Heart is more important than beauty

Beautiful of form and face Rachel (Gen. 29:17),

Even though she was beautiful of form and face, her heart wasn’t beautiful.

How can we know this?

1. Rachel became jealous of her older sister Leah when she saw that she bore her husband Jacob no children (30:1).   She didn’t regard her unloved sister Leah as an object of love, but a competition (v. 8).

2. Rachel said to her husband Jacob, “Give me children, or else I die” (v. 1) even though it was God who gave the fruit of the womb (v. 2).

3. Rachel considered taking Leah’s husband as a small matter (v. 15).  And she regarded Jacob as small [or lightly (?)] because she let Leah to hire him with Leah’s son’s mandrakes (v. 16).

4. Rachel stole the household idols that were her father’s (31:19).  And she even hid it from her husband Jacob (v. 32).  She also lied to her father Leban (v. 35).

5. Rachel was a greedy woman.  We can know this by looking at her father Leban’s household idols that she stole (v. 19).  Leban’s household idols were the idols that the people in the ancient Mesopotamia served and there were types of family guardian deities and the objects of worship.  In addition, the household idols were passed on as a legacy from one generation to the next, showing that the idols were used for inheritance.  That was why Rachel stole her father Leban’s household idols because of her greed regarding her father’s inheritance (Internet).

6. And for some reason, I think there were some foreign gods in Jacob’s house because of Rachel (35:4).  The reason I think this way is because Rachel would have grown up seeing the household idols, the idols her father Leban served, and also she stole them and brought them into Jacob’s house.