owever, this measure does not alleviate her grief, and the text goes on to describe a transaction wherein Rachel, in the hope of conceiving, haggles with her sister Leah over a plant thought to be an aphrodisiac with fertility powers. Rachel, in despair, pleads with Jacob to "Give me children - otherwise I am dead" (30:1). Despite her willingness to bear children, Rachel presents an obstacle to the value of fertility. Although she does not pose the extreme threat that Sara presented, since Jacob sires children through Leah and his two concubines, her infertility still represents a serious obstacle to both her universal and her particular function as child bearer. Hence, the values in Genesis are contravened by yet another woman who does not conform to the female archetype of fertile mother. While fertility is an overriding value in God's human construct that women in Genesis threaten to undermine, women also obstruct the "natural" course of history which God has set in motion as part of his ideal world. After God reconstructs the world through Noah and then Abraham, the divine element recedes from the world slightly, and a natural historical course begins to play out through the momentum that God has initiated. The first incident in Genesis in which a woman interferes with this momentum involves Rebecca, who intervenes on behalf of her second born son, Jacob. The second involves Leah who heavily veils herself, tricks Jacob, and takes her younger sister's place under the bridal canopy. As a result of Rebecca's manipulative directives, Jacob, the younger son, inherits the divine blessing from Isaac, though it is clear from the text that Jacob's brother, Esau, had been Isaac's favored child. Rebecca's actions are subversive because they result in the violation of the law of primogeniture that seems to have been the standard practice of inheritance in the book of Genesis. And by reassigning the inheritance, Rebecca threatens to des...
