The Lost Matriarch: Finding Leah in the Bible and Midrash

6. Leah Comes to the Promised Land

137 6 leah comes to the promised l and Confronting Esau Although Leah’s already limited presence in the text becomes even further diminished with the family’s journey from Haran, the Bible is not finished with her just yet. We can still learn more about her life and her character from several indirect references to her in the remaining narrative. To view those references, however, we must try to catch a glimpse of Leah through the screen of a story that now primarily focuses on Jacob and Rachel. The family’s journey back from Haran is more than a simple return to Jacob’s homeland in Canaan. Jacob is returning to face the situation from which he fled two decades ago: confronting his brother Esau. The Bible doesn’t indicate that Jacob or anyone else in Haran had any contact with Jacob’s parents or brother during all this time. Jacob returns after twenty-two years—a period that his mother had assured him (with manipulative understatement? a mother’s unrealistic hope? narrative irony?) would be only “a few days,” until Esau’s anger over the stolen blessing had cooled (Gen. 27:44). Without having heard anything in the interim, Jacob still doesn’t know what reaction to expect from Esau. Esau had likewise thought that he was postponing his revenge against Jacob only for some “days”—until the conclusion of the days of mourn- 138 Leah Comes to the Promised Land ing for Isaac’s anticipated death. (Due to his blindness, even Isaac seems to have thought that he was about to die, which explains why he was so anxious to bless his firstborn son.) But even assuming that Esau would stand by his resolve not to take revenge until Isaac’s death, Jacob does not yet know whether Isaac still lives. (Later in Jacob’s life, his son Joseph will also be exiled. Midrash notes that for twenty-two years Joseph makes no attempt to contact a grieving Jacob, despite Joseph’s rise to a position of immense power in Egypt. Midrash sees this as a measure-for-measure punishment for Jacob having subjected his parents to the same period of anguish when he was alive and well in Haran.)1 From the time of their first struggles in Rebekah’s womb through their development as children competing to win their parents’ favoritism, Jacob and Esau exemplify two opposing characters. Perhaps these twins are meant to depict two different sides of a single personality.2 If so, Jacob might really be returning to confront himself, attempting to vanquish the darker aspects of his own soul. What has changed is that now Jacob has himself been subjected to connivance and deception by Laban and has seen the sufferings that flow from sibling rivalry. Chastened and reformed by the harsh lessons of his life in Haran, he is finally ready to come to terms with his older brother. The metaphor for this self-struggle will be the famous scene just before he meets his brother, when Jacob wrestles through the night with a mysterious stranger (Gen. 32:25–33). Variously interpreted as wrestling with God, with God’s angel, with Esau’s protecting angel, or with Esau, Jacob really may be wrestling with himself—with the side of himself that he must overcome before he can meet his brother. For Leah’s story, however, perhaps the most telling aspect of Jacob’s meeting with Esau is what Jacob’s management of that meeting reveals about his relationships with his wives and children. Leah Comes to the Promised Land 139 And Jacob went on his way, and the angels of God met him. And when he saw them, Jacob said, “This is God’s camp”; and he called the name of that place Mahanaim. (Gen. 32:2–3) Jacob’s flight from Canaan began at Bethel with his dream of the angels on the ladder as he reached the border when leaving his homeland (Gen. 28:12). Now his reentry into Canaan is marked by another vision of angels.3 This time Jacob names the location Mahanaim—“two camps”—apparently because there is now a camp of angels beside his family’s camp. But from his family’s point of view, “two camps” describes how Jacob treats his several wives and children at this critical and dangerous juncture.4 Jacob’s harsh actions in dividing his family will...