Reuben Brought Mandrakes and Leah Met Jacob on the Road

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The Boy Who Walked Past the Harvest

It was wheat harvest, the season when everything in the world is ripe and everything ripe belongs to somebody. Reuben went out into it as a boy and came back with his hands full, and every plant in his hands had been growing on ground no man owned.

He had walked past the standing grain to get them. He had walked past orchards in first fruit. Nobody was watching him do it. Rabbi Hiyya bar Abba said the plants were mandrakes, Rabbi Yitzhak said barley, Rabbi Yehudah bar Simon said violets, and on the one thing that mattered they refused to argue: the boy took nothing that had an owner.

He did not taste a single one either. He carried the whole bundle to Leah with the field smell still on it and put it in her hands first.

The Wife With Sons and No Husband

Leah had four sons already and no evenings left. Rachel had the evenings and an empty cradle. Hannah would sing the arrangement back centuries later, and it came out sounding like an accusation: the woman full of children hired herself out, the woman starving for children gave up, the barren one ended up with seven, and the one who should have mothered the whole house was left to waste.

Rachel looked at what the boy had brought in and wanted it. "Give me some of your son's mandrakes."

Leah had an answer ready and it had been ready a long time. Rachel got the flowers. Leah got the night.

She Went Out to Meet Him

She did not wait at the tent. Jacob was coming in from the field at dusk with the dust of the whole day on him, and Leah went out and met him on the road, and she would not let him stop to wash his feet.

"You are coming in to me. I have hired you, and the price was my son's mandrakes."

It is a hard sentence for a wife to say out loud in front of God and everybody, and the verse keeps it word for word. Heaven had already looked at what was behind it and found nothing there but a woman trying to raise tribes.

A prophet warned that the rebels would be sifted out of Israel, the children of brazen women among them, and somebody was going to ask whether the son of that night was one of them. Rabbi Yonatan settled it in the other direction. A man whose wife asks him plainly gets children the like of which did not exist even in the generation of Moses. Bring me wise and understanding men, Moses had said when he went looking for judges. Of the sons of Issachar, Scripture says, men who understood the times.

Two Tribes Out of a Bundle of Flowers

The child born from that night was Issachar, and Leah named him for the bargain. God has given me my reward, she said, because I gave my maid to my husband.

Rabbi Levi told people to stop and look at what a handful of weeds had done. Two of the great tribes of Israel stood up out of those mandrakes. Issachar sat down over the Torah and did not get up. Zebulun went out to the sea, sailed, traded, came home, and put the food in his brother's mouth, and because of that arrangement Torah multiplied in Israel. The mandrakes gave forth their fragrance, the Song says, and this is what it smelled like.

Moses Blessed the Sailor First

Issachar was the ninth son born, and at the dedication of the Tabernacle his prince brought his offering second, ahead of seven older brothers, because the tribe carried the learning. They kept the calendar. They knew when to add the month. Two hundred heads of courts came out of Issachar, and the rest of Israel ruled as they ruled, and when they were asked why, they answered that it was a law given to Moses at Sinai.

None of it came from Issachar. It came from Zebulun on the water, from cargo and weather and ports, from a brother who bought the hours.

Moses knew it. At the end of his life, blessing the tribes one by one, he reached these two and put the merchant's name in front of the scholar's. Rejoice, Zebulun, in your going out. And Issachar, in your tents.