Genesis 30:18
And Leah said, God hath given me my hire, because I have given my maiden to my husband: and she called his name Issachar. And Leah said, God hath given me my hire, because I have given my maiden to my husband: and she called his name Issachar.
Genesis 30:18 belongs to the account of Jacob's marriages to Leah and Rachel and the sons born to him during his years of service to Laban for his two daughters in Haran. It belongs to that period when God prospered Jacob in flocks and herds despite Laban's efforts to deprive him of his right. The verse records Leah calling her son Issachar and saying that God had given her her hire because she had given her maid to her husband Jacob. The word hire means a reward or recompense. Her giving of her handmaid to Jacob is described as her hire in the birth of Issachar.
The verse belongs to Jacob's troubled experiences marked by selfishness and unfaithfulness as well as by plotting and suffering. In those experiences he overreached and was himself overreached. Yet Jacob's story shows God's care for him despite his selfishness and unfaithfulness. The account teaches that God's providence may seem slow, but retribution comes sooner or later.
The verse exposes the very great unhappiness that polygamy brought into Jacob's family. Standing with the accounts of Abraham and David, it proves that polygamy causes great unhappiness in every family where it enters. Polygamy was never anything but evil and wrong. It was terribly rebuked when it first found place among the people of God, was tolerated by Moses because of the hardness of ancient Israel's hearts, and was set aside by Christ's return to the original order of things in Eden which ought never to have been departed from. Leah's giving of her handmaid to Jacob is an example of a patriarchal violation of the marriage institution, and such violations do not make marriage itself less sacred.