RACINE, JEAN. - Poet, born at La Ferté-Milon, in Valois, on 21 Dec. 1639, died in Paris on 21 Apr. 1699. Of petty bourgeois stock, orphaned in childhood, he was cared for more by his paternal grandmother, Maria Desmoulins, than by his own father, who placed him in the Jansenist school of Port-Royal.
RACHELE - The tomb of R. - Palestine.
From the biblical narrative it appears that R.’s barrenness was willed by God as a punishment for the unjust preference shown by Jacob for her. The young R. consoles herself to some extent because her maidservant Bilhah bears her two sons, Dan (q.v.) and Naphtali (q.v.), whom she may regard as her own by a right sanctioned even by the Code of Hammurabi; she also resorts to aphrodisiac essences (Gen. 30:14-15). At length God takes pity and “opens her womb,” so that she becomes the mother of Joseph (Gen. 30:22-24).
When Jacob departs from Mesopotamia, R. does not know how to part with the household gods (Gen. 31:34-35). On entering Palestine, R. with her son still appears as Jacob’s favourite, to whom he assigns the safest place in the caravan (Gen. 33:2). R. dies in giving birth to her second son Benjamin (q.v.) during the journey between Bethel and Ephrathah, that is, near Rama (cf. 1 Sam. 10:2; Jer. 31:15) and not at Bethlehem, as the present text has it owing to a very ancient gloss (Gen. 35:19). This gloss, together with the tradition of a tomb near Bethlehem, led the Evangelist to apply to the Slaughter of the Innocents the pathetic verse of Jeremiah (Matt. 2:18).