Rachel

The Holy Righteous Rachel is one of the matriarchs of the people of Israel, the beloved wife of the patriarch Jacob and the mother of Joseph and Benjamin. Her story is in the Book of Genesis. Her name means ewe lamb. The Church remembers her among the righteous of the Old Testament, on the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers before the Nativity of the Lord, which has no fixed date.

Meeting Jacob

Rachel was the younger daughter of Laban, the brother of Rebecca, and the younger sister of Leah. Jacob was therefore her first cousin. Genesis first shows her at the well in Mesopotamia, where she had come to water her father's sheep. Jacob had left the land of Canaan to escape the anger of his twin brother Esau and to find a wife among his mother's kin. Seeing her, he fell in love and promised to serve seven years for her.

On the wedding night the bride was veiled, and Laban gave Jacob Leah, saying that by custom the elder daughter had to be married first. Jacob received Rachel too, after seven more years of service. The book says that the first seven years seemed to him a few days, because of the love he had for her.

Her children

Rachel remained childless for many years, which was a great grief, while Leah and the handmaids Bilhah and Zilpah bore sons to Jacob. She gave Bilhah to Jacob, and Bilhah bore Dan and Naphtali. In the end God opened Rachel's womb and she bore Joseph, who would prepare in Egypt the way for his family.

When Jacob left Laban's house, Rachel took her father's household idols without her husband's knowledge. When Laban overtook them, she hid them under the camel's saddle and said that she could not rise. Jacob had sworn that whoever had the idols should not live, not knowing what she had done.

Her death

On the road to Ephrath, that is Bethlehem, Rachel bore her second son, but the labour was hard and she died. With her last breath she named him Ben-⁠oni, son of my sorrow, and Jacob called him Benjamin, son of the right hand. She was buried by the road, not in the cave of Machpelah, where Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Leah and Jacob lie. Jacob set up a pillar over her grave (Genesis 35:19-20).

Rachel's tomb, a few hundred metres from the southern edge of present-⁠day Jerusalem, has been known from ancient times and is a place of pilgrimage. It was already known in the days of Samuel, who mentions it as a landmark (1 Samuel 10:2). At the wedding of Boaz and Ruth, the elders of Bethlehem wished the bride to be like Rachel and Leah, who built up the house of Israel (Ruth 4:11).

Rachel in the word of the Church

The prophet Jeremiah shows Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more. Saint Matthew the Evangelist links these words with the infants of Bethlehem killed on Herod's order. For this reason Rachel has remained in Christian thought the image of the grief of mothers. Jewish tradition adds that Jacob buried her by the roadside so that she might pray for her children led into exile.

From Rachel descend the tribe of Joseph, with Ephraim and Manasseh, and the tribe of Benjamin. Together with Leah she is counted as a mother of the whole people of Israel.