Leah Ruined Her Own Eyes Crying Over Esau

Laban had two daughters. Rebekah had two sons. The families had communicated by letter while the children were still young, and the arrangement seemed obvious: the older son to the older daughter, the younger to the younger. Esau was the older son. Leah was the older daughter. This is where the trouble began.

Leah grew up hearing about her future husband, and what she heard was not encouraging. Esau was a man of the field, a hunter, a man of violence. His deeds were fierce. The Legends of the Jews says simply that Leah made inquiries and all the tidings spoke of his villainous character, and she wept over her fate until her eyelashes dropped from their lids. She wept herself into a physical defect. This is how Genesis explains Leah's weak eyes: not illness, not accident, but grief expended in advance of a marriage she dreaded.

Rachel had the opposite experience. Every account of Jacob praised and extolled him. The tradition quotes a proverb: good tidings make the bones fat. Rachel grew more beautiful day by day because the news about Jacob was good every day. By the time Jacob arrived in Haran, having fled from Esau's murderous anger, the gap between the sisters had widened into something unmistakable. Jacob had already made his decision before he set foot in Laban's house.

He rolled the great stone from the mouth of the well when he saw Rachel approaching, effortlessly, the way a cork is drawn from a bottle, with supernatural strength given to him when he crossed the border of the Holy Land. He kissed her and wept. He told Laban he would serve seven years for Rachel. Laban said nothing that directly contradicted this. Jacob served. Seven years passed. He said: give me my wife.

Laban assembled the people of Haran. He told them his plan: Jacob was pious and had brought water to the city; it was they who had benefited, and now he would deceive Jacob and give him Leah instead, because Jacob's love for Rachel would keep him working another seven years. The people agreed. They gave Laban pledges for their silence. He bought the wine and meat and oil for the wedding feast with the pledges they had left with him, so they had in effect paid for the party at which they would deceive their benefactor. This is what the text calls an Aramean thing to do. Laban is called Arami, the deceiver, and the usage is precise.

On the night of the wedding the guests extinguished all the candles. Jacob was surprised. They told him his countrymen had no sense of modesty. He believed them. The Book of Jubilees, written in the second century BCE, uses this story as the source of a commandment: the children of Israel shall not give the younger before the elder, for it is very wicked. The deception Laban perpetrated became the law that forbids its repetition.

The guests sang a wedding ode with the word Halia as its refrain, hoping Jacob would hear it as Ha-Leah, this is Leah. He did not notice. Throughout the night, Leah responded when he called Rachel's name. When morning came and he understood what had happened, he confronted her bitterly: you deceiver, daughter of a deceiver, why did you answer me when I called Rachel's name? Leah said: is there a teacher without a pupil? I learned it from you. When your father called you Esau, did you not say, here am I?

She had him. Jacob had deceived his own father by pretending to be his brother. He had answered to the wrong name. He had no standing to condemn her for doing exactly what he had done, even if she had done it at her father's instruction. He turned his anger on Laban instead, and Laban soothed him and offered him Rachel after the seven days of Leah's wedding feast, in exchange for seven more years of service. Jacob agreed. He married Rachel a week after he married her sister.

The tradition notes that Leah was not only lovely in countenance and form but pious. Her weak eyes were her only defect, and she had brought them on herself through the sheer force of her own grief and prayer. The rabbis who preserved this detail were making a claim about what Leah's weeping actually accomplished: she had prayed herself away from Esau and toward Jacob. The defect was the proof of the prayer. Her eyes were ruined and her life was changed.

Laban's deception on the wedding night was not only a private wrong. The Book of Jubilees, written in the second century BCE, draws a law from it: the children of Israel shall not give the younger before the elder in marriage, for it is very wicked. What Laban did became the prohibition against doing it again. Jacob's seven more years of labor for Rachel is never portrayed as punishment. It is what love looks like when it meets obstruction and simply keeps going. Jacob served fourteen years total for the right to build his household with the women he and Rachel had both always known were meant for it. By the end, even the deception served the plan.