the flocks, and she would not let him go to his tent and wash. "You are coming to me tonight," she said, standing in the dirt with the sheep still moving past them.

The Wall at the Citadel

Leah died first.

Her four sons sat on the ground with Jacob, and the sons of the other wives came to comfort them, and the whole household was inside the walls when four thousand men in iron and brass closed around the citadel. Esau had waited a long time for a day when his brother would not be watching the road.

Arrows came over the wall. Jacob climbed up where the army could see him and called down to his brother.

"Is this the consolation you have come to bring me?" he said. "My wife has been taken by death, and this is how you comfort me."

The words went out over four thousand drawn bows. My wife. Not the sister he had worked fourteen years for, and not the voice that had answered him in the dark. Leah.