The Flax Beater and the Mothers Who Fell in Their Houses

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The Arrangement Everybody Had Agreed On

Leah wept about it for years before anyone thought to ask her. The two households had settled it the way such things get settled, without a document and without a discussion, and everybody in both camps repeated it as a fact. The elder daughter to the elder son. The younger daughter to the younger son. Rachel would have Jacob. Leah would have Esau.

She said the same thing over and over while she cried. May it be his will that I do not fall to the portion of that wicked man.

Nobody arranged a rescue for her. There was a girl saying one sentence into the dark for as long as it took, and then the arrangement that both households had treated as settled came apart, and she went to the wedding tent first, ahead of her sister.

What the Women Behind the Loom Said

Then the whole country turned on her.

Sailors coming off the boats mocked her. Travelers on the road mocked her. The women crouched in the pits behind the loom, working the warp weights with their hands, stopped to mock her. This Leah, they said. Her inside is not like her outside. She walks around looking like a righteous woman, and a righteous woman does not do that to her own sister.

She had prayed her way out of Esau and into a marriage where she was the one nobody had wanted. Jacob's tent held two wives and everybody knew which one he had worked seven years for. Leah stood inside her own house, hated, with the story of the wedding night following her from village to village.

And Jacob, when he thought about what she had let happen to him in the dark, made up his mind to divorce her.

A Beater Does Not Waste His Arm on Bad Flax

A man who works linen for a living can tell by the feel of a stalk what it will take. The poor stalks he barely touches, because one hard blow against the stone splits them and there is nothing left worth spinning. The good stalks he beats, and beats again, and keeps beating, because that is the only thing that turns a rod of dry plant into thread.

The potter does the same at the kiln. He never raps the thin-walled pots. One knock and they are shards. He goes down the line of the sturdy ones knocking each of them over and over, and they ring, and they hold.

A householder with two cows, one strong and one feeble, does not stand there weighing the decision. The yoke goes on the strong one.

God does not test the wicked. They are a churning sea that throws up mud, and one blow and they are done. He tests the ones who can take it. Leah was good flax.

The Women Who Fell Inside Their Houses

She was not the only one on the floor. God holds up all who have fallen, and the ones who fall inside their own houses, where nobody outside can see it happen, are the barren women.

Sarah had spent decades there. Abraham's younger brother Haran was fathering children at an age that made the family arithmetic look absurd, and Abraham had none, and the price of a conception in that house ran higher than pearls. She was hauled into Pharaoh's palace and came out of it untouched, and Pharaoh, who had watched what happened to his household on her account, took his own daughter and handed her over as Sarah's servant girl. Better my daughter a maidservant in that house, he said, than mistress of any other. Her name was Hagar, and she walked out of Egypt behind a barren woman.

Am I Divorcing the Mother of These

God saw that Leah was hated, and he opened her womb.

Reuben. Then Simeon. Then Levi. Then Judah. Four sons in the years when Rachel had none, and a woman who had been bent double inside her own tent straightened up and stayed standing.

Jacob counted the boys in his yard and put the divorce out of his head. Am I going to send away the mother of these, he said, and that was the end of it. Six of his sons came out of Leah in the end, and a daughter.

Years later, in Egypt, at the very end of his life, the old man made Joseph swear not to bury him there. Then Israel bowed down over the head of the bed.

The head of Jacob's bed was Leah. The girl who had wept herself sick over a marriage arrangement was the one he bowed toward when he had nothing left to bargain with, and she was already buried in the cave at Machpelah, waiting for him to be carried up.