Rachel

When Jacob leaves Laban's household without telling him, Rachel takes her father's teraphim, his household gods, and hides them. Laban pursues, overtakes the caravan, and searches the tents. She has put them in the camel's saddle and is sitting on it, and she tells her father she cannot rise because she is menstruating. He searches everywhere else and finds nothing.

The scene is doing several things at once. It is comedy at the expense of gods that can be sat on and not noticed. It is also a legal puzzle, because the text does not say why she wanted them. One long standing proposal, argued from second millennium family law documents recovered in northern Mesopotamia, is that possession of the household figures carried a claim on the estate, which would make the theft an inheritance move rather than a devotional one. The proposal has been questioned as much as it has been repeated, and the text itself offers no motive.

There is a shadow over it. Jacob, not knowing what she has done, tells Laban that whoever has the gods shall not live. He is unwittingly cursing his own wife, and she dies in childbirth two chapters later on the road to Ephrath. The narrator does not connect the two, and the reader is left to.

Jacob sets a pillar over the grave, and the text notes that it was still there when the account was written, which is the kind of remark that turns a story into a place.

Jeremiah, writing of exile, hears a voice in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping: Rachel weeping for her children and refusing comfort because they are not. The next verses answer her directly, telling her to keep her voice from weeping because the children shall come again to their own border. She is chosen for the passage because she is the mother of the northern tribes through Joseph, and the north was the part that had been carried away.

The Gospel of Matthew quotes the lament, without the answer, of the children killed at Bethlehem.

The tomb itself sits on two different roads in the Hebrew Bible. Genesis places it on the way to Ephrath, and adds the gloss that Ephrath is Bethlehem, south of Jerusalem. The first book of Samuel places it in the territory of Benjamin, well to the north of the city, which is also the direction Jeremiah's Ramah lies in. The two locations cannot both be right and the discrepancy has been discussed since antiquity, with the Genesis gloss often treated as a later identification.

The Bethlehem identification is the one that carried. A domed structure stood over the site from at least the medieval period, and was rebuilt in 1841 with funding from Moses Montefiore. Women have gone there to pray, particularly for children, for many centuries, and a pilgrimage is kept on the eleventh of the month of Cheshvan. The site now stands within a fortified enclosure on the boundary between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and access to it is a matter of continuing political dispute.