What Does Genesis 30:18 Mean?

(18) **Issachar.**—Heb., *there is hire. *As is so often the case in Hebrew names, there is a double play in the word: for, first, it alluded to the strange fact that Jacob had been hired of Rachel by the mandrakes; but, secondly, Leah gives it a higher meaning, “for God,” she says, “hath given me my hire.” In her eyes the birth of her fifth son was a Divine reward for the self-sacrifice involved in giving her maid to Jacob, and which had been followed by years of neglect of herself. As, too, it is said that “God hearkened unto Leah,” we may feel sure that she had prayed for God’s blessing upon her re-union with her husband; for Calvin’s objection that prayer would scarcely accompany such odious courses has little weight. Leah and Rachel were uneducated and untrained country women, whose sole anxiety was to have offspring. Leah was the most religious and best disciplined of the two; and the shame ideally was that she should have been forced thus to buy her husband’s attentions.