The brother of Rebekah had two daughters.  Leah, the elder, was tender-eyed, but Rachel was beautiful; and both sisters loved their cousin, while the heart of Jacob clung to the younger, the fair damsel who first welcomed him; so that he overlooked the claims of the elder,—­the plain, if not disfigured, Leah.  He brought no offerings with him to conciliate the favour of the father, and, according to the custom of the East, to facilitate his marriage.  But he offered his personal service as an equivalent.  And the son of Isaac served seven years for the daughter of Laban.  But this long period was passed; and dwelling, as Jacob did, in the presence of Rachel, a member of the household of her father, they seemed but as a few days, for the love he bore her.

But the time had now arrived when the marriage should be celebrated, and Jacob claimed his bride.  But he who had wronged his brother, who had by disguise deceived his father, was now imposed upon by guile and treachery; and all the hopes and expectations of these long years were defeated.  The customs of Eastern marriages favoured the deceit, and Jacob found that he was wedded to Leah, and not to the object of his affection.  The deceit was most unjustifiable.  The disappointment and the resentment must have been proportionally great; and miserable was the excuse of Laban, and wretched the device which was offered as an atonement.  Yet Jacob must have bowed before the retributions of an avenging God, and the remembrance of his own treachery may have stayed his anger.

Thus commenced the family of Jacob, with all the elements of dissension, strife and bitterness incorporated into its very earliest existence.  The daughters of Laban both became the wives of Jacob, and they were rivals as women, as sisters, as wives and as mothers—­forced to dwell together, yet ever in sullen hatred or bitter strife.  When the ties of natural affection are severed, the heart never ceases to bleed; and there is no hatred so deep, so implacable as that which springs up where hearts once knit are thus alienated and forced asunder:  and the sorrows and evils which sprang up in the family of Jacob may have led to that command so explicitly given by Moses—­“Neither shalt thou take a wife to her sister to vex her, in her lifetime.”

The heart of Jacob never departed from Rachel.  She was the chosen bride.  He loved her with a deep and true affection, while the forced claims of Leah awoke only the remembrance of the deceit.  In the emphatic language of the Bible, “he loved Rachel, but he hated Leah,” and it was in accordance with the constant exhibitions of human nature that it should be thus.  He had never sought her love.  No love, no devotedness, could efface the remembrance of her connivance at that deep-laid plot which had imposed her upon him as a wife.  Yet the lot of Leah was peculiarly a lot of reproach and trial—­and as we behold her wretchedness, we are led, not to extenuate her fault, nor to palliate her sin, but to forgive and pity her sorrows.