And Leah conceived again, and bare Jacob the sixth son.
Leah conceived again and bore Jacob his sixth son, one of the sons born to him during his time with Laban. This falls within the account of his marriages to Leah and Rachel and his years with Laban, when he was in the land of the children of the East serving Laban fourteen years for his two daughters, after Bethel and before his departure from Haran to return to Canaan. It sits in the story of his checkered and unsatisfactory experiences, marked by selfish plotting and resulting suffering, in which overreaching is met with overreaching and God's providence brings retribution. The same period shows God caring for Jacob despite his selfishness and unfaithfulness.
The verse belongs to the patriarchal accounts that exemplify violation of the marriage institution through Jacob's polygamous household. Such individual violations do not cancel or lessen the sacred character of marriage, which was established before the fall. Jacob's polygamy was evil and wrong and brought very great unhappiness, as polygamy brings into every family where it enters. It was part of an evil allowed through the whole Old Testament period after its terrible rebuke in the church at the beginning, tolerated by Moses because of hardness of heart, and contrary to the original order in Eden that should never have been departed from.
Leah conceived again and bore Jacob his sixth son, one of the sons born to him during his time with Laban. This falls within the account of his marriages to Leah and Rachel and his years with Laban, when he was in the land of the children of the East serving Laban fourteen years for his two daughters, after Bethel and before his departure from Haran to return to Canaan. It sits in the story of his checkered and unsatisfactory experiences, marked by selfish plotting and resulting suffering, in which overreaching is met with overreaching and God's providence brings retribution. The same period shows God caring for Jacob despite his selfishness and unfaithfulness.
The verse belongs to the patriarchal accounts that exemplify violation of the marriage institution through Jacob's polygamous household. Such individual violations do not cancel or lessen the sacred character of marriage, which was established before the fall. Jacob's polygamy was evil and wrong and brought very great unhappiness, as polygamy brings into every family where it enters. It was part of an evil allowed through the whole Old Testament period after its terrible rebuke in the church at the beginning, tolerated by Moses because of hardness of heart, and contrary to the original order in Eden that should never have been departed from.