Genesis 29:17, “Leah [was] tender eyed; but Rachel was beautiful and well favoured.”
There is a movie coming out on Lifetime in couple days called The Red Tent. It is an adaptation of a popular novel by Anita Diamant about the daughter of Leah, Dinah. Unfortunately, I do not have cable TV, or even a working television to view this movie. But I did read the book and found it a good read although there is no real historical evidence that the Jews actually had a red tent in those days, but it is a nice touch.
Nonetheless this started me on a little research on the life of Dinah’s mother Leah. We have all heard the story in Sunday School how Jacob fell in love with Leah’s younger sister Rachel and agreed to work for seven years for her father Laban to purchase the rights to marry her. Then on the wedding night the old man who wanted to marry off the ugly older sister Leah secretly substituted her for her younger sister Rachel and when Jacob woke up from his wedding night he discovered he had slept with the wrong woman. Finding out the deceit involved he meekly agreed to work another seven years in order to get Rachel.
What has always baffled me is that if I were Jacob I would have hauled the old guy off to the nearest Patriarch and had the marriage annulled. If I were Rachel I would have screamed bloody when the preacher asked, “If there be anyone who feels this marriage should not take place speak now or forever hold your peace.” Yet, it seems Rachel went along with this whole charade without as much as a peep out of her. But, like the good Christian Sunday School boy I was, I just shucked it off to one of those crazy cultural things that people engaged in in those days.
But let’s look at this cultural thing and especially as this story is explained in the Jewish Talmud. In Christianity it is traditionally accepted that Jacob preferred Rachel because she was more beautiful that her sister Leah. Yet Leah was descended from Sarah who was a real knockout at the age of 90 and Leah’s daughter sure did a number on the prince of Shechem, I mean this old boy was like totally smitten. I find it hard to believe with such a glamorous gene pool that Leah turned out to be an ugly duckling. Some commentators say that the Hebrew word for tender eyes which is rakak means to be weak and that she had weak eyes. They even go on to say that this word rakak suggest that she was really had a physical deformity and that Jacob was repulsed by her appearance. I do not find any evidence of rakak suggesting such a thing. Many translations such as the NIV say she had weak eyes, one says ordinary eyes, another even says attractive eyes, the ISV says she looked rather plain, another says bleary eyed, and the Living Bible says there was no sparkle in her eyes. I say poppycock.
You trace this word rakak into its Semitic root, deep into the Canaanite language and you find the only concept of weakness comes from the idea that a person has such a tender heart that they could not go hunting because they could not bear to harm an innocent animal even for their own survival. Such a person was said to have ‘ayani rakak eyes of tenderness. This is really an ancient idiom to express the idea of a gentle, loving and caring person. It is here that I wave the KJV flag and say, “I am in your camp.” Leah had tender eyes.
Remember Leah was the mother of Judah from whom David descended and eventually Jesus. To me the picture is almost Messianic. Leah was a caring, loving woman, the one who brought home stray cats and dogs or lambs. It is suggested that is why God blessed her with so many children because she made such a wonderful caring mother. She had so much love to give and longed for the love and affection of Jacob who just outright rejected her. Just as Jesus has so much love to give and longs for us to return that love but we just outright rejected him for some physical attractiveness of this world.
In the Talmud (Bava Batra 123a) we find Judaism teaches something much different about Leah than Christianity. It is taught that because of Leah’s weak eyes or tender heartedness, she understood that one of her future children, this would be Judah, would father a great king, King David. Here is where my Christianity dove tails with the Jewish teaching. I say it was revealed in her heart that one of her future children, Judah, would be the father of the Messiah Jesus.
The Talmud teaches that she heard at the crossroads people saying, “Rebecca has two sons, and Laban has two daughters; the elder will marry the elder, and the younger will marry the younger.” As she sat at the crossroads she inquired, “ How does the elder one conduct himself.?” They replied, “He is a wicked man, a hunter of animals.” She then asked about the younger man and they said, “He is a wholesome man who cares for his mother and farms.” And Leah wept until her eyelashes fell out. At that moment she was determined to marry the younger son, Jacob.
You know what I think, and this is just my opinion here, we cannot know for sure, but I would like to believe that Leah and Laban knew the destiny of the oldest child of Leah, Judah, and that child must be conceived through Jacob. We know Laban as a bad, deceitful and idolatrous man, yet maybe he had a spark of tenderness within himself and felt that his daughter Leah was such a gentle, tenderhearted and giving child that once Jacob got over his bedazzlement with the more outgoing and charming Rachel he would fall deeply in love with Leah and forget all about Rachel. I would like to think he had Jacob work seven years for Rachel in the hope that he would see the real beauty in Leah and decide to marry her and failing in that maybe another seven years as the husband to Leah he would discover she was his true love which unfortunately never happened.
Rachel’s son Joseph may have gotten top billing but ultimately the tribe of Joseph is never mentioned among the twelve tribes and is believed to have been absorbed into the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, we just are not sure. The tribe of Benjamin, Rachel’s other son nearly got wiped out and were known as the warring tribe. Judah, however, was the son through which Jesus came. Judah was the eldest, he should have received the birthright that Jacob was bestowing upon Joseph, he should have had the coat of many colors, yet it was Judah who stood up for Joseph when the other brothers wanted to kill him. It was Judah who save Joseph’s life. Judah was his mother’s son, tender hearted.
I will most likely not see the movie Red Tent, but in the book Dinah was a woman who truly loved this prince. She was, like her mother, just a romantic who fell in love creating a whole set of problems that Harlequin Publishing somehow overlooked.
The point is, I like to think that my Jesus descended from a mother who was not a bleary eyes, ordinary eyed, weak eyed, plain looking woman who had no sparkle in her eye. I like to think that may Savior descended from a tender hearted, loving woman with a sparkle in her eyes, who took in lost sheep, cats and puppies and just really got a bum rap.
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