Genesis30chapter 30

The classical readers take the rivalry of the two sisters as a contest in merit rather than in affection. Rashi turns Rachel's envy into praise: "She was envious of her because of her good deeds", reasoning that Leah must be the more righteous or she would not have been given children, on Genesis Rabbah 71:6 (Rashi on Genesis 30:1:1, the Pentateuch with Rashi's commentary by M. Rosenbaum and A. M. Silbermann, 1929 to 1934, public domain). He reads Zilpah's silent conception as a mark of her youth, and adds the tradition that Laban gave her to Leah to make the deception harder to see (Rashi on Genesis 30:10:1, citing Genesis Rabbah 71:9). Reuben's mandrakes he takes as a proof of the character of the tribes, that a boy in harvest time brought home only what belonged to nobody (Rashi on Genesis 30:14:1). On the birth of Dinah he hands on the saying that Leah judged herself, prayed, and the child's sex was changed, on the authority of Berakhot 60a (Rashi on Genesis 30:21:1). God's remembering of Rachel he reads as a merit accounted to her, "He remembered it to her as a merit that she had transmitted the secret signs to her sister", and her prayer for one more son as prophetic knowledge, "She knew prophetically that Jacob would rear only twelve tribes" (Rashi on Genesis 30:22:1 and 30:24:1, citing Genesis Rabbah 73:4 and 72:6). He also notes that Laban says plainly that he had divined the source of his own prosperity (Rashi on Genesis 30:27:1). Radak reads the same chapter for its household sense, and his weight falls on the standing of the four sons of the handmaids. He observes that the Torah adds the words for Jacob at each of those four births and not at Leah's first four, and takes the addition as a statement that these sons stood in Jacob's eyes exactly where Leah's and Rachel's stood (Radak on Genesis 30:5:1, translated by Eliyahu Munk, HaChut Hameshulash, CC-BY). He reads Leah's turn to her own handmaid as the act of a woman who thought she would bear no more and whose concern was the number of the children born to Jacob (Radak on Genesis 30:9:1 and 30:18:1). Ibn Ezra comments here at 30:13:1 and stands as a citation, the corpus holding no English of him under a licence permitting quotation.