Two weeks ago, I played tour guide on an aerial survey of the family dysfunctions threaded through the Old Testament. It was far from an exhaustive tour; it’s sort of like the Grand Canyon—even in an airplane, if you want to see everything there is to see, you’re going to be up there long enough for your brain to overload and shut down. Even the curated version was a lot to take in, and I know a few of you were surprised at how much is there, and how bad it is. That’s a perfectly reasonable response, and quite unsurprising. For one thing, churches generally aren’t in the habit of focusing on the ugly stories; one of the times I got myself in trouble was for preaching on Genesis 38, the story of Judah and Tamar, on the first Sunday of Advent. I’m still proud of that Advent series on the women named in Jesus’ genealogy, but I admit having that as the main Scripture passage on a Sunday when the reader was a 13-year-old boy was not good judgment on my part . . . even if, given his family circumstances, I suspect he was rather less shocked by it than a number of adults wanted to believe.
There’s another consideration here, though, which I suspect is just as significant, and this is one which is nobody’s fault: the cultural difference between us and the ancient Israelites, and particularly as it comes to how we do narrative. Ours is the culture that created the soap opera, the stream-of-consciousness novel, and the third-person-omniscient narrator. We’re used to a lot of detail about what the characters are thinking and feeling. We can do all that, and we can make all that work, because we are a written culture—we have words on a page to do the remembering for us. Ancient cultures depended on oral transmission, which meant narrative form was determined by the strengths and limitations of human memory. As such, ancient narratives—including those we find in the Old Testament—are, by our standards, plot-heavy and sparse on emotional detail. You get what’s in the dialogue and that’s about it. As a consequence, the text isn’t going to open up the emotional world for you. You have to feel your own way in.
That’s part of our task this morning. It’s also the reason I sent out the links to Rich Mullins’ song “Jacob and 2 Women”—which I guess didn’t go out until last night; sorry about that. No doubt some appreciate the song more than others, and it’s only a three-minute song so it’s obviously incomplete, but it’s more about feeling the story than telling it. If it shapes you a little as you hear and think about Jacob and his family this morning, that is well. If not, no doubt that is also as the Lord wills. However you come to our text this morning, I encourage you to listen with your imagination and try to put yourself in the story.
To place everything in context here, Rebekah and Jacob deceived Isaac to defraud Esau of his blessing. That’s most of Genesis 27. To keep the son she didn’t love from killing the one she did, she convinced Isaac to send Jacob off to Laban to get a wife. That’s the end of Genesis 27, which sets up the journey of Genesis 28. As Lydia unpacked for us last Sunday, that journey included Jacob’s dream at Bethel, in which God made it clear that his promise to Abraham would be fulfilled through Jacob.
Then, in the first part of chapter 29, Jacob reaches his destination. He sees a well with three flocks of sheep, each with its shepherd, gathered around it—doing nothing, because the well was capped with a stone so large, it took all of the shepherds together to move it. Rachel comes on the scene, the other shepherds identify her as Laban’s daughter, and when he sees her, Jacob is inspired. Partly to impress her, partly to get the other shepherds out of the way, he moves the stone all by himself, and then he waters her flock. He kisses her, he weeps—he has a lot of pent-up emotion, and now his journey is done and he can let it all out—and then he introduces himself as her cousin. Rachel runs to get her father, Laban runs out to greet his nephew, and he welcomes Jacob as family. If we could only stop there, it would seem all was right with the world.
But of course, we can’t stop there; and even in the first part of chapter 29, there’s still one subtle hint that all is not right with the world. After all, haven’t we already seen this movie once before? Didn’t something a lot like this happen about five chapters back? Yes, it did, and if you keep Abraham’s unnamed servant in mind, you can see there’s a strong contrast between his arrival among Abraham’s kin and Jacob’s arrival. Abraham’s servant prays hard, putting his trust in God to make his mission a success; Jacob doesn’t talk to God at all, even after God talked to him at Bethel. Also, Jacob waters Rachel’s animals, instead of the other way around. That might seem like a good thing, but it shows what Jacob believes will make his mission a success: his own best efforts. As a consequence, he shows his cards from the start, and plays right into his uncle’s hand.
Thus our passage this morning begins with a devious question from Laban. He knows Jacob came for a wife but arrived with nothing (another contrast to Abraham’s servant, of course), and he’s seen Jacob’s attachment to Rachel, so he knows what his nephew wants. His ostensible concern is for Jacob’s wellbeing: family members aren’t paid for their work, but given Jacob’s poor financial situation, he offers to make an exception. On the surface, this is a magnanimous proposition—but if family members aren’t paid and Jacob is, what does that mean? Functionally, Laban is demoting Jacob from family member to employee, which puts Jacob under his thumb. This isn’t magnanimity or generosity, it’s a power move.
And Jacob falls for it. We know he offers seven years’ labor for Rachel, which is an extremely generous bride-price. Thing is, as far back as we know, Near Eastern cultures have valued haggling and bargaining; it’s a safe bet this wasn’t Jacob’s first offer, just the one Laban accepted. Or . . . sort of accepted. Notice, he doesn’t actually say, “If you work seven years, for me, you can marry Rachel.” He says, “Better I give her to you”—no names here—“than to some other man. Stay with me.” He leaves himself a loophole, because he’s looking to kill two birds with one stone. He’s securing Jacob’s highly valuable labor—his nephew is clearly a skilled shepherd—for a good long term, but he’s also setting himself up to solve a vexing problem.
This is why, in between Laban’s disingenuous question and Jacob’s request, Genesis makes a point of telling us that Rachel is the younger of two sisters, but she’s the one all the boys want. On the one hand, she’s gorgeous and has all the right curves in all the right places (the Bible’s very earthy about these things); on the other, big sister’s eyes are dull, they don’t sparkle, which was considered a key quality to female beauty. What the text doesn’t tell us yet is that to conform with the custom of his culture, Laban has to marry off Leah first because she’s oldest. Rachel’s the one drawing all the good offers, but he can’t accept any of them until Leah is married. Now, capitalism hadn’t been invented yet, but the qualities of human nature which led to its invention had, so undoubtedly Laban’s neighbors, knowing he’s in a spot, have been low-balling him with offers for Leah. Laban’s unwilling to take a low-ball offer, so he’s stuck.
—Until Jacob comes along, that is. Laban lies to him by omission in two ways, knowing Jacob will hear what he wants to hear and naïvely assume Laban’s good faith. One, as I noted a moment ago, he doesn’t say “Rachel,” just “her,” meaning he hasn’t actually technically promised Rachel to his nephew. Two, he doesn’t tell Jacob about their custom, meaning his nephew has no reason to suspect a thing. Maybe at some point in those seven years, one of his neighbors will make an offer for Leah that Laban is willing to accept; but if not, now he has a Plan B.
So Jacob works seven years for his uncle. As far as he’s concerned, he’s betrothed to his beloved—and in the ancient Near East, being betrothed was essentially being married, only without the sex. This makes Jacob so happy that the seven years pass for him in the blink of an eye. Everything is great . . . but then the seven years come to an end, and Laban says nothing. Jacob has to go to his uncle and say, “Come on, Laban, pay up! Give me my wife so I can sleep with her.” Laban still says nothing, but he does throw a wedding celebration, and once again Jacob naïvely assumes he’s gotten what he wants. Instead, however, Laban mousetraps him. It’s a neat piece of work. One, the bride is heavily veiled, because that was the custom. Two, the wedding was held in the evening, which may or may not have been custom but definitely meant the bridal tent was pitch-black. Three, the celebration wasn’t a feast—at least on its first night, when the ceremony was held—it was a drinking party. Laban got Jacob drunk enough not to realize he’d married the wrong woman.
. . . Until the morning. Jacob is furious, of course. The deceiver is deceived, but he doesn’t appear to have the self-awareness to realize he had it coming. Instead, he roars at Laban, “How could you do this to me?!” Laban, however, has chutzpah to burn, and he counterattacks with even greater force. That’s not clear in our English translations of v. 26; we read “It is not done” in the ESV, or “It is not our custom” in the NIV, and it sounds like a very prim and proper sort scolding a child for belching at the dinner table. This is much, much stronger language than that. This is Tamar’s protest to Amnon in 2 Samuel 13 when he seizes her to rape her: “Such a thing is not done in Israel.” Laban is accusing Jacob of a major moral lapse.
In so doing, of course, he’s acting as if his nephew had known all about their custom, when of course he’d never said a word to Jacob about it. It’s an interesting side note that the neighbors had obviously helped Laban keep the secret, for whatever reason. Maybe they hoped Jacob would leave in a fury and one of them would be able to marry Rachel instead, I don’t know. If that was the case, however, their hopes are disappointed. Jacob completes the at-home honeymoon week with Leah, then marries Rachel, in return for another seven years’ service. These, however, don’t pass quickly.
The upshot of all this? “Jacob got two women”—really four, since each of his wives had him father children with her maid—“and a whole house full of kids.” He loved Rachel so much more that verse 31 literally says Leah was “hated”—that’s how great the difference was between his love for her and his love for her younger sister. Yet he does seem (at least to my eye) to have had some love for Leah, and he did keep sleeping with her. At the same time, though, he clearly held bitter resentment toward Laban, and you have to wonder if he resented Leah as well for going along with her father’s plan. Yet it was Leah, not Rachel, who gave him most of his children, and Rachel’s jealousy of her sister’s fertility may have equalled Leah’s jealousy of her sister’s place in their husband’s heart. All in all, the whole situation clearly displays the reason for God’s command in Leviticus 18:18: “You shall not take a woman as a rival wife to her sister, uncovering her nakedness while her sister is still alive.”
So, then, given our focus in this season: where is love in all this? It’s messy, to be sure, but I think I see three answers to that question. The first, to give credit where credit is due, is in the constancy of Jacob. That’s not a description which often fits, but it does here. Consider this: he worked joyfully for seven years for Rachel. He kept his eyes firmly fixed on her for seven years with no immediate sexual gratification. Physical attraction can drive a man a long way—for instance, to move a stone that normally took three or four people to roll away—but seven years’ hard work before getting a paycheck? His attachment to Rachel clearly began with the physical, but it obviously grew. And then after Laban swindled him, he worked another seven years without trying to scheme his way out of it. The great deceiver played it straight—why? To me, the only answer that makes sense is that he loved Rachel too much to risk losing her.
Second, and more painfully, I think we see love in God’s judgment on Jacob. Remember, this follows hard on the heels of Bethel. God makes a sweeping promise to Jacob, and the very next thing Genesis gives us is this story. Jacob here is repeatedly hoist on his own petard. Guided by his mother, he deceived his father by masquerading as his brother Esau. Even though that was done to bring about a result which God had promised, it was still deeply wrong—and here Jacob reaps what he sowed when Laban and Leah play much the same trick on him. One ancient Jewish midrash underscores the point by telling the story this way: “All that night he kept calling her ‘Rachel’ and she kept answering him ‘Yes?’ ‘But the next morning, behold, it was Leah.’ . . . He said to her, ‘Liar and daughter of a liar!’ She answered: ‘Can there be a schoolmaster without any pupils? Was it not just this way when your father called out to you ‘Esau’ and you answered him?’” Indeed, Jacob convicts himself by his own charge against Laban: when he cries out, “Why have you deceived me?” he uses the verb form of the same word his father Isaac had used in telling Esau how Jacob had stolen the blessing.
We should also note that when Laban says, “It is not done in our country,” he’s talking about the younger sibling supplanting the firstborn; it’s the same pair of words used in chapters 25 and 27, where Jacob swindles Esau out of his birthright and steals his blessing. These aren’t the words the narrator uses to differentiate the sisters in 29:16, but they’re the words Laban uses. We don’t know whether he knew their significance or not, but later generations certainly did. Yes, God intended from the beginning to raise Jacob above Esau, but that didn’t make Jacob raising himself above Esau anything right or good. God has promised to bless Jacob, and he will be faithful to keep that promise, but part of that blessing is—must be—teaching him some hard and painful lessons. If God loves Jacob even as he is, he also (as my Nana used to say) loves Jacob too much to let him stay that way.
Third, we see love in God’s compassion on Leah. When he sees that she is unloved in comparison to her sister, he gives her children. In particular, he gives her sons to be Jacob’s heirs; and though she cannot see it, he gives her the sons who will matter most. Her third son is Levi, whose descendants will be the priestly tribe in Israel; from his line will come Moses, the scriptural archetype of a prophet and leader. Leah’s fourth son is Judah, the ancestor of King David, and thus of Jesus the Messiah, the “prophet like Moses” promised in Deuteronomy 18. You could say all three offices of leadership God established in Israel—prophet, priest, and king—trace back to Leah.
Genesis 29 doesn’t give us an easy “happily ever after”; but then, none of the Bible does. Instead, it shows us love in the middle of the mess. It’s the throughline of the story, however messy the details may be, and the lifeline in the storm, however fiercely it may rage. When we sing, as we did earlier, “We lift high his glory/shown throughout our stories,” instinctively we feel his glory is shown through the good things in our stories—our successes, our victories over sin, the times when God does what we ask him to do, and so on. Scripture shows us—here and in many other places—that in fact his glory is shown in every part of our stories, the good, the bad, and the incomprehensible. He is the King of love, and he is sovereign over us, at every point—even in the mess and the storm, the fire and the flood, and even when we cannot understand. No matter how lost we get ourselves, he is the one who makes a way in the wilderness. No matter how dark our lives may become, he is the light the darkness has never mastered. No matter how often or how badly we may break faith with him, he is the keeper of the covenant, and his covenant love and faithfulness never leave us, and never stop working to bring us home.
Photo © 2009 Pascal. Public domain.