Genesis 29:34
And she conceived again, and bare a son; and said, Now this time will my husband be joined unto me, because I have born him three sons: therefore was his name called Levi. And she conceived again, and bare a son; and said, Now this time will my husband be joined unto me, because I have born him three sons: therefore was his name called Levi.
The verse belongs to the account of the sons born to Jacob during his time with Laban, in the chapter that also tells of his journey east and his service to Laban for his two daughters. The surrounding chapter shows him serving for seven years twice told, two complete seven-year periods, illustrating the scriptural use of the number seven to signify completeness or the whole. The chapter's measuring of time by weeks preserves a trace of the Sabbath from the beginning of the world, proving the seventh day was set apart at creation as obligatory for the whole human race.
The verse belongs to the checkered and unsatisfactory experiences of Esau and Jacob, showing Jacob's selfish plotting and his consequent suffering, where as he overreached and supplanted he himself met overreaching. God's providence though seeming slow brings retribution sooner or later. It stands in the story where the deceiver is deceived and Jacob sets his face homeward, calling for readiness to obey God's leading.
The verse is part of the patriarchal history in which the institution of marriage is plainly violated by Jacob's marriages in taking more than one wife. The violation does not lessen or destroy marriage's sacred character, because marriage was instituted for man before the fall and its sanctity is not derived from later conduct or from the Decalogue, but from its creation origin which the seventh commandment guards. Jacob's polygamous family proves that polygamy was never anything but evil and wrong and was the cause of very great unhappiness in every family where it entered, even though it was allowed among God's ancient people through the whole Old Testament period and tolerated because of hardness of heart, until the original order in Eden was restored. Levi in the verse is a personal name, not a name applied to Jews who were small in stature in contrast to a large Leviathan, and not a Jewish male in contrast to a female Leviathan.