Greek word · G4478
Ῥαχήλ
rachēl
Rachel
Proper name, Hebrew Rāḥēl, 'ewe'. Jacob's favoured wife and mother of Joseph and Benjamin. Through Joseph she was ancestor of Ephraim and Manasseh, the core of the northern kingdom.
Appears once in the Greek New Testament. ·
What it means
From G. Abbott-Smith, A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament (1922), via STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0).
In depth
From the study of Matthew 2:18
- Range of meaning
Proper name, Hebrew Rāḥēl, 'ewe'. Jacob's favoured wife and mother of Joseph and Benjamin. Through Joseph she was ancestor of Ephraim and Manasseh, the core of the northern kingdom.
- Against the English
The English reads like a woman named Rachel crying in Bethlehem. In fact it is a poetic picture: the long-dead mother of the tribes rises up to mourn her descendants.
- Used elsewhere in the period
Genesis 35:16–20 tells how she died giving birth to Benjamin and was buried by the road near Bethlehem. At a wedding in Bethlehem, Ruth 4:11 calls 'Rachel and Leah' the two who 'built up the house of Israel'. In Jeremiah 31:15–20 she mourns Ephraim and the northern tribes in exile. Later rabbinic writings (Genesis Rabbah 82:10; Lamentations Rabbah, proem 24) say Jacob buried her by the road so that she could pray for her children as they passed into exile. These sources were written down centuries after Matthew, so they show where the tradition went, not certainly what Matthew's readers knew.
Where it appears
Matthew · 1
-
Matthew 2:18 Ῥαχὴλ Rachel
“A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”
Here: Jacob's beloved wife, mother of Joseph and Benjamin, who died in childbirth on the road near Bethlehem (Gen 35:16–19). Here she stands for Israel as a mother, grieving centuries after her death.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.