And Leah said, Happy am I, for the daughters will call me blessed: and she called his name Asher.
Genesis 30:13 belongs to the record of the sons born to Jacob after he left Bethel and journeyed to the land of the children of the East, where he met Laban and served him fourteen years for his two daughters. It falls within the account of Jacob's marriages to Leah and Rachel and his sojourn with Laban, belonging to his polygamous family life and to the patriarchal violations of the marriage institution. The verse records Leah naming her son Asher because she felt happy and expected other women to call her blessed.
It identifies Asher as a son born to Jacob through Zilpah, Leah's handmaid. Though his mother was called a servant, Asher was recognized as free and equal with Jacob's other sons, shared his father's property equally, and became a head of a tribe in Israel, showing that the handmaids' children were not treated as chattel slaves. The surrounding account involves deception and Jacob's checkered and unsatisfactory experiences, in which his selfish plotting brought suffering and after he overreached others he was himself overreached, yet it shows God caring for Jacob despite his selfishness and unfaithfulness, and that God's providence, though it may seem slow, brings retribution sooner or later.
The violations of the marriage institution in this patriarchal history do not make marriage less sacred, because marriage was established before the fall. The polygamy in Jacob's family life was evil and wrong and the cause of very great unhappiness in every family where it entered, and though long allowed among the ancient people of God and tolerated by Moses because of hardness of heart, it departed from the original order in Eden to which Christ pointed in Matthew 19 and ought never to have been departed from.
Genesis 30:13 belongs to the record of the sons born to Jacob after he left Bethel and journeyed to the land of the children of the East, where he met Laban and served him fourteen years for his two daughters. It falls within the account of Jacob's marriages to Leah and Rachel and his sojourn with Laban, belonging to his polygamous family life and to the patriarchal violations of the marriage institution. The verse records Leah naming her son Asher because she felt happy and expected other women to call her blessed.
It identifies Asher as a son born to Jacob through Zilpah, Leah's handmaid. Though his mother was called a servant, Asher was recognized as free and equal with Jacob's other sons, shared his father's property equally, and became a head of a tribe in Israel, showing that the handmaids' children were not treated as chattel slaves. The surrounding account involves deception and Jacob's checkered and unsatisfactory experiences, in which his selfish plotting brought suffering and after he overreached others he was himself overreached, yet it shows God caring for Jacob despite his selfishness and unfaithfulness, and that God's providence, though it may seem slow, brings retribution sooner or later.
The violations of the marriage institution in this patriarchal history do not make marriage less sacred, because marriage was established before the fall. The polygamy in Jacob's family life was evil and wrong and the cause of very great unhappiness in every family where it entered, and though long allowed among the ancient people of God and tolerated by Moses because of hardness of heart, it departed from the original order in Eden to which Christ pointed in Matthew 19 and ought never to have been departed from.