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The first glimmer of the softly breaking dawn peeked through the partially opened cottage window and beheld a sleeping Jacob. He was the picture of contentment, still lost in his lingering dreams. His left arm rested easily against the bare shoulder of the young woman beside him. Slowly he awakened, caressing her thin neck and full breasts without opening his golden-brown eyes. Although fully awake, she did not move, but frigidly stared at the window with facial muscles taut with tension. Outside, a speckled rooster began to announce the beginning of another day. Jacob finally lifted his tousled head to implant a good-morning kiss on the nectared lips of his newly married "wife."

Suddenly he recoiled from her, as though seared by a fire. In total shock, he shouted, "What are you doing here? Where's Rachel? What in God's name is going on?" Bounding from the bed, the terrified woman draped herself in a scant sheet and cowered pitifully on the wood floor in the corner of the room.

"Where's Rachel?" he demanded. "Leah, did you spend the whole night here?" She slowly moved her trembling head to affirm his question, but did not dare raise her terror-stricken eyes. "Where is Rachel," he roared for the third time, "and why are you here?" Leah desperately tried to answer, but no words could escape her fear-tightened throat. She mutely glanced at his condemning face for a moment, then stared nervously at the floor.

Finally, after two stuttering attempts, she spoke: "My father brought me to the cottage ... and ... ordered me to spend the night with you."

The brightening sun highlighted copious beads of clammy perspiration forming and beginning to trickle down Jacob's crimson brow. "Where -- is -- your -- sister?" he asked again, more slowly and more angrily.

"I think she's in the main house ... in her room ... but I don't know. Dad didn't say."

The bewildered Jacob rubbed his squinting eyes and ran both open-fingered hands through his disheveled hair. "I married Rachel, not you. Why did Laban do this?" Leah attempted to respond but piteously broke into a flood of hysterical tears and dashed from the room, still clumsily wrapped in her sheet. The door banged in Jacob's ears and he could hear her wailing all the way to the house.

As his heart filled with anger and disgust, his thoughts raced in every direction as he tried to unravel this unexpected mystery. Rachel doesn't love me, he thought. She only enticed me and then, at her father's suggestion, deliberately substituted her sister. Jacob was convinced they had all plotted against him. He hated them and could feel a fiery surge of revenge rising within. The early morning shock, however, had left him momentarily too weak to want to begin a fight with Laban and too frenzied to be certain he could stop if he did begin.

Jacob sat on the edge of his nuptial bed, facing the window, and looked down the long road he had traveled here, seven years ago. "I should never have come," he muttered. Far beyond those distant hills was his childhood home and family. He had not treated them rightly and he was deeply sorry. Maybe God is punishing me for hurting them, he reasoned, recalling his dishonest "buying" of the firstborn title from his twin brother, Esau, for a bit of food. More than that, he truly regretted the convincing but deceptive charade he'd perpetrated against his trusting father, Isaac. As a result, he had unjustly received his father's choicest blessing, one that had been reserved for Esau.

Now he, himself, was the victim of deceit. His father-in-law had presented one daughter at the altar and a different one in the bedroom. How could he have spent the night with Leah and loved her, all the time thinking it was Rachel? No doubt the excitement of the wedding day, the late hour when the party ended, and especially the overconsumption of wine had dulled his sensitivity and judgment. But still, he should have caught on, and he accused himself of being stupid to allow this to happen. The more he thought about it, the more angry he grew with Laban. The more he grew angry with Laban, the more he was haunted by his own shabby behavior, deliberately misleading his old and sightless father.

Noiseless tears ran freely with the thought that Rachel would have cooperated in such duplicity. He remembered the first sight of her when he had arrived in Haran. He remembered how he had proudly lifted the huge stone from the well, a stone that normally required several people to raise. He had loved Rachel immediately and, until now, thought she had felt the same.

Quickly he dressed amidst a thousand rambling thoughts and set out to find Rachel to confirm the bitter truth. Following Leah's assumption that Rachel was in the main farmhouse, he now left the cottage and headed there. It was his intention not to confront Laban until he had seen Rachel. But near the path leading to the house, Laban was mending the sheep-pen fence. He pretended not to have seen Jacob and continued diligently at his work.

Walking slowly to gain his composure, Jacob approached. "You made a damned fool out of me," he shouted, squinting angrily at Laban.

Laban continued to busy himself with the fence without looking at Jacob. Calmly he replied, "It's the custom of our people that the older daughter should marry first." Then he laid down his hammer, leaned against the post, and faced the offended young husband, who was nervously clinching his hands behind his back, lest he lash out in physical violence. In the silence, Jacob stared threateningly at the older man who showed no uneasiness nor regret at what he had done.

"I suppose Rachel agreed with this devious little joke to preserve your so-called custom?"

"No," Laban responded, directing his attention toward the house, "she did not agree. She knew nothing about it." Laban bent down to rub the coal-black nose of a sheep, poking its woolly head through the fence, anxious to be led to the pasture. "Like you, Jacob, Rachel drank too much wine at the wedding party and then the servants gave her more when she was preparing to meet you in the cottage." Jacob's anger began to melt. Laban continued, "She passed out, they told me, and stayed in her own bed. She probably is still asleep."

The unexpected revelation caused Jacob to happily readjust his thoughts about Rachel and his tightly clinched fingers now loosened. "That girl loves you very much, young man; I can assure you of that ... very much."

Without responding, Jacob ran to the house.

Rachel was sobbing in her mother's arms, having just awakened and not finding Jacob. She could not imagine where he was and why she was not in the cottage. Her mother was furious with Laban, felt pity for Rachel, and was now embarrassed in the presence of Jacob. Quickly she withdrew from the room when he arrived, leaving them alone.

The conjugal fiasco was not hidden from the servants, for they had shared in it at the command of Laban. Everyone in the household, both family and servants, were fearful of the pent-up fury within Jacob and they expected violence before the day's end.

Following their noon meal, which was barely tasted, Laban called the family into the spacious sunlit parlor. In an unemotional tone he spoke with all the authority he could summon as head of the household. "We are all well aware of what transpired last night," he said. "I am solely responsible for it, since I had to preserve the venerable traditions of our family." His unflinching eyes focused on the mute faces before him. "Numerous times over the past seven years I considered trying to stop this love affair, but I knew I could not." Looking directly at Rachel, he added, with a note of finality, "Therefore I decided to solve the difficulty in the provoking manner in which I did."

Before the family dispersed, Laban candidly explained that sexual relations carried a stronger binding force than wedding vows. That meant that Leah, not Rachel, was officially the wife of Jacob. But he also realized his whole scheme would backfire if Rachel and Jacob would decide to run away together. Since Leah would then still be without a husband, and might possibly now be pregnant, Laban's burdens would increase. He therefore offered Rachel also in marriage to Jacob in return for another seven years of work. Jacob could marry now and pay later, which Laban painfully explained was not his normal way of doing business.

To further complicate the marriage scene, each wife brought to the union a female servant who was permitted to have sexual relations with the husband and bear children to his name. Leah brought Zilpah and Rachel presented Bilhah. Thus it was that Leah gave birth to Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah. Bilhah then bore Dan and Naphtali. Zilpah followed with Gad and Asher, and then Leah had two more: Issachar and Zebulun. Eventually, Rachel became pregnant with Joseph and finally Benjamin. Jacob's life became increasingly more complicated with the birth of his twelve sons, for whom the twelve tribes of Israel would be named one day.

Jacob loved Rachel intently;
In her his young heart did delight.
But when they were wedded
He soon had been bedded
With Leah, instead, for the night.

When he awoke in the morning
He tried to give "Rachel" a kiss
He saw he'd been tricked
And was terribly ticked,
And screamed, "Seven years just for this?"

If you ever marry the younger
While the older girl single still waits,
As soon as you're wed
Send their father to bed
Before he a mismatch creates!

Read Genesis 29