Hey, thanks for being with us as we kick off Monday, continuing through Genesis.
Probably going to jump a little bit today.
We’ll cover chapter 35 in a couple of little things.
Probably won’t read all of it,
but chapter 35 and 36 really are the transition stories.
And you might remember that typically as we come to the end of each of a character story,
and we sort of transition to the new character,
there are usually a chapter or two between them
to kind of clean up,
tie up the loose ends,
some of that.
So that’s a little bit of what we get
today.
We get a lot happening,
but none of it
necessarily moves the narrative forward.
And then chapter 36,
we’ll just kind of leave that for you.
If you want to read that,
that one’s all about descendants and where people settle and a long list of peoples and tribes,
and kind of sets the stage for chapter 37,
which is when Joseph comes on the scene.
And really,
for the rest of the book,
the last 13 chapters of the book,
Joseph is going to be
pretty much front and center for most of that time.
So let’s just jump into 35 today.
God calls Jacob back to Bethel to settle there,
and he journeys there.
He takes on his people.
I do want to point out
as they move,
so verse 2 of chapter 35,
“Jacob said to his household,
and all who were with him,
‘Put away foreign gods that are among you.
Purify yourselves,
change your clothes,
then come and let us go to Bethel,
that I might make an altar there to
the God who answered me in the day of distress and has been with me wherever I have gone.’”
So they gave Jacob all the foreign gods they had and the rings that were in their ears,
and Jacob hid them under the oak that was near Shechem.
This is a kind of formula we see
in the Exodus story.
We see this in the other parts of the Old Testament,
this idea of putting away foreign gods.
And here, really, for the first time,
we learn that there are among Jacob’s company some representation of other gods, other religions.
And this will be really a consistent theme,
particularly in the post-Exodus stories,
in the Joshua stories,
in the King stories,
that Israel will struggle really throughout
all of the Old Testament with being led astray by the people around them and serving the wrong gods.
And so,
very interesting that we get this language here.
Jacob gets an altar,
we’ve seen this before.
And then we get told,
“Deborah, Rebecca’s nurse dies.”
And then verse 9,
“God appears to Jacob again and blessed him.
God said to him,
‘Your name is Jacob.
No longer will you be called Jacob,
but you shall be called Israel.
This will be your name.’
So, he was called Israel.” And for the rest of the story,
that’s largely going to be the case.
Again,
as we shift, we’ve seen this before,
Michael, as we shift from a character as a character
to a character as essentially a nation or a people group.
And that will be the case here
as Jacob changes his name to Israel.
Yeah, I’m not going to beat the point too much here,
but remember that the point of this story is
essentially God and God’s blessing,
the choice that God has made to bless Abraham and all of Abraham’s descendants.
So, that is the story that will now be transitioning, right?
We have characters in the story,
but they are simply representing a moment in time as God is faithful
generation to generation to this promise that God has made.
That said,
let us not make a mistake.
It is not an accident here that when we hear again this insistence that your name will be
Israel, that it’s in the same section where we’re having this talk about altars being made,
putting away false gods.
This is a clear moment in the story where we are intensifying
that very jealous relationship that God has with God’s people.
When God makes this promise,
God made a covenant, remember,
with Abram.
God made this covenantal agreement,
and in that agreement there was both God’s commitment as well as Abram and therefore Abram’s descendants.
And so, to have this built in the story,
Clint, like we have it here,
this is not just a detail thrown in.
To pair Israel the name,
which of course of this man is going to be the name of these people,
with this idea of building the altar,
staying true to the one who is given the blessing,
been faithful to the blessing.
I mean,
this isn’t an accident.
What we should be reminded as this theme,
as you point out,
becomes more and more fleshed out in the end of this book and really
more into the books to come,
that this is where it finds its fountainhead.
Faithfulness to God matters,
and at this critical moment where Jacob turns into Israel,
that’s when we see
this commitment being made and putting away other God’s being choice that Jacob is making.
Then we get another very interesting name story.
In verse 16, it says they’re journeying from Bethel,
and along the way,
we find out that Rachel was pregnant,
and along the way she goes
into childbirth, and the text says she had hard labor.
And when she was in hard labor,
the midwife said to her,
“Do not be afraid,
for now you will have another son.”
And as her soul was departing, for she died,
she named him Benomie,
but his father called him Benjamin.
Now,
this is a very interesting story.
We really didn’t get a lot of warning to this
story.
As Rachel passes away in childbirth,
she is admittedly fairly elderly at this point,
and the strain and the hardness of the labor,
the difficulty of the delivery.
She dies in childbirth,
but as she does,
she names her new son Benomie,
which means the son of my sorrow,
or a son of sorrow.
But
Jacob,
the father, his father,
called him instead Benjamin,
which means the son of my right hand,
or possibly the son of the south as they’re out of Israel at this point.
But I can’t remember…
I don’t think I remember another instance, Michael, where
a name is changed by a character in the story.
We’ve seen several times that God changes the name,
but clearly the son of my sorrow is a lot to hang on a child,
certainly a lot to hang on a family.
And so interesting,
as part of this text,
it’s very interesting that Jacob steps in and sort of intervenes,
giving Benjamin a softer name.
Right.
Well, and also emphasizing, Clint,
his importance,
because we’re going to find out as this book continues,
that Israel has some
really substantial feelings towards the sons of his beloved wife.
You remember the whole story of
Leah and Rachel.
And so now, as Rachel dies in childbirth,
bearing a son, this son is going to
become a very substantially loved member of the family.
And that’s going to feature in some of the
stories that come later.
One thing that continues,
though, in this story, Clint,
and, you know, there is a lot of family drama that happens in the midst of this.
There’s a lot of sons.
There’s a lot of wives.
And there’s even in the next section we’re going to look at here,
there’s some things that just make you think, huh,
Jacob, or now Israel’s family,
is messy and complicated.
And that’s a
thing that the text doesn’t go to hide.
I mean, it points it out.
It just says it as it is,
and it moves on.
And so clearly,
things aren’t clear cut in his household.
I mean, there’s a lot of moving pieces.
Yeah. So there’s a very interesting text,
and it connects later to a different story.
But in verse 22,
the Bible does one of those strange things where it
just throws what seems to be an enormous,
odd detail,
almost as if it’s in passing.
So let me read this to you.
“While Israel lived in the land,
Reuben went and lay with Bilhah his father’s
concubine, and Israel heard of it.” Now, again,
Bilhah is likely fairly old at this point,
but Reuben, among those firstborn children,
is also on the older side.
And at some point,
those two get together.
It seems to indicate at Reuben’s insistence,
though, or instigation, but maybe,
again, we don’t know.
What we do know is that later,
Reuben will be denied part of his
inheritance as the oldest son,
and it is likely related to this verse.
It is likely this verse
explains why, as an oldest son,
he will not be included in an inheritance later when Jacob gifts
his property and land to his sons.
But, I mean, this is a punishable-by-death thing later in the
legal codes of Numbers and Deuteronomy.
This is a death sentence.
And yet here, it’s one of those
strange instances where it just drops into the story,
and we all have to kind of go, “Oh,
whoa, we didn’t see that coming.
We don’t know what to make of that.” Yeah.
I mean, fundamentally,
if we didn’t know this already,
Jacob’s role in his own family and now within his family,
with his wives and children,
right, all of these roles are reversed in strange ways.
And so, it serves in a way to point out how God’s faithful to the blessing and not faithful to a particular
order or tradition.
I mean, because all of those things are upended here.
Jacob shouldn’t have received the blessing.
Reuben shouldn’t have done this act.
I mean, we could make a long list,
Clint, of just all of the things that don’t fit in the right spots,
and yet that is essential to
the way the story runs.
I think we’ve said this before,
folks, but I think the average person
underestimates by far the messiness
of the families in Genesis.
We tend to think of a family
unit, and we tend to think that the Bible must affirm our idea of family unit.
Family units in the Scripture are almost without exception,
very messy,
very broken,
sometimes very damaged,
and this is yet another instance of that.
So, the Bible doesn’t
moralize that here one direction
or another.
It doesn’t defend it.
It doesn’t condemn it,
but it puts it out there.
Again,
it will tie to some things later.
But then we have a listing of the 12 sons according to their mother.
Notice, as Michael has sort of previewed,
Joseph and Benjamin are the beloved.
They are the favorite
because they are the sons of Rachel.
And then finally, we close this chapter with the death of Isaac.
Jacob came to his father Isaac at Mamre,
where Abraham and Isaac had resided as aliens.
Now, the days of Isaac were 180 years,
and Isaac breathed his last and died,
and he was gathered to his people old and full of days,
which is a wonderful tribute.
Whenever Scripture says
about someone that they died old and full of days,
it is a compliment to the way they lived.
It is a compliment to who they are.
Michael, intriguing to me is this last line,
“And his sons Esau and
Jacob buried him.” We don’t have much to do with Esau in the story,
though he’ll be mentioned in
the next chapter for his descendants.
But as a character,
he’s really kind of played his role
in Genesis.
We don’t hear from him or much about him anymore.
But fascinating that just a couple of chapters ago,
we saw these boys and wondered what would happen when Esau killed Jacob.
Jacob was afraid,
this whole contest between them and the reconciliation.
And now they stand together
at the end to bury their father.
And I don’t want to read too much into that because we don’t know
too much about it.
But it seems to me that that’s the Bible’s way of giving a nod to
the fact that they worked their stuff out and did their duty before God and before their father,
and that together,
his sons, Esau, there’s something,
I think there’s intentionally
something nice about that.
It rings positive.
Yeah, the Bible is not interested,
Clint, in some of our Hallmark movie happy endings that we enjoy.
We like it when all of the strings
sort of come together and we can see the picture that has been made throughout the whole story.
We don’t really get that most of the Bible.
And here,
you’re going to be reading into one
sentence if you’re going to suggest that this is a kumbaya moment.
But there is a sense in which
the brothers who were literally tricking one another out of their inheritance and running in
fear and then coming back in fear and the question of, you know,
living next to each other or not,
and all of these things,
all of this drama that we’ve seen,
there’s a kind of solidarity here.
As we end Isaac’s story,
remember the one who was promised all the way back in that
idea of the generations.
Now,
there are 12 families under Jacob alone,
not even counting Esau’s descendants.
There are 12 men who are going to carry on this tradition and this name
Israel that’s now been given.
We see this official transition happening.
You said, and very rightly, that this chapter operates as a bridge from what has been before to what is coming.
And realistically,
that means closing the chapter of Isaac.
It means opening
the reality of what’s going to happen beyond Israel,
even.
And that’s going to open up for us the story of Joseph
and that which comes later.
I think these sections of Scripture,
Clint, are really interesting.
They’re hard to study when you’re reading through the Bible,
when you’re seeking to sort of gain
some understanding of what they mean.
I think they’re hard because in some ways,
there’s not a lot of devotional meaning here.
I mean, you’re not going to learn about how to act as a father or
how you should treat your children as a mother.
You’re not going to come to this for some kind of
encouragement for today, most likely.
You know, when you come to a text like this,
what you’re finding is the Scripture is making it clear who the subject of these stories are.
The subject is not any one particular person,
although it stopped off at different places.
The point is what is
being passed between them.
So that’s not a really easy thing to hold on to.
Clint, that’s not a
red thread that’s maybe easy to trace.
But if we can try to hold on to that,
I think we can see it operating here,
even if this isn’t the most exciting text.
Right.
And because in chapter 37,
we pick up the story of Joseph and we really focus almost exclusively on Israel,
the Bible takes chapter 36 and really gives you a long,
very detailed
rundown of what happens to Esau’s people,
where they live,
who they are,
the kingdoms that they
lead, the kind of establishment that they have.
For us,
there’s very little.
If you are not going
to get out a map and keep track of these as relates to Israel’s story coming up later in the book,
this is going to be of very little importance to most of us.
But it is the Bible’s way of saying,
we have these two
lineages of Isaac’s story.
Here’s what happens to Esau’s.
And now that we’re done with that, in one chapter,
we have another 13 chapters focused primarily on that
main part of the story,
which is Israel and Israel’s descendants.
No, Clint, I never thought of it this way.
And push back, if you disagree with this,
it seems that with some of these characters,
and Esau’s maybe example par excellence,
the text doesn’t just want to cut it off and end it and say that’s the end of Esau, because Esau matters.
We had something like this with Hagar and Ishmael,
where the text goes out of its way to point out the peoples that come from that person,
from that sort of branch of the family tree.
And in doing so,
the text makes it clear,
those folks are still around.
Here are the nations.
Here’s the kings.
Here’s the geography.
Here’s the people that remain because of God’s faithfulness to this other person.
But in doing that,
it’s kind of a narrative way of closing the loop.
It’s saying this is the end of this part of the story.
We’re going to move on with the main
subjects, the one who carry on the covenantal promise.
But this is very much a way of honoring
the fact that those,
these people may not be the ones through whom the promise with capital T-H-E,
that they still matter and that they still exist in the world around you.
No, I think that’s right,
Michael.
I mean, they are not Israel,
but they are connected to Israel and therefore their story matters.
It’s a secondary story.
It’s not the primary story that the Bible’s going to focus on,
but it does matter.
They
are of interest in that regard if for no other reason.
And so the Bible wraps that up there.
Now,
beginning tomorrow, we will focus on Joseph.
We will look through stories that you probably
know, though there may be things in them that are surprising because sometimes when we
revisit familiar stories, we find that we’ve not maybe learned the whole version occasionally.
And so I hope you can be with us tomorrow as we really open the next door and begin
the last part of this book.
See you tomorrow, friends.