"... The legal text from the Hebrew Bible that is most relevant for a discussion of Jacob’s love and hate in Genesis 29 is Deuteronomy 21:15–17. Although various commentators have long noted a possible connection between the Genesis narrative and the Deuteronomic law, in recent scholarship it is the work of Calum Carmichael that stands out as attempting to identify a direct connection between the two passages. (The question of whether or not such a connection exists will be taken up later in this study.) As Carmichael points out, this legal text “raises the question . . . about what a man might do should he be married to two wives, one of whom he hates, the other whom he loves, and whose firstborn son is by the former. It is Reuben’s situation exactly.”10 In other words, the situation of the firstborn son described in the law matches with that of Reuben described in Genesis. But in terms of the wife who is said to be the hated one in the Deuteronomic text, that would seem to be Leah’s situation exactly. What, therefore, does the law mean when it says that one of the wives is “hated”? ... The husband had the right to enact such a demotion, but, in the eyes of the law, the wife had done nothing to deserve it ..."