Genesis 30:8
And Rachel said, With great wrestlings have I wrestled with my sister, and I have prevailed: and she called his name Naphtali. And Rachel said, With great wrestlings have I wrestled with my sister, and I have prevailed: and she called his name Naphtali.
Genesis 30:8 belongs to the account of Jacob's marriages to Leah and Rachel and their life in Laban's household. It belongs to the record of the sons born to Jacob while he was in the land of the children of the East, after his journey from Bethel and his fourteen years of service for Laban's two daughters. The verse records Rachel naming Bilhah's son Naphtali after the intense struggle between Rachel and Leah over bearing children, with the name expressing wrestling and her claim to have wrestled and prevailed.
The verse falls within Jacob's checkered and unsatisfactory experiences, where his selfish plottings bring suffering and the overreacher is himself overreached, showing that God's providence may seem slow but brings retribution sooner or later. It belongs to the history of Jacob's polygamous family and shows the very great unhappiness that polygamy caused in every family where it entered. Polygamy was never anything but evil and wrong, though allowed by God's ancient people through the whole Old Testament period and tolerated by Moses because of the hardness of Israel's hearts, while the original order of marriage in Eden ought never to have been departed from.
The chapter is an example of patriarchal conduct that violated the marriage institution, but such violations do not diminish marriage's sacredness. Marriage was established before the fall, and its sacredness is guarded by the seventh commandment. Though Naphtali was born to Jacob through a handmaid, he is counted among Jacob's free sons, recognized as free and equal with the other sons, sharing in his father's property and becoming a head of a tribe in Israel like the other sons, so that birth to a handmaid did not make him a chattel slave.