Leah

07 Aug

Leah

What do Isaac, Joseph, and Leah have in common? They are Old Testament types of Christ. We don’t usually consider Leah to be part of this list, but if you think about it, her life represented Christ’s earthly journey in three ways: she was unattractive, rejected, and yet chosen.

First, Leah was unattractive. Jacob’s trek to Padan-Aram with a dual purpose, to both flee his angry brother’s threats of murder and to marry a wife who was not a Canaanite, led him to his extended family. When he arrived, he found that his Uncle Laban had two daughters: Rachel the beautiful younger daughter, and Leah the not-so-beautiful older daughter.

After Jacob’s seven years of labor for Rachel’s hand in marriage, Laban deceitfully replaced her in Jacob’s marriage bed with Leah, giving the excuse that the older must marry first. Based on the promise of seven more years of labor to pay for her, Rachel was also given to Jacob as wife.

In Isaiah 53:2, the Messiah, is described in terms of lacking attractiveness: “For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant and as a root out of a dry ground. He has no form nor comeliness and, when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.” Like Jesus, Leah had no physically appealing aspects on which to claim any personal or cultural advantage.

Second, Leah was rejected. Genesis 29:30-31 tells us that Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah.

While the Bible is generally written without moral comment, throughout the Bible bigamy and polygamy never turn out well. God stated at the beginning “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Gen. 1:24). God’s plan has always been one man and one woman in the marriage relationship. And from the beginning, humans have tested God in this, only to run afoul of God’s perfect will in the matter. Someone always gets hurt when mankind sins. In this case, Leah was the one who was hurt, first by her father’s fraudulent exchange and then by Jacob’s negligence and rejection.

Isaiah 53:3 prophetically tells us that “[Messiah] was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid, as it were, our faces from Him. He was despised and we esteemed Him not.” Jesus, Himself, told His disciples “The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be slain, and be raised the third day” (Luke 9:22).

When God saw that Leah was, in fact, “hated”, He opened her womb so that she was able to bear children when Rachel remained barren (Gen. 29:31). Later in her life, Leah thought she would be loved because she had birthed more children than Rachel (Gen. 29:31-35 and 30:20). But Jacob continued to love her younger, more beautiful sister more than Leah.

Third, it was through Leah’s son, not either of Rachel’s sons, that the Messiah was to come. Jesus is a direct descendant of Leah’s son, Judah (Matt. 1:1-17). She, the unattractive and unloved bride, was chosen to bear forward the lineage of Jesus.