Is Rachel in the Bible? Yes, Jacob’s Wife, and Her Name Means “Ewe”

Yes. Rachel is the younger daughter of Laban in Genesis, the wife Jacob loved and for whom he served her father fourteen years, and the mother of Joseph and Benjamin. Her Hebrew name, Raḥel, means “ewe.” She died giving birth to Benjamin near Bethlehem, and the prophet Jeremiah later pictures her “weeping for her children” (Jeremiah 31:15).

Who was Rachel in the Bible?

Rachel enters the story at a well near Haran, where she comes with her father’s sheep, “for she was a shepherdess” (Genesis 29:9). Jacob, who had fled there from his brother Esau, was her cousin: her father Laban was his mother’s brother. He rolled the stone from the mouth of the well, watered Laban’s flock, then kissed Rachel and wept aloud (Genesis 29:10–11).

Laban had two daughters. “Leah’s eyes were weak, but Rachel was beautiful in form and appearance” (Genesis 29:17). Jacob offered to serve seven years for Rachel, “and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her” (Genesis 29:20). On the wedding night Laban gave him Leah instead, and when Jacob protested, Laban answered, “It is not so done in our country, to give the younger before the firstborn” (Genesis 29:26). A week later Jacob married Rachel as well, and he served Laban another seven years for her (Genesis 29:27–30).

Leah had four sons while Rachel had none. Rachel envied her sister and said to Jacob, “Give me children, or I shall die!” He answered in anger, “Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?” (Genesis 30:1–2). Rachel gave Jacob her servant Bilhah as a wife and named the two sons Bilhah bore him, Dan and Naphtali (Genesis 30:3–8). At last “God remembered Rachel, and God listened to her and opened her womb.” She called her son Joseph, saying, “May the Lord add to me another son!” (Genesis 30:22–24).

When Jacob left Laban to return to Canaan, “Rachel stole her father’s household gods.” Laban searched the tents, but she had hidden them in her camel’s saddle and was sitting on them, and she told him she could not rise because “the way of women is upon me” (Genesis 31:19, 34–35). Genesis does not say why she took them.

On the road from Bethel, still some distance from Ephrath, Rachel went into a hard labor. As she was dying she named her son Ben-oni, which could mean “son of my sorrow,” but Jacob called him Benjamin, “son of the right hand.” “So Rachel died, and she was buried on the way to Ephrath (that is, Bethlehem), and Jacob set up a pillar over her tomb” (Genesis 35:16–20). Through Benjamin she was the ancestor of Saul, Israel’s first king (1 Samuel 9:1–2), and of the apostle Paul, who calls himself “a member of the tribe of Benjamin” (Romans 11:1).

What does the name Rachel mean?

Rachel is the Hebrew raḥel, “ewe,” a female sheep. The same word is used for animals elsewhere in the Old Testament: Jacob reminds Laban that under his care “your ewes and your female goats have not miscarried” (Genesis 31:38), and in Isaiah the servant of the Lord is “like a sheep that before its shearers is silent” (Isaiah 53:7), where the Hebrew word for that sheep is raḥel. The New Testament applies Isaiah’s words to Jesus (Acts 8:32–35), but the name Rachel itself means only “ewe,” not “lamb of God.”

The Greek of the New Testament writes the name Rhachēl (Matthew 2:18). Other forms include Rachael in English, Rachelle in English and French, Raquel in Spanish and Portuguese, Rachele in Italian, Rahel in German, Rakel in the Scandinavian languages, Rochel in Yiddish and Rahil in Arabic. The name was common among Jews in the Middle Ages but came into general Christian use in the English-speaking world only after the Reformation. In the United States it reached 9th place for girls in 1996 and ranked 250th in 2025. In Israel it ranked 17th in 2024.

Where was Rachel buried?

Genesis twice places her grave on the way to Ephrath, “that is, Bethlehem” (Genesis 35:19; 48:7), and says Jacob’s pillar over it was still there “to this day.” Unlike Leah, she was not buried in the family tomb at Machpelah (Genesis 49:31). Another passage speaks of “Rachel’s tomb in the territory of Benjamin at Zelzah” (1 Samuel 10:2), and some scholars place the original site north of Jerusalem for that reason. The traditional Rachel’s Tomb stands on the road between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Eusebius and the Bordeaux Pilgrim mention it early in the 4th century, and Jews, Christians and Muslims have all honoured it.

Why is Rachel weeping for her children?

Ramah was a town of Benjamin, north of Jerusalem (Joshua 18:25), and later in Jeremiah’s book it is the place where the captives of Jerusalem and Judah were gathered before being taken to Babylon (Jeremiah 40:1). The prophet hears Rachel mourning there for her descendants: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more” (Jeremiah 31:15). The next verse answers her: “Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears, for there is a reward for your work, declares the Lord, and they shall come back from the land of the enemy” (Jeremiah 31:16). The verses that follow speak of Ephraim, her grandson through Joseph, as God’s “dear son” (Jeremiah 31:20).

Matthew quotes the same verse after Herod “killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under” in his search for the infant Jesus: “Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more” (Matthew 2:16–18). Genesis places Rachel’s grave on the way to Bethlehem, the town where the children died.

Rachel in Jewish and Christian tradition

Jewish tradition counts Rachel among the four matriarchs, with Sarah, Rebekah and Leah, and the blessing given when Boaz took Ruth as his wife names “Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel” (Ruth 4:11). The Babylonian Talmud tells that Jacob gave Rachel secret signs so that he would know her on the wedding night, and that she passed them to Leah so that her sister would not be shamed (Megillah 13b). A rabbinic commentary on Genesis says that Jacob buried her by the road because he foresaw that the exiles would pass that way, so that she would ask God’s mercy for them (Genesis Rabbah 82:10).

Augustine read Jacob’s two wives as two sides of the Christian life: Leah the toil of the present life, lived by faith, and Rachel “the hope of the eternal contemplation of God” (Reply to Faustus 22.52). Michelangelo carved the two sisters on the tomb of Pope Julius II in Rome with the same meaning, Rachel for the contemplative life and Leah for the active life. Rachel is not named in the Qur’an, which often mentions Jacob and Joseph, but Muslims honour her as Rāḥīl, the wife of Jacob and mother of Joseph.

Is there a Saint Rachel?

Nominis, the saints’ directory of the Catholic Church in France, lists Sainte Rachel, the wife of Jacob, with a local feast on 15 January.

Related reading

• The Story of Leah: Her Biblical Significance
• What Does Jacob Symbolize in the Bible?
• Why Was Jesus Born in Bethlehem?

Related reading

• Is Your Name in the Bible? A Directory of 231 Names