The Mandrakes

One day in the wheat harvest, Reuven went out to the field and found mandrakes, a fragrant plant. The Midrash notes that though the fields were full of grain, he took nothing that belonged to anyone else, only what was ownerless. He did not taste them himself but brought them straight to his mother, Leah.

Rachel, who still had no children, asked Leah for some of the mandrakes. Leah answered with pain: was it not enough that Rachel had taken her husband, that she would take her son's mandrakes too? Rachel offered a trade: Yaakov would stay with Leah that night in return for the mandrakes. When Yaakov came home from the field that evening, Leah went out to meet him and told him she had hired him with her son's mandrakes.

The Torah says that Hashem listened to Leah. Rashi explains, from the Midrash, that she longed and searched for ways to add tribes to Israel, and Rebbi Abahu says that Hashem saw her intent was entirely for the sake of Heaven. She bore Yissachar and later Zevulun. The Midrash says that through the mandrakes, two great tribes were born: Yissachar, who sits and learns Torah, and Zevulun, who goes out to sea and supports him. Through that night, the Midrash adds, Leah gained two tribes and a place beside Yaakov in burial.

Then Leah conceived once more. The Gemara relates that she reckoned: ten of the twelve tribes have already been born, six from me and four from the maids. If this child is a son, my sister will not have even as many as one of the maids. She judged the matter and davened, and the child was born a girl. She named her Dinah, from din, judgment.