Hey friends, welcome back.
We are continuing through Genesis today.
Chapter 29,
Jacob and
Rachel and their story,
and we pick the story up in verse 21.
Just to recap,
as of yesterday,
Jacob has arrived at Laban’s house.
He’s met
Rachel.
We have met Rachel and Leah and Laban,
and Jacob has committed to work for Laban for seven years because he’s fallen in love with Rachel,
and that is the
sort of arrangement they agree on in order for him to take her as his wife.
And so,
we pick up the story at the end of that seven years,
and I should…
I don’t know how much
I can preface this,
but this is a tough story.
This is a strange story,
but we’ll do our best to
find what we can in it.
So, here we go.
Verse 21,
Jacob said to Laban,
“Give me my wife that I may go
into her, for my time is completed.” So Laban gathered together all the people of the place
and made a feast.
But in the evening,
he took his daughter Leah and
brought her to Jacob,
and he went into her.
Laban gave his maid Zilpha to his daughter Leah to be her maid.
When morning came,
it was Leah,
and Jacob said to Laban,
“What have you done to me?
Did I not serve you for Rachel?
Why have you deceived me?”
Laban said, “This is not done in our country,
giving the younger before the firstborn.
Complete the week of this one,
and we will give you the other in return for serving
me another seven years.”
Jacob did so,
completed her week,
then Laban gave him his daughter Rachel as a wife.
Laban gave his maid Bilha to his daughter Rachel to be her maid.
So Jacob went into Rachel also,
and he loved Rachel more than Leah.
He served Laban another seven years.
So, there are
layers to how we read this story,
and we’ll start with what I think is the easiest,
which is that Jacob is getting a dose of his own medicine.
This language about the younger
doesn’t get to surpass the older.
Remember that Jacob’s very name is the one who supplants,
and what he has done to his brother in taking his place,
the younger jumping ahead of the older
in return in regard to the birthright and the blessing.
And now,
Jacob, who has been the trickster,
is getting tricked,
and Leah is substituted for Rachel.
The kind of
implication here is that at the wedding there’s drinking,
there’s a veil, there’s an unawareness of some sort,
for sure,
and he wakes up
finding himself married to Leah.
And Laban has now tricked
him, and the explanation is,
“Well, in our country,
the younger doesn’t get to go first.” That’s not
how it works here.
And at the surface level,
you can read that as a kind of
reversal of fortune on
Jacob.
It’s a sense in which he’s getting a taste of his own medicine.
And I think,
you know,
there is another way we have to look at this text,
but at the surface level,
I think that’s part of what’s happening here.
Yeah, so to maybe add a little bit of context to that,
you have the exact wording here is,
“It is not done,
giving the younger before the firstborn.” And here,
we get this sense that
in this place,
whatever sort of striving you’re doing, Jacob,
it’s not going to work.
It doesn’t count here.
This isn’t the right order,
which of course is,
as you say, Clint, it’s a kind of critique of the misordering that has happened in Jacob’s own
system where he’s favored by his mother and the trickery.
It’s interesting because the mechanism
he uses to trick his father,
whose eyesight is not good,
who is struggling with some blindness,
is in the night here,
the reality of his bride is kept from him.
So though his physical eyes
are not in any way harmed,
he’s unable to distinguish.
He’s blind to the reality of
what’s happening to him.
So the metaphor is so deep,
it is clearly not accidental.
I mean, the point here is
as a narrative,
this is not somehow just fortunately similar to the other.
This is clearly and intentionally resonating with the themes that we’ve had earlier in the story.
And what is fascinating here is Laban ends up
in this situation where he negotiated
with Jacob a deal that would have,
in Jacob’s mind, lasted seven years.
It turns out that Laban
has found a way to double that.
He’s been able to both marry off his daughters in an equitable way,
but he’s also been able to gain 14 years of good labor.
And so the real winner in this one is a
distinct sort of contrast to the winner who was Jacob,
who walked away with the inheritance and the blessing.
So
we see this very clearly.
It’s intentional and we shouldn’t miss it.
And that brings us to,
I mean, to use that language,
Michael, that brings us to the loser
in the text, which we might think of as Jacob,
but really as Leah.
As we go beneath the surface
and we read this text from a personal standpoint and from a
psychological standpoint,
we can’t help
but hurt for Leah.
It’s not Jacob’s fault that he’s not in love with her.
He doesn’t mistreat her.
He didn’t ask to be in this situation.
Laban has done this.
And Laban has really treated her in some ways
as a nonperson.
Now, whether it’s the case that Leah has some
kind of flaw that makes it unlikely that he can find her a husband,
we don’t know that.
Commentators have guessed at that.
Preachers have preached that.
The text doesn’t tell us that.
We simply know that Laban took advantage of an opportunity and that Jacob doesn’t love her.
But look at what the text does.
It’s very interesting the way the text reinforces her pain.
Notice that she is
named only on the front end of the story when it was Leah in the tent.
And then at the end,
and listen to how she’s referred to in the context of the story,
complete the week with this one.
And I’ll give you the other also.
Jacob did so completing her week,
and Laban gave him Rachel as a wife.
And so Leah is not even named.
She is in many ways a kind of nonperson in this story.
Laban gave her,
used her to trick someone who loves her sister and doesn’t love her.
He’s,
we will see that he does his duty.
He’s faithful to her as a husband,
but he’s not in,
he doesn’t love her in the way that he does Rachel.
And she now finds herself in this
terrible situation of coming in second,
even as the oldest,
which is,
again, that’s important biblically, theologically.
It’s not important personally.
She is in a terrible spot through
no fault of her own.
Yeah. And this is uncomfortable in a similar way and not an equal way to when
Abram and Sarai were making decisions and you had Hagar and Ishmael.
It’s certainly not the same,
but we have here another woman who by no fault of her own finds herself in the circumstance that we
would later as readers come to say that she’s not gotten a fair shake.
She’s not had an equal share.
Some of that is the point.
I mean, some of that is explicitly named because Jacob also hasn’t had a
fair share.
It’s just the reality is he’s taken more of the share than he should have,
than it’s rightfully his.
He’s, he’s found his way,
wormed his way into a position where he’s taken advantage
of who’s the other one who’s been taken advantage of Esau,
right?
His own brother.
He took advantage of his own brother to get to the sick circumstance.
I want to be clear.
He didn’t take advantage in
this situation to get Leah.
It turns out in this circumstance that,
that she finds herself in this
position because of her father’s trickery.
The theme of families that are messy and the competing
interests I think is really interesting to me in a text like this because on one hand,
it draws us into the narrative of these people,
these, these individuals.
We can in some way feel what they
felt.
We can really empathize with the situation that these people find themselves in.
On the other hand,
if you ask yourself,
why would this be included in the biblical text when you’re writing
Genesis, that beginning story, the beginning of the family of faith,
when you sat down to tell this, the family story,
you know,
this is an interesting part of the story to tell in this much detail and
it’s clear that the biblical writers are less interested in sanitizing and more interested in
fleshing out all of these different competing interests.
The interests are important to the
biblical writer and so they make us uncomfortable,
but they’re supposed to.
They’re intended to reveal to us the complicated nature of God’s promise being passed on when people seek after
their own self-interest,
when they put themselves first.
In this case, it’s Laban putting his own interests first.
Look at the people who fall in the wake of that and then of course we see later
through the story the larger arc of how God’s going to still work in the midst of it.
And we should keep in mind that these stories also reflect a culture that is not chiefly interested
in the feelings of the characters,
particularly if those characters are women.
They are not full citizens and we see, unfortunately,
a very good example of that here.
And the character of Leah is fascinating.
There is this next part of the story that we’ll go through,
just these next few verses.
And Leah gets a very interesting journey condensed down into just a few verses.
Let me read this and then we’ll talk through it.
“When the Lord saw that Leah was unloved,
he opened her womb,
but Rachel was barren.
Leah conceived,
bore a son, and named him Reuben.
She said, ‘Because the Lord has looked on my affliction,
surely now my husband will love me.’
She conceived again, and bore a son,
and said, ‘Because the Lord has heard that I’m hated,
he has given me a son also,
and she named him Simeon.’ Again she conceived,
and bore a son,
and said, ‘Now this time my husband will be joined to me,
because I have borne him a son.
Therefore he was named Levi.’ She conceived again,
and bore a son,
and said, ‘This time I will praise
the Lord.’ Therefore she named him Judah,
and then she ceased bearing.”
There are unfortunately not a great number of stories in the Old Testament that you can point
young girls to that seem to contain really helpful,
powerful lessons.
But I have always
thought that Leah is one of them.
Leah finds herself in this situation and her desperate hope
is that she will gain equal ground with her sister.
Really, as we read this part of the story,
her hope is that she will be loved.
And we even frame the story with the Lord’s intervention.
When he sees that she is unloved,
he opened her womb.
Notice he doesn’t open Rachel’s womb.
That struggle continues.
For at least a period of likely four or so years,
Leah is conceiving and bearing children,
and Rachel is not.
And look at this journey.
“Because the Lord has looked on my affliction,” and what does she say?
“Now my husband will love me.” In other words,
she hopes that by doing something she will earn love.
She will gain love.
She says it again.
“He’s given me a son because the Lord heard I’m unloved.” And then a third time,
“Now my husband will be joined to me.” Notice that we’re settling along the way.
We started with, “Now he will love me.
Now he will be joined to me.” And then the ultimate expression of her journey
is that she conceived again and bore a son.
And this time she said,
“I will praise the Lord.” So
she goes from thinking that she can earn or gain her husband’s affection,
thinking of her worth as
outside in what she does for him,
and ultimately comes to the point where she says,
“I will praise the Lord.” Now this isn’t the end of Leah’s story,
and you could argue how much ultimately she gets that,
but it is a fascinating way in just a few verses.
The way that the author has taken us through,
“I hope now he loves me.
I hope this will change.
I hope this will change.
I hope this will change.”
Until ultimately finding herself and her worth by saying,
“This time I will praise the Lord.” And I
don’t want to take a lion’s share of the time here,
but I do want to point out that if you know your history,
Judah,
that last child of Leah’s,
is a very, very significant character and a lineage
later in the story.
Yeah, so that is the fruit of living with some complexity and messiness and
mystery in the midst of biblical interpretation,
especially in narratives and especially in the
Bible.
So, in the first reading of this,
it just seems like a person caught in a tidal wave,
being spun around by forces outside of her control.
It’s heartbreaking, this idea that she can’t find love.
Yet the reality is that in the midst of all the things that she does,
she can’t find love. God is working towards the furtherance and the full promise given for the entire nation of Israel.
We’re seeing this go from a very small point in Abram,
then Abraham,
and we now see it expanding
as it reaches further and further out.
What we don’t see yet is the text that is to come.
We get into Exodus,
we see this flushed out even more,
but realistically this is moving and it’s
moving in a positive direction and the mechanism of moving the narrative forward is the messiness.
It is the frustration.
In fact, it’s even,
it’s fair to say,
conflict.
And how often in our own
lives do we run as quickly and far away from conflict as possible?
No one wants to live in
the middle of it and of course no one seeks it out.
The good news is,
even in the midst of messy
situations, God can be doing and working towards ends that we might struggle to understand in the
moment.
If we can trust God,
if we can learn as we go,
as I think it’s fair to say we see happening
here for Leah in this season,
if that can be our story,
there can be good in it,
even if we find
ourselves in a moment where it doesn’t seem like there’s much good.
Absolutely, and I don’t want
to overstate that because as I said,
Leah’s story is not done and there are some indications later
that perhaps this struggle revisits her and that this is not her final word.
But in the context of
this passage, I think we see in Leah an interesting journey that leads through pain and struggle,
ultimately bringing her to a moment where she says,
“I will praise God.” And in the backdrop
of the Old Testament,
that’s the journey that we’re always taking,
that larger journey outside
the foreground of the nation of Israel.
That’s on the horizon yet,
we don’t yet see it,
but it is encapsulated in these stories as it’s, well,
the right word might be,
as it’s Genesis, where it starts.
And so, again, I don’t want to oversell that because we’re not done with Leah.
Leah still has some struggles to come,
but she is a fascinating character and this part of her story,
I think, is very interesting and I think offers some powerful things to reflect on.
I bet you someone is wondering what’s happening with Rachel right now?
And if that thought or
question has come to you,
you’re going to want to join us tomorrow because the text is going to
turn to Rachel and all of the things that you might assume in light of what we talked about today
are probably very close to being accurate.
So do join us.
The story gets even messier as we go
and there’s something to learn in that as well.
Thanks, everybody.