The second son born through Bilhah is named Naphtali, and the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan hears in the name a principle of Jewish spiritual life.
Rachel says: With affliction afflicted was I before the Lord in prayer. The Aramaic uses an intensive doubling — affliction upon affliction. Her prayer has been soaked in suffering. Then she adds: He hath received my request that I might have a son as my sister, and hath given me two.
Two sons through her handmaid. Not yet through her own body, but two children she can count as hers. Her wrestling — the Hebrew naphtulei — has yielded a reward.
Then the prophecy. Even so are my children to be redeemed from the hand of their enemies when they shall afflict themselves in prayer before the Lord.
Rachel is naming the pattern of Jewish redemption. Affliction in prayer, then deliverance. Inui tefillah — pouring oneself out in front of Heaven, emptying oneself until there is nothing left but the request — is the mechanism by which her children will one day be rescued in every future generation of exile.
The Targum is pointing forward to the prayer of Moses in Egypt, the prayer of Hannah at Shiloh (1 Samuel 1:10), the prayer of Mordechai and Esther in Shushan, the prayer of the exiles in Babylon. Every time the children of Israel are in the hand of their enemies, the answer comes through the same pattern Rachel identifies at her son's naming. Affliction. Prayer. Deliverance.
Naphtali, in other words, is not merely the name of a tribe. It is the name of a theology.
The takeaway: Jewish redemption has always traveled through the narrow gate of sincere, afflicted prayer. Rachel named the gate when she named her son.