Jeremiah 31 is widely considered to belong to what is known as the ‘Book of Consolation’, a unit spanning four chapters (Jeremiah 30–33), with God’s promise of Israel’s future restoration as its unifying theme. Readers can locate some of the most tender messages in the Bible in Jeremiah 31. There are the affectionate words of verse 3: ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love’. Verse 20 establishes the idea of Ephraim as God’s ‘dear son’. In verses 31–34, there are promises of a ‘new covenant’.

Amidst such a hopeful outlook, we find the evocative image of Rachel in verse 15:

Thus says the LORD: ‘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 not’.

This verse is immediately followed by another divine word: a decree to cease from weeping, and the promise of future rewards and her children’s return from exile (v.16).

Yet, it is this woeful and mournful picture of Rachel, abstracted from its happy context, that has persisted over time.

Both before and after Jeremiah 31:15, and in both biblical and extrabiblical reception history, Rachel plays a prominent role. Here in a passage of a prophetic book, she not only represents her own sons (Manasseh, Ephraim, and Benjamin) but also Judah and Levi (i.e. the sons of Leah) in the southern kingdom. Centuries after the cataclysmic Babylonian captivity, the matriarch reappears in a disaster on a more local scale, as Herod targets ‘all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under’ (Matthew 2:16).

This massacre in the time of Jesus is the subject of Peter Paul Rubens’s painting. When wicked political leaders exercise authority, innocent people suffer, whether they are located in seventeenth-century Europe or in first-century Palestine.

Similarly, in the first half of the twentieth century, Jacob Steinhardt has in mind his fellow Jews suffering under the Third Reich. Both Rubens and Steinhardt look to Rachel as a fitting symbol of innocent suffering in the face of the violence of war.  

Kings and führers, however, are not the only causes of Rachel’s weeping. When impersonal and natural causes led to the death of his child—a smallpox epidemic as the United States was establishing its new independence—Charles Willson Peale again conjured up Rachel. (This was especially appropriate as his wife was her namesake.)

The grief of parents is a universal experience that transcends times and cultures. Rachel is a sympathetic figure and her voice and her tears speak to victims of bereavement everywhere.

The difficulty in uniting these three artists goes beyond understanding their diverse backgrounds: Rubens, a Flemish Catholic; Peale, an American, probably Deist; and Steinhardt, a non-religious European Jew.

It is hard to ascertain whether the overall optimistic context of Jeremiah 31 is a major factor in their decision to make Rachel a central focus in their works.

In Rubens’s painting, the images of angels carrying wreaths in the sky strongly suggest that he wanted to communicate something hopeful. The children are clothed in white, representing purity. Peale similarly depicts his deceased daughter in white while his Rachel looks upward (though we do not know what—if anything—she sees). As for Steinhardt, there seems only to be darkness and despair. Rachel has her eyes closed. Yet despite their differences, it is beyond doubt that all three acknowledge Rachel as a suitable embodiment of their own personal turmoil.

To venture further, however: these artists—initially drawn to Rachel with a sense that she is a sympathetic fellow sufferer—have knowingly or unknowingly tapped into the stirring power of maternal suffering in the story of God with his people. As noted earlier, God immediately implores Rachel to stop weeping and comforts her in Jeremiah 31:16. Influential readers have not lost sight of this connection. The rabbinic minds behind the midrash Eichah Rabbah (proem 24) imagine Jeremiah summoning the patriarchs and Moses to reprise their roles as intercessors and to weep on behalf of Israel. Yet, in this instance, they fail to move God to intervene as they did before. Meanwhile, where Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses fail, Rachel succeeds. She recounts her stories of sacrifice and persuades God to hear her pleas.

The impact and influence of Rachel weeping continue as innocent people suffer in this world as victims. Time will tell where she will be summoned next. Yet in every instance where she appears, sufferers and observers look to her for sympathy and trace the trajectory of her cries to the ears of God.

References

Hadjittofi, Fotini, and Hagith Sivan. 2020. ‘Staging Rachel: Rabbinic Midrash, Theatrical Mime, and Christian Martyrdom in Late Antiquity’, Harvard Theological Review, 113.3: 299–333

Lindars, Barnabas. 1979. ‘“Rachel Weeping for her Children”: Jeremiah 31:15–22’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 4.12: 47–62

Strickert, Frederick M. 2007. Rachel Weeping: Jews, Christians, and Muslims at the Fortress Tomb (Collegeville: Liturgical Press)

Thompson, J. A. 1995. The Book of Jeremiah, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans)