Loving Rachel

Jacob has gotten a bad rap over the centuries, not least because of the way his two wives have fared in the hands of the allegorists. For Philo, beautiful Rachel represents bodily beauty and Leah beauty of soul: “Rachel, who is comeliness of the body, is described as younger than Leah, that is beauty of the soul. For the former is mortal, the latter immortal, and indeed all the things that are precious to the senses are inferior in perfection to beauty of soul, though they are many and it but one.”

By the same toke, Leah represents contemplative virtue and Rachel active virtue: “Thus one of the lawful wives is a movement, sound, healthy, and peaceful, and to express her history Moses names her Leah or ‘smooth.’ The other is like a whetstone. Her name is Rachel, and on that whetstone the mind which loves effort and exercise sharpens its edge. Her name means ‘vision of profanation’, not because her way of seeing is profane, but on the contrary, because she judges the visible world of sense to be not holy but profane, compared with the pure and undefiled nature of the invisible world of the mind.”

Jacob loved Rachel, not Leah, choosing the lesser good over the greater.