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When she saw that her sister, Rachel, had given her servant, Bilhah, to Jacob as a wife, Genesis 30:9-11 says that Leah gave her servant, Zilpah, to him as a wife, too. At that point, Jacob was married to Leah and Rachel, and he was also married to each woman's servant, Zilpah and Bilhah, respectively. In the struggle that continued between the two sisters, they seemed to believe that the winner would be the one that could either directly or indirectly give Jacob the most or the best sons. Leah had already given him four sons, but she seemed to feel that she had to give him more since Rachel had used Bilhah to give him sons five and six. Therefore, Zilpah became Jacob's fourth wife, and she gave him his seventh son, who was named Gad.

When Gad was born, Leah named him by that name because she saw him as a great fortune, and years later, when Joshua was leading the children of Israel into the Promised Land, his descendants lived up to that name. In Numbers 32:1-42, they, along with the tribe of Reuben and the half-tribe of Manasseh, had not wanted to go into the Promised Land because the territories of Jazer and Gilead to the east of Canaan were better for their livestock. They wanted to remain behind, and Moses allowed them to do so if they would join their brethren when the time came to do battle with the Canaanites. They agreed, and in Joshua 4:12-13, they honored their agreement by helping take Jericho.

In Genesis 49:19, Jacob declared that Gad would be attacked. Several hundred years later, in Jeremiah 49:1-6, the prophet wrote that the Ammonites defeated Gad's descendants, that the Ammonites would eventually be driven out, and that Gad's descendants would be allowed to return to their land. According to the Jewish historian, Josephus, the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, defeated the Ammonites in the fifth year after the destruction of the Temple, and about seventy years after that, Gad's descendants were able to return to their land.