No Bullshit Bible Lesson #17: Battle of the Wombs

Genesis, Chapter 30:

Seeing how many children Jacob fathered with Leah, Rachel became quite jealous.
        “Jacob, you give me babies or I swear I’m gonna die!”
        “Hey, it’s not my fault God dried up your womb!”
        “Fine, go have sex with my handmaiden and she’ll bear me some proxy babies!”

So Jacob did as his irrational swinger wife demanded and had a baby with her handmaiden. This pleased Rachel to no end and she sent him once again to bed her servant, and another son was born. And Rachel once again felt superior to Leah.

Leah, for her part, could see that her marital advantage was quickly being eroded and, still walking funny from the first four children she bore, sent her handmaiden to bear more children in her stead. And the servant had two of Jacob’s sons. So Leah now felt like she was back on top.

Then Reuben, Jacob’s eldest child with Leah, was out in the fields and found some mandrakes and brought them to Leah. For some reason, Rachel really wanted some of those mandrakes and asked Leah for some.
        “Oh,” Leah replied, “first you steal my man now you want my son’s mandrakes?”
        “Bitch,” Rachel undoubtedly wanted to reply, “Dad had to trick him into your bed, but he chose me, you skanky ho-bag!” Out loud she said, “Oh, for crying out loud! Give me some damn mandrakes and he’ll come screw you tonight, okay?”

So when Jacob came in from the field, Leah intercepted him,
        “Hey, your ‘favorite’ wife just sold your penis to me for the night in exchange for some veggies, so come give it to me, big boy.”

This apparently seemed to God like a virtuous arrangement, so he blessed Leah with yet another son. And then another. Then she felt that surely, having had six of his children, Jacob would move out of Rachel’s place and come live with her instead. She had a daughter anyway, just to sweeten the deal.

God, who had to have been amused by these women battling for the presumably well-endowed Jacob, decided to make things a little more interesting; he unlocked Rachel’s womb, making her the third straight generation in her family to have a barren womb that was made fertile by God. Shockingly, she had a son. She named him Joseph.

About this time, Jacob went to Laban,
        “Okay, man,” he said, “I’ve been working for you for fourteen years. Give me my wives and my kids and let me go home.”
        “Oh, man...I was afraid you were gonna say that. See, you and your kids have been a lot of free labor for me and I’m afraid my farm is gonna go to crap without you! I want you to stay, name your price.”
        “Dude, look. When I got here, you had, like, nothing. Now look at you. You have more cattle than you know what to do with. I did my time, now let me go home and provide for my own family.”
        “Jacob, please stay...just tell me what you want.”
        “I don’t want anything from you. Just let me leave. If you do that, I will tend to your herds once more. I’ll go through and separate from the herd all the speckled and spotted animals and give them to you, fed and cared for. When I am done caring for the flock, the ones that are not spotted will be mine and the rest yours to keep.”
        “Um...sure?”

So Laban took all the spotted, speckled, etc and gave them to his sons and then put three days distance between him and Jacob.

Jacob took this time to use aphrodisiacs on the animals to get them to mate and paired them up to selectively breed them so that he would get all the good, strong ones while Laban was left with all the weak, feeble ones. Just goes to show what happens when you screw a guy out of seven extra years of his life in order to saddle him with a wife he never wanted.