All right, after a long rambling start,
thanks for being with us,
Bible study today,
Genesis 29.
And this gets into a kind of an extended story.
We introduce three new characters today that all become very crucial to the Jacob narrative.
The first part,
kind of talk about maybe more than read.
Essentially, Jacob arrives and he comes to where his uncle Laban and family is,
and there’s a well there, and they are in the process of
getting ready to water livestock.
He introduces himself and he asks after Laban,
and they say,
“Yes,
it is well with him.” They replied,
“And here is his daughter Rachel.”
This is verse seven.
And Rachel then is trying to water the flocks,
as are these people.
And so let me just jump here,
verse nine of chapter 29.
“While he was still speaking,
Rachel came with her father’s sheep,
for she kept them.
When Jacob saw Rachel,
the daughter of his mother’s brother Laban and the sheep of his mother’s brother Laban,
Jacob went up and rolled the stone from the well’s mouth and
watered the flock of his mother’s brother Laban.
Then Jacob kissed Rachel and wept aloud,
and Jacob told Rachel he was her father’s kinsman
and that he was Rebecca’s son,
and she ran and told her father.
When Laban heard the news about his sister’s son Jacob,
he ran to meet him and embraced
him and kissed him and brought him to the house.
Jacob told Laban all these things and Laban said to him,
‘Surely you are my bone and
flesh and he stayed with him a month.’”
Okay, so we have a family connection of sorts.
This feels a little odd because in the Old Testament,
there are these elaborate family
trees and sometimes relationships happen within the family tree.
So we’re talking about Jacob and Jacob and Rachel are essentially cousins.
Sometimes that’s a technical word in the Old Testament,
other times it’s a more generic
word, but in this case,
they not only have a family relationship.
Jacob is going to pursue a marriage relationship,
but at this point,
he meets her,
he greets her, he kisses her with greeting,
asks after Laban,
and interestingly,
Michael,
Laban runs to meet him, and we know this in the Old Testament,
true in the New Testament as well,
running is considered not manly.
Running was considered disgraceful,
and so that’s a sense here of how excited Laban is.
There’s genuine love here,
there’s genuine relationship, they’re
drawn to one another,
and Laban defies convention and doesn’t worry about his reputation or his appearance in pursuing this connection.
Yeah, so two really quick things on that.
First of all,
family relationship continues to be a heavy influence in this story,
and so that’s something worth noting that the kinsmanship,
which we see named here as such,
is an unbelievably important thing.
Even the emphasis of that,
the bone of my flesh is the language we get at the end here.
So the kind of connectedness here is one that is super important both in the ancient world
and in this culture,
but also in the furtherance of the kingdom,
that this has been,
the promise that has been made,
has been deeply connected to this family tree,
as you call it,
Clint.
So that’s the first thing.
The second thing is,
all of these characters are in motion here.
You notice that?
That we have
Jacob arriving,
and Rachel is working,
and Laban is running.
There’s all of this movement happening all at the same time,
and this is a person in
flux.
We just had this dream,
this restatement of the promise.
We’ve already talked about how this becomes a new chapter in Jacob’s life,
and what’s interesting is,
this sets off both a happy beginning,
but also a very complicated middle,
which will make more sense as we go into the story.
But what we’re seeing happen here is nuanced,
and it’s in motion,
it’s in flux.
This is good news for Jacob because he’s not sleeping on a rock under the stars anymore,
and then on the other hand,
it’s going to introduce new complexities to the story.
So things are getting better and more complicated.
Yeah, I want to, I think maybe this is a good time to preface the next cycle of stories
because they do have a lot of complexity.
There are strained family relations,
there are kind of accidental victimizations,
there’s greed,
there’s some of what we saw in the Abraham story,
the competitiveness of women in this case.
There’s also a kind of underhandedness of Laban that mirrors Jacob’s own trickery.
Jacob is now on the receiving end of some of the kind of deception that he practiced
on Isaac and on Esau.
There is a lot going on in these next couple chapters that is very interesting and very
messy considering these people are family.
Obviously, there’s a lot of lesson in that our families are both,
in many ways, the place of our greatest strengths and the place of our greatest wounds.
So as we go through here,
you will be at times moved and you’ll be at times troubled by the
kind of relationship and the kind of things that happen between these people,
and I just want to warn you of that because you’ll get a chance to see both and we want to try and
be honest about both and learn from both as we encounter them.
Yeah, if you’ve been uncomfortable with Jacob’s deceptiveness,
trickery, maybe is a better word,
then you may be further disquieted by the sort of just desserts that is sort of
worked into the text.
And, you know, I’ll be honest,
we,
in the Christian family of faith,
see revealed in Jesus Christ, grace,
good news to those who don’t deserve it.
And there is grace.
We pointed out how it’s woven through this story, right?
Family members who are making choices,
but God still is faithful to God’s promise.
This is grace.
But in the Old Testament narratives,
there’s also simultaneously a comfort level with dealing
with the ramifications and consequences of human choices.
And there is this at times sort of reverse movement that says you get what you have coming
to you.
And so here we have Jacob having an encounter with God in yesterday’s text,
and you have this sort of if-then statement that we pointed out being very strange in a character’s interaction
with God.
Now, here today,
God is faithful in bringing Jacob to his desired location,
but the fruit and result of going there,
the idea of him finding respite,
the idea of him going to
a place that’s safe,
is not entirely the outcome that Jacob would have chosen for himself.
And that’s, I think,
the really kind of human wisdom of this text that we’re already beginning
to see set up here.
We see the arrival at the destination,
but the destination is not going to be paradise.
It’s not going to be all things put together and perfect.
Yeah, and we’ll get into the intro of this next cycle of stories here in a moment.
I also want to say that I think this next chapter,
chapter and a half introduces us,
brings us into contact with one of the,
I don’t know of a better word,
one of the saddest
characters in the Old Testament,
very much a kind of background character in this story,
though not entirely, at least at first.
So let me read here just a few verses.
I’ll go from 15 here.
“Then Laban said to Jacob,
‘Because you are my kinsman,
should you therefore serve me for nothing?
Tell me what your wages will be.’
Now Laban had two daughters,
the name of the elder was Leah,
the name of the younger was Rachel.
Leah’s eyes were lovely and Rachel was graceful and beautiful.
Jacob loved Rachel, so he said, ‘I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter,
Rachel.’ Laban said, ‘It’s better that I give her to you than I should give her to any man.
Stay with me.’ So Jacob served seven years for Rachel,
and they seemed to him but a few days because
of the love he had for her.”
So here we get introduced to the fact that they’re our sisters.
Laban has two girls,
Rachel and Leah,
lots of irony scattered throughout this text.
Leah is the oldest,
Jacob falls in love with the youngest.
Now the description here is interesting.
My translation says, “Leah’s eyes were lovely.”
Historically that has been translated differently.
Scholars will probably admit that they don’t exactly know what the word means,
but historically it was often translated,
“Leah’s eyes were dull.”
Sometimes it was, “Leah’s eyes were weak.”
And the actual word has some connection to the word for cattle,
and it doesn’t mean
she looked like a cow.
If you’ve been around cattle,
they have the large sort of dull looking eyes.
And the thought is there’s a reference possibly to her having some kind of
problem visually, some kind of problem with her eyesight,
or maybe some kind of appearance of her own eyes.
Though others have read that and said,
“No, it means she had big beautiful eyes,
and from
then you get the translation lovely.”
So probably in its context,
this was telling us something about Leah that we’re not sure
we understand at this point.
I want to be clear though that scholars have been careful not to say,
“Well, Rachel’s beautiful and Leah’s ugly.” That’s not the case here.
The case is Jacob, for whatever reason,
loves Rachel,
and that’s the one in whom he’s interested.
This will come more into play tomorrow,
but it is interesting if you remember Jacob’s
story being the youngest who surpasses the oldest,
there’s a setup here that we’re going
to encounter as we continue the story.
Sometimes the biblical interpreter’s commentary writers can be quite dull.
I just want to share,
sometimes they’ll throw in a little bit of spice that makes it fun.
My commentator here on verse 30 says,
“He loved Rachel more than Leah.” An ominous statement.
I like that.
An ominous statement.
I think that that’s actually true.
There’s a sense in which this is foreshadowing.
It does peak for us this real kind of conflict that was present between a son and a mother
in Jacob’s own experience,
where Esau and Isaac are on the same team and Jacob and his
mother are on the same team,
and then now suddenly you’re going to see their new rivalries
popping up, even as we had that in the Abraham story.
It’s fascinating to see the biblical writers are clearly—ominance is a good word.
This is showing us that things are about to get messy.
Well, and there’s no inherent fault in this.
Again, we can’t blame Jacob.
I fell in love with my wife.
She has two sisters.
I didn’t fall in love—right?
There’s nothing—Jacob has done nothing wrong here.
He’s interested in Rachel,
and he’s deeply infatuated or in love with her.
In fact, the Bible has very little in it that could be considered romantic.
I mean, there’s the Song of Songs,
but it’s a strange book.
But this stands out.
Listen to this.
“Jacob served seven years for Rachel,
and they seemed to him but a few days because
of the love he had for her.”
That’s about as romantic as the Old Testament gets in these kinds of stories.
When the Bible talks about love,
it is generally not emotional.
It’s kind of practical marriages.
We’ve seen this.
We’ve seen people get married,
and there’s really been no mention of the ways in which
they love each other.
But such is Jacob’s interest in Rachel,
that the seven years of labor that he agrees
to trade Laban for the marriage is nothing to him.
It’s not even work.
It means nothing to him because of what he gains.
And so I think we want to be aware of that,
because when the Bible does something that
it doesn’t usually do,
we want to ask why,
and we want to listen to it.
That’s also a setup, though,
the reality that the idea of how all-in he is in this one relationship
is only going to accentuate in the narrative how substantial his disappointment is going
to be when we come to this tomorrow.
And the other thing worth noting is,
scholars will talk about how in this story Jacob is
the central character from a 21st century perspective.
These women haven’t been asked or consulted.
There’s also the other frame of this that says that realistically there is a kind of
transactional thing happening here.
Seven years of work will get you my daughter is the agreement.
And so certainly that makes us uncomfortable.
It should make us uncomfortable.
But the text isn’t interested in answering to that part of the story that the text is
interested in how all-in Jacob is,
which will come to the reversal tomorrow.
But if that sticks out to you,
I mean, it’s understandable that it would.
Well, and what is really fascinating about that is,
remember that historically a dowry
was brought by the bride.
It was the bride’s family that produced incentive for the marriage and/or a kind of reward or
a benefit.
And so here already we begin to see the tables getting flipped on Jacob.
We will see that full stop tomorrow as we continue the story.
It’s dangerous to be a trickster.
It’s a dangerous road to try to walk.
So stay with us because it gets very,
very interesting from here.
Thanks for being with us,
friends.
We will see you tomorrow.