Reclaiming our Stories: Rachel

By Hannah Bardin

Read more of Rachel's story: Genesis 29:14-25; 30; 31:19, 30-35; 35:16-26 

Writing about Rachel was surprisingly hard. I spent hours reading commentaries and watching videos and sermons about Rachel and Leah trying to get a handle on what I would write. Nearly everything I found cast Rachel in one of two roles: the beautiful, demure, patient younger sister, or the bitter, jealous, spiteful wife. Rachel, according to the Bible, is both. She’s complex and multifaceted, and her story is deep and meaningful. She doesn’t have to be watered down or simplified for her story to mean something. 

Rachel is the beautiful younger sister. She’s described as beautiful in the moment we’re introduced to her. She does wait fourteen years to marry the love of her life. First she’s told she has to wait seven years to marry Jacob, and then at the last moment her father swaps her out for Leah at the wedding. She wants to have children so badly that at one point she yells to her husband, “give me children or I will die”. She’s always described as Jacob’s favorite wife, despite how long it was before she was able to have a son. When she finally gives birth to Joseph, she says “God has taken away my reproach. May the Lord add to me another son!”, and she eventually has another boy. She’s remembered by many as a matriarch of the faith, and her tomb remains a landmark for many. 

Rachel also has some less desirable traits. She initially offers up her maid to serve as a surrogate because she was so envious of Leah’s sons. When she screams to Jacob, “give me children or I will die”, he tells her to take it up with God, because Jacob isn’t the one preventing her from having children. When her maid, Bilhah, gives birth to her second son, she names him Naphtali, because Rachel has “had a great struggle with [her] sister, and [she has] won.” Toward the end of her life, she and her family flee from their homeland, and she secretly steals her father’s house gods. Not even Jacob knows that she’s taken them. She hides her superstitions and shame from everyone. She’s far from the perfect, beautiful sister that some characterize her as.

I think it’s important to recognize that we often only get a fraction of Rachel’s story. Like many women in the Bible, her story is sometimes simplified to make it more palatable or to fit a narrative. How often have you felt like you have to simplify yourself to fit a mould? Have you ever felt that your complexities make you unusable, whether by God or by people? Where does that stem from? Rachel was a deeply complex, deeply meaningful Mother in the Bible, and God is persistent in her life. What’s to say that God isn’t actively working in yours?