We turn now to Rachel, Jacob’s second wife, but the first in his heart. She was struggling to conceive, and what follows is a familiar pattern among the people of God: when waiting becomes unbearable, the temptation is to act.
“When Rachel saw that she was not bearing Jacob any children, she became jealous of her sister. So she said to Jacob, ‘Give me children, or I’ll die!’ Jacob became angry with her and said, ‘Am I in the place of God, who has kept you from having children?’ Then she said, ‘Here is Bilhah, my servant. Sleep with her so that she can bear children for me and I too can build a family through her.’ So she gave him her servant Bilhah as a wife. Jacob slept with her, and she became pregnant and bore him a son. Then Rachel said, ‘God has vindicated me; he has listened to my plea and given me a son.’ Because of this she named him Dan.” (Genesis 30:1-6)
Is someone close to you experiencing something you desperately want for yourself? It’s not a pleasant feeling. The gap between what we have and what we long for can feel unbearable when someone else seems to have it so easily.
Rachel hadn’t learned from history. Abraham and Sarah had done the same thing with Hagar, and it hadn’t ended well. Once again, a human solution to a divine timing problem created more pain than it resolved. When the waiting becomes too much, the instinct is always to engineer something, to fill the silence with action. Rachel does exactly that.
What’s striking, though, is what happens at the moment of blessing. Rather than congratulating herself on her clever scheme, Rachel looks up. “God has vindicated me,” she says, the language of a courtroom, of a judge ruling in someone’s favour. It implies she felt she was in a dispute, perhaps with Leah, perhaps even with Jacob, who had suggested the problem lay with God himself. However tangled her methods, her instinct in that moment is to credit grace rather than cleverness. Perhaps that tells us something: even our most impatient reaching can somehow land in God’s hands.
But then a second son is born, and something has shifted.
“Rachel’s servant Bilhah conceived again and bore Jacob a second son. Then Rachel said, ‘I have had a great struggle with my sister, and I have won.’ So she named him Naphtali.” (Genesis 30:7-8)
The language has changed entirely. Where the birth of Dan prompted gratitude to God, the birth of Naphtali prompts something far more earthly, the satisfaction of settling a score. Along the way, Rachel’s longing for a child has quietly curdled into a longing for victory over her sister.
This is how comparison tends to work in us. It rarely stays still. Rachel began in genuine anguish, a woman who simply wanted a child. But somewhere between Dan and Naphtali, that grief reshaped itself into competition. She stopped asking, “Give me this good thing,” and started asking, “Let me have more than her.”
There’s also something poignant about the nature of rivalry here. Rachel declares she has won, but Leah is still there. The marriage is still complicated. The household is still fractured. Winning a round in a rivalry rarely ends it; it usually just raises the stakes for the next one.
The Bible doesn’t tell us Rachel was wrong to feel this way. It simply records her words with quiet honesty and lets the reader sit with the unease because most of us recognise it. The moment we begin to frame someone else’s life as a competition we’ve entered, we’ve already lost something more important than whatever we’re fighting for.
Two sons have been born. And Rachel, for all her gains, still sounds like someone who is losing.
Missions Paul 