What Rachel And Leah Really Looked Like According To The Bible

To set the scene of how Jacob came to be in love with Rachel: As National Geographic explains, he was fleeing from his brother, Esau, when he took refuge in the household of his cousin, Laban. There, he fell in love with Laban's daughter, Rachel, and asked to marry her. However, Laban wanted Jacob to pay for Rachel, and indeed, Jacob worked for his relative for seven years to earn her hand. But according to the text, it only "seemed like a few days" to him because he was so in love with her.

But Laban deceived Jacob. And on the day following his wedding night, Jacob woke up to find that he'd been given Leah, not Rachel. After some more bargaining, Jacob worked another seven years and wound up with Rachel, but only after 14 years of servitude to his father-in-law. She must have been pretty beautiful, right?

Actually, yes. The Bible describes Rachel as "beautiful and lovely" — or similar words, depending on the English translation. Leah, however, is described as having "weak eyes." As Rabbi Sarah Mack writes in T'Ruah, the Hebrew word in that passage could be translated in several ways, and the contextual clues here don't really help. Was Leah visually impaired? Were her eyes droopy and unattractive? For whatever it's worth, Mack believes that her eyes were "weak" in a metaphorical sense from crying over how little Jacob loved her compared to her sister.