The Bible portrays YHWH as in control of opening and closing the womb. Yet biblical narratives and other ancient evidence show women seeking fertility through plants, rituals, amulets, and midwifery practices—revealing a world in which divine control and human agency coexist in the pursuit of conception and safe birth.
Leah names her sons to express her longing for Jacob’s love, but eventually abandons that hope. When her daughter is born, Leah names her Dinah—from the noun דין (din), a silent cry for “justice” after being trapped in a marriage to Jacob, who did not love her. Growing up in the shadow of her mother’s marital agony, Dinah seeks a different life for herself. In the Bible’s only story to foreground a mother–daughter connection, she ventures beyond the safety of home to explore her non-Israelite neighbors.
Rachel and Leah give Jacob their maidservants, Bilhah and Zilpah, as wives to bear children on their behalf. The four sons born to the maidservants are named by Rachel and Leah to express their own feelings and experiences of having more of “their” own children. Yet the Bible consistently calls them the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah and counts them as Jacob’s sons, part of the twelve tribes of Israel. Should Bilhah and Zilpah then not be considered matriarchs?
Hate in ancient Near Eastern law, the Torah, and Elephantine ketubot is a legal term. If a man demotes his wife to second in rank for no fault, merely because he “hates” her, he cannot also take away her firstborn son’s right to inherit a double portion.
To marry a woman, a man had to first pay her father a מֹהַר (mohar), “bride-price.” Although Laban allows Jacob to marry Rachel before working off his debt, she only has her first child at the end of the seven-year period.
“When morning came, there was Leah!” (Genesis 29:25). Could Jacob not tell the difference between Rachel, his beloved of seven years, and her sister Leah—for a whole night? Commentators have long tried to make sense of the story by adding extra details, but perhaps we need to rethink the nature of Jacob and Rachel’s relationship during those years.
The Bible pays little attention to the death of its female characters, writing only cursory death notices, or sometimes none at all. Second Temple period authors retell the Torah’s stories to give more pride of place to the death scenes of its heroines.