Q. Did Jacob Really Hate His First Wife, Leah? (Genesis 29:30-33)
Contrasts, Hyperbole & Priorities
A. With the emotional content which we endow the word 'hate' in English, no, not at all, no more than the Saviour did when He told His disciples to "hate [their] father and mother, wife and children, brothers sisters - yes, even [their] own life" if they meant to follow Him (Luke 14:26, NIV). Most intelligent people understand this to be about contrasts - namely, that our prioretising Messiah over others in our life, or one wife over the other, seems like 'hate'. They would argue that these are typical examples of Jewish hyperbole or exaggeration. And there would be some truth to that.
'Hate' as a Legal Term Denoting Status
But as Professor Bruce Wells has discovered [1], there's a much better explanation (though it does not discount what I have just suggested), namely, that this was a legal term denoting status or rank. In the case of Leah, whom he was tricked into marrying by his father-in-law Laban, Jacob seemingly demoted her so that her firstborn son (who would be Reuben) could not receive the double inheritance right because it was Rachel he had wanted to marry in the first place giving her firstborn son (who would be Joseph) the double inheritance. Ironically, Reuben later proved his unworthiness (as Jacob's firstborn brother Esau had) in his murderous treatment of the Shechemites following the rape of Dinah and was disinherited in favour of his half-brother Joseph. But that is besides the point.
Divorce Case Study
Bruce Wells notes:
"...in the case of divorce and remarriage, Deuteronomy distinguishes between the reason for the first and second divorce:
"A man takes a wife and possesses her. She fails to please him because he finds something obnoxious about her, and her writes her a bill of divrcement, hands it to her, and sends her away from his house. She leaves his household and becomes the wife of another man; and (if) the second husband hates her, writes out for her a bill of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends he away from his house, or if the second husband who took her dies..." (Dt.24:1-2).
"While the first husband divorces the woman for 'ervat davar, a negative term implying that she is at fault for something, the second husband's divorce is because he 'hates' her, i.e. without grounds. The parallel case in the verse is that the second husband passes away, i.e. in both, the woman is not at fault. We see here that men could divorce their wives with grounds or without grounds; the latter, divorce for 'hate', is what we now call a no-fault divorce." [2]
Ranking in Near Eastern Plural Marriage
In the ancient Near East, if a man was married to several wives, it was normal to regard one of the wives as being of 'first rank'. He was free to promote or demote his wives as he chose. What that meant in practice was that he gave the wife of first rank more priviliges than the other wives such as "more rations and resources, more frequent social interactions (social and sexual)...and sometimes more privileges for her children" [3].
Leah Demoted Without Grounds
This ranking system explains what the Torah means by Leah being "hated". Beginning as Jacob's only wife, she was then demoted only a week later, without grounds, when Jacob married her sister Rachel:
"So he went into Rachel also, and he loved Rachel more than Leah...And Yahweh saw that Leah was the hated one...And Leah conceived and bore a son, and she named him Reuben. For she said, 'Because Yahweh saw my affliction. Surely now, my husband will love me'. And she once again conceived and bore a son. And she said, 'Because Yahweh heard that I am the hated one, He gave this son to me as well.' And she named him Simeon" (Gen.29:30-33).
When Leah says, 'Surely now, my husband will love me,' she is expecting to regain her lost status of first rank as 'the loved wife'. Alas, even after the birth if Simeon, she remains the demoted wife.
Inheritance Rights
Which brings us to the other passage concerning inheritance rights:
"If a man have two wives, one [be]loved, and another hated, and they have born him children, both the [be]loved and the hated; and if the firstborn son be hers that was hated: Then it shall be, when he maketh his sons to inherit that which he hath, that he may not make the son of the [be]loved firstborn before the son of the hated, which is indeed the firstborn: But he shall acknowledge the son of the hated [wife] for the firstborn, by giving him a double portion of all that he hath: for he is the beginning of his strength; the right of the firstborn is his" (Dt.21:15-17, KJV).
Torah Protects the Firstborn and Establishes Plural Marriage
Where the Torah differs with the standard Near Eastern practice, Isaac Mendelsohn of Colombia University said that "the innovation on this law is the abrogation of the arbitrary power of the father to choose a firstborn" [3]. Note carefully that if the Near Eastern practice of plural marriage been wrong, this would have been the perfect opportunity to abolish that too in favour of monogamy, and thus end the modern European controversy and prejudice against plural marriage since Roman Catholic times. But He did not. He established the validity of plural marriage but modified the unfair treatment of the firstborn that was practiced in the pagan Near East.
Christ Did Not Abolish Plural Marriage When He Could Have
Likewise, when in the first century AD the Saviour abolished the tradition of the Elders (Mt.15:2; Mk.7:3,5), returning the lax divorce laws to the way they had been from the very beginning, He could likewise have done the same with Israel's extant marriage practices, but did not, leaving plural marriage intact:
"They (the Pharisees) said to Him, 'Why then did Moses command to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?' He said to them, 'Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery; and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery'" (Mt.19:6-10, NKJV).
Yahweh is Not an 'Orthodox' Christian in Respect of Marriage Law
Again, had plural marriage fallen under the umbrella of an unrighteous practice permitted because of
'hardness of heart', this would have been another perfect opportunity to redefine marriage in the New Covenant and turn us all into Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and Protestants. But He did not because neither Yahweh nor His Son are Catholic, Eastern Orthodox or Protestant. Righteousness in respect of living out the marriage covenant, then, is not as orthodox Christians teach us.
Marriage Laws Protecting Wronged Wives
Moreover, 'hatred' as we understand the word today was a legal term and if a man 'hated' a wife wihout a just cause he could be punished (Dt.22:13-19), thus protecting the wronged wife. Indeed, after such a judgment in favour of the wife he was forbidden from divorving her for as long as he lived (v.19), thus revealing the love and favour of the Father toward righteous women and His dipleasure toward unrighteous men, a very different spirit indeed from that of the hardened heart of the Pharisees. Thus a man who 'hates' a wife for no just cause loses his right to divorce her even if subsequently there might be just cause, a clause that served as a deterant to the exercise of ungodly male headship.
Marriage and Homosexuality Laws Compared
From this we learn that not only does Yahweh love marriage (a man married to one or more women) but He protects wives against ungodly men, be they in a 'monogamous' or 'polygynous' [5] relationship, for there is no distinction between the two as in orthodox Christendom. Moreover, both Moses and Christ had the perfect opportunity to get rid of multiple marriage had this only been permissive, because of laxity in the rules of earlier times, if they had so chosen but they did not. This is in sharp contrast to homosexuality which, though banned in the Tanakh (Old Testament), remained banned in the New too - in other words, the claim by some that the anti-homosexual stand in the Tanakh was too strict (Lev.18:22; 20:13) and was later lifted by the 'love' commandments of Christ (the reverse of the anti-plural marriage claim) was unambiguously refuted by Paul (Rom.1:26-27) [6].
Conclusion
So did Jacob really hate his first wife, Leah? Not in the modern sense, no, but he did treat her wrong by demoting her. For though Laban had wronged him, and we can understand his righteous indignation at being tricked, he was wrong to take this out on Leah who was the innocent party [7], leading to the rivalry between the two wives which could otherwise have been avoided. But then this was the carnal Jacob before he became the spiritual Israel. Not only did Jacob latterly love Leah, as he should have done from the start, but he loved Bilhah and Zilpah too, fathering through his four wives the forefathers of the 12 Tribes of Israel according to Yahweh's eternal plan. Believers are admonished, like Ruth in marrying Boaz, to imitate Leah and Rachel in Yahweh's righteousness (Ruth 4:11).
Endnotes
[1] Bruce Wells, The Torah: The Hated Wife
[2] Ibid., pp.1-2
[3] Isaac Mendelsohn, On the Preferential Status of the Eldest Son, BASOR 156, December 1959, pp.38-40
[4] Ibid., p.2
[5] These words and their implied distinction of two different categories of marriage do not exist in Scripture but are modern terms. In Father Yahweh's world, a man may simply marry for the first time and stop if he so wishes, or keep on marrying within reasonable limits, viz. his ability to take care of further women, i.e. not marrying to excess
[6] Interestingly the Tanakk (Old Testament) only prohibits male-to-male sexual relations, a reason the rabbis often turned a blind eye to intimacy between women which at the very least would have amounted to fornication (were they unmarried...to husbands) or, worse, adultery (were the women already married to different husbands) under Torah rules, leading some modern promoters of polygamy to suggest that heterosexual men can marry bisexual women, allowing for bisexual lesbian relationships in plural marriage. For any kind of homosexual behaviour between women, see the Bi Women page.
[7] Apparently it was a tradition in the area where Laban lived that elder daughters be married off before younger ones, assuming Laban was being truthful, which Jacob knew nothing of.
Author: SBSK
