Illegitimate

Your servant my father said to us, ‘You know that my wife bore me two sons; Genesis 44:27  NASB

My wife– Sometimes we just read over critical details in the text because we know the stories so well.  As a result, we don’t experience the emotional impact in the text.  We end up with the Sunday school version—theologically correct and emotionally impotent.

This verse is a perfect example of not reading what it says.  Let’s set the context.  Judah is the speaker.  He stands before Zaphnath-Paaneah, Egypt’s second most power lord (who we know is really Joseph).  Judah is pleading that Benjamin not be forced to come to Egypt.  In his speech, he reveals a startling admission of a fractured family.  Describing his father, Jacob, he says, “My father said to us, ‘My wife bore two sons.’”  Did you read that!? Jacob told his own children that he had one wife, the wife of the two sons who mattered to him.  Joseph and Benjamin count.  The others don’t.  In fact, Jacob doesn’t even acknowledge that their mothers were also his wives. As far as their father is concerned, the other ten boys are illegitimate.

You cannot understand this story unless you come to terms with its emotional details. Can you imagine what life was like in this “family”?  We already know that Jacob hated Leah.  Yes, that’s right. The text of Genesis 29:31 is often translated “Leah was unloved,” but that isn’t what it says in Hebrew. The verb is śānēʾ.  It means, “to hate.”  Jacob retains a life-long hatred for this woman who stole his true love, Rachel, from him on his wedding night.  You might also ask yourself about Leah who is willing to deceive her sister’s husband and who pretends to be her sister when the light is out.  Oh, and just so you see the connection (which is the way Hebrew stories are written), Leah pretends to be someone else just as Jacob pretended to be someone else.  She mimics Jacob’s deception.  The deceiver is deceived.  No wonder Jacob hates her.  She is him.

Now we recognize that the children of Leah are considered insignificant by their own father.  Now the emotional tension of this fractured family helps explain why the sons of Leah hated the children of Rachel.  Now we can see why they had no remorse about selling Joseph to the Midianites and telling their father that he died.  And now we know why Judah, whose own sons were taken from him, finally admits to the world that he and his brothers have lived in a home where they weren’t really wanted.

All in one tiny phrase, “my wife.”

And now one more connect-the-dots Hebrew clue.  Laben brings Leah to Jacob. Jacob does not ask her to come to him, nor does he expect her.  Someone else arranges the marriage.  Do you see?  “The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man and brought her to the man” (Genesis 2:22).  Doesn’t Leah reflect Havvah?  Isn’t she the one who disrupts the man’s self-contained tranquility?  Doesn’t she force him to confront his own sense of divine control?  And then there’s this:  the Messiah does not come from the line of the “two sons.”  He comes from the line of the sons who didn’t count.  What do you make of that?

Topical Index:  Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Judah, wife, Genesis 44:27