Rachel

רחל


In Genesis 31:38 and 32:15 (highly ironically in the circumstances of both of these), as well as in Isaiah 53:7 and Canticles 6:6, the word is specifically used to mean "a ewe"; which makes for a very interesting contrast with the likelihood that Le'ah means "a cow" – paralleling in the female line the transition from Taurus to Aries that we witnessed in both the Kayin (Cain) and Havel (Abel) and the Ya'akov (Jacob) and Esav (Esau) stories. But more famously, in Genesis 29:6 ff and Jeremiah 31:15, she is the wife of Ya'akov and the mother of Yoseph and Ben-Oni/Bin-Yamin.

Why the sheep connection? As Drummond explains in The Oedipus Judaicus, the astrological era changed in about 2,200 BCE, from Taurus to Aries, and with it the Bull-cult became replaced by the Ram cult. Thus Le'ah ("cow") is supplanted by Rachel ("ewe") as the chief symbol of the mother-goddess – Le'ah's counterparts having been the cow-goddesses Io/Yah and Hat-Hor, inter alia.

Thus Ya'akov, who is associated with flocks (as in the Lavan legend of his breeding speckled and spotted sheep, in Genesis 30), "supplants" Esav, by literally assuming the goat-skin and making the goat-stew potage. Thus, 2,200 years later, when the astrological era switched from Aries to Pisces, so the water-associated Jesus (baptism, Galilee, walking on, Tabgha, and especially the Icthys, the fish as his primary symbol forever afterwards) supplanted the "paschal lamb" Yitschak (Isaac), who had previously replaced the bull-scapegoat Kayin - at least in Christian mythology; Judaism was no longer a religion focused on the constellations (to which we should say mazal tov, except that to say mazal tov is to wish "may the stars be alligned in your favour"). It has not been left unobserved that we, today, are at the cusp of a new age ourselves, the dawn of the age of Aquarius. Only the symbols remain to be updated. T.S. Eliot has attempted to do so, through his use of the Fisher-King in "The Wasteland"; but few others have made the endeavour. I am inclined to think the new logo should be helix-shaped, as per the logo of The Argaman Press, which is both the primordial serpent of Creation and the epistemological ikon of the genome.

The cult of Rachel is worth some explaining. Her tomb that is not at Machpelah with the other patriarchal wives, but at Tseltsach (usually pronounced Zelzah in English - see 1 Samuel 10:2). The birth of Ben-Oni at Tseltsach, on the road to Beit-Lechem Ephratah. The birth previously of Yoseph. The modern fertility cult at her grave. etc. Also her stealing of her father’s teraphim. Her "maidservant" Bilhah, and the sons "born on her knees". Other sheep goddesses in mythology. Fo all of these, see my commentaries on the Genesis text, as well as the notes on Bin-Yamin and Ben-Oni.

Rachel (רחל) also means "to cherish".

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