The Lost Matriarch: Finding Leah in the Bible and Midrash

4. Leah Continues the Conflict

101 4 leah continues the conflict Leah and Rachel Bargain for the Mandrakes Surely the involvement of Bilhah and Zilpah must have produced a further intensification of the rivalry between the sisters , or perhaps new vectors of dissention among the four wives. We might even anticipate conflicts or varying alliances among the eight young sons of Jacob from three different mothers. But biblical style often does not detail events, dialogue, or descriptions that directly describe developments of character or plot background. Instead, the Bible may use some seemingly interpolated stand-alone episode to serve as a gloss on what is obscured or skipped in the main narrative. Familiar examples of such interpolated episodes in Genesis include Abraham and King Abimelech in Gerar, when Abraham claims that Sarah is his sister (Gen. 20:1–18), and Judah’s encounter with Tamar, his daughter-in-law (Gen. 38:1–30). It is left to the reader to find the implications in such episodes that can illuminate the main story line. Such an episode appears in our story immediately after Zilpah gives birth to her two sons, when Leah and Rachel bargain over the dudaim plants that Leah’s first son, Reuben, gathers from the fields. Once, at the time of the wheat harvest, Reuben found some mandrakes [dudaim] in the field and brought them to his 102 Leah Continues the Conflict mother, Leah. Rachel said to Leah, “Give me, please, some of your son’s mandrakes.” But she said to her, “Was it not enough for you to take away my husband, that you would also take my son’s mandrakes?” Rachel replied, “Therefore he shall lie with you tonight, in return for your son’s mandrakes .” (Gen. 30:14–15) The episode opens with Reuben retrieving the dudaim from the fields and bringing them to his mother, Leah. The Rabbis begin their analysis with a dispute over what the Hebrew word dudaim means. The context suggests that it is some kind of wild plant or herb, perhaps the mandrake plant. Dudaim ends in -im, a Hebrew suffix that typically signifies a plural noun, and the mandrake plant may have had this plural form of name because its root is forked, resembling the legs of a human body. And perhaps because of this shape, the plant was deemed in folklore to possess magical aphrodisiac or fertility powers.1 (Robert Alter notes a further suggestive relationship between the word dudaim and the word for lovemaking, dodim.)2 But the Rabbis recoil at the idea that the Matriarchs would quarrel over possession of a magical plant.3 Jews are not supposed to believe in magic; the miraculous is God’s realm. Some commentators argue that Reuben does not bring his mother the anthropomorphic mandrake root for its power to aid fertility. He brings her only its fragrant fruit for its pleasant aroma.4 Or perhaps the plant was not a mandrake at all, but some other fragrant plant or herb such as a jasmine or violet,5 because, while Leah and Rachel might have desired a source of floral aroma for their own pleasure (or, more likely, for increasing their attractiveness to Jacob), they would not have stooped to sorcery. Other commentators acknowledge that the mandrake plant had the power to assist in fostering pregnancy, but reject any suggestion of magic, noting that such powers are no more than the ordinary medicinal qualities naturally found in many herbs and plants.6 Leah Continues the Conflict 103 Despite the valiant rabbinic efforts to deny that Rachel wanted the dudaim to become fertile, it seems most likely that this was indeed her motive. This would explain why this apparent interpolation was placed in the midst of the story of the sisters’ rivalry over bearing Jacob’s children. And this conclusion might be reinforced by its consistency with Rachel’s later actions (Gen. 31:19) when she steals Laban’s teraphim (icons of household gods), perhaps also for magically inducing conception. There follows in this mandrakes story what becomes (ironically , from our point of view) a high point for Leah’s presence in the text—the first of Leah’s only two lines of direct dialogue in the entire Bible. This first line is her only dialogue with Rachel, and the language makes Leah seem like an unpleasant, mean sister. Rachel has carefully used words of politeness (“Give me, please” or “Give me, I beg...