One plain sentence sets up everything in this passage. 31"When the LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb." Jacob loved Rachel and tolerated Leah, and the household knew it. God takes the side that nobody else in the house is taking. He sees the woman the family has decided to overlook.
Leah names her first three sons as a person names things when she is trying to fix something. Reuben: 32"for now my husband will love me." Simeon: 33"the LORD has heard that I am hated." Levi: 34"Now this time my husband will be attached to me." Every name begins with the LORD and ends with Jacob. She is thanking God for gifts she hopes will buy her husband's love. It is faith, and it is faith with a request stapled to the end of it.
Then the fourth son arrives, and the sentence changes. 35"This time I will praise the LORD." Jacob is not in it. She names the boy Judah, which means praise, and the text adds, 35"Then she ceased bearing." Whatever she still hoped from Jacob, she seems to have set it down. What she holds now is God, praised for himself.
Meanwhile the loved wife is the barren one, and she cannot bear it. 30:1"Give me children, or I shall die!" Rachel says to Jacob, and he answers in anger: 30:2"Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?" She gives him her servant Bilhah, and when a son is born she names him Naphtali and says, 30:8"With mighty wrestlings I have wrestled with my sister and have prevailed." That name has no mention of the LORD in it at all, only a scoreboard. Leah answers with her servant Zilpah. Then comes the mandrake bargain, in which the sisters trade a night with their shared husband. Two women, one man, and a house full of children born out of rivalry. Scripture does not pretend it is a beautiful family.
Rachel's turn comes at the end of the passage: God remembers her, she bears Joseph, and her name for him is a prayer for one more son (30:22-24). Out of this household God builds the twelve tribes. Judah, the son named for praise and born to the wife nobody chose, becomes the ancestor of David and of the Messiah (Matthew 1:2-3). Jacob would later say of him, "The scepter shall not depart from Judah" (Genesis 49:10). The line runs through the unloved woman's fourth child, born at the moment she stopped angling for her husband's heart and thanked God instead.
Paul describes the pattern: God chose "what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are" (1 Corinthians 1:28). Leah asked for love in three tries and received something larger after the asking gave way to praise.
Prayer
Father, much of our prayer sounds like Leah's first three sons, with thanks aimed at whatever we hope you will arrange next. Teach us to arrive where she finally did, at praise that asks for nothing more. Thank you that you see what everyone around us has decided to overlook. Where we are still waiting for a love or an honor that may never come, help us set that longing down and find you enough. In Jesus' name, amen.