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The history of the patriarchs and matriarchs (that is Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and Rachel and Leah) is recorded in Genesis 11-50. While fraught with questionable actions and moral failures, the Bible presents the lives of these nation founders as the beginning of God’s amazing plan for salvation––His plan to redeem fallible human life with His mercy and truth.
Some Biblical sites directly associated with the personal lives of these patriarchs are still known to us today, nearly 4000 years later. Amongst them is the unusual tomb of Rachel, the second, but beloved, wife of Jacob and mother to Joseph (father to the Israelite tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh) and Benjamin, founder of the tribe of Benjamin.
Genesis 29-35 tell Rachel’s story: Her marriage to Jacob, her war with her sister Leah for cultural supremacy in their household, her stealing of her father’s family idols, and her death on the way to Bethlehem from complications in childbirth. This is a tragic account of a woman loved, but plagued by cultural expectations that haunted her in her barrenness, as she was beginning to overcome them she died, cut off too soon to enjoy her victory.
“A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children.”
Jeremiah 31:15a
The Biblical authors record specifically that instead of burying her in the family tomb of his grand-father Abraham, Rachel’s husband Jacob instead buried her where they were, along the path of the road to Bethlehem. He is said to have set up a marker on her grave, where it was still standing hundreds of years later (Genesis 35:20), at the time of the writing of Genesis.
About a thousand years after her death, the prophet Jeremiah used the matriarch Rachel in his prophecy about the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BC (Jeremiah 31:15-17). He pictures her as weeping over the deportation of her people at the city of Ramah, when God replies that He hasn’t truly abandoned them, He would bring them back from exile in His time. Matthew uses this image again in his Gospel in reference to a slaughter ordered by Herod the Great (Matthew 2:16-18).
The traditional location of Rachel’s tomb is today kept as a place to honour this mother of three tribes of Israel: Ephraim, Manasseh, and Benjamin. In the Byzantine period, an open dome structure was placed over the tomb both to honour it, and serve as shelter from the elements, and it was further renovated in 1841 by closing up the dome structure and adding a receiving room or antechamber. Today, it is protected by strong modern walls and guard towers that surround the original structure.
Corie Bobechko is a daily co-host, speaker, and writer of Bible Discovery. She also hosts a YouTube channel that shows how history and archaeology prove the Bible. Her heart for seekers and skeptics has led her to seek truth and share it with others. Corie also has a Bachelor of Theology from Canada Christian College.
Sered, Susan Starr. “Rachel’s Tomb: The Development of a Cult.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1995): 103-48. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40753126.
