Genesis 30:1-24

Hey everybody, welcome back, and thanks for joining us again as we wrap up the week with
Genesis, trying to get all the way through chapter 30 today where we find a kind of continuation of the story,
a lot of childbearing going on as Leah,
we saw yesterday, has had children,
and now the aftermath,
the response of that as that story continues.
And it’s in this chapter,
we kind of re-encounter something we saw in the Abraham story,
the presence of surrogates essentially,
maids who also function as wives.
We saw Sarah give a haggard to Abraham when she was unable to produce children or to have
children and now we find that same thing repeated and it’s no more comfortable but at least it is
familiar.
And now we begin to see why yesterday we saw these two maids mentioned as the dowry or
as the thing that the one who came with each of the sisters when Jacob married them.
So I’ll begin here reading in chapter 30,
we won’t go through all of this but I do want
to set up the front end then we’ll talk through some of the story.
When Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children,
she envied her sister.
She said to Jacob,
“Give me children or I shall die.”
Jacob became angry with Rachel
and said, “Am I in the place of God who has withheld from
you the fruit of the womb?”
Then she said, “Here is my maid,
Bilhah.
Go in with her that she may bear upon my knee and that I too may have children through her.”
So she gave him her maid,
Bilhah, as a wife and Jacob went into her
and Bilhah conceived and bore Jacob a son.
Then Rachel said, “God has judged me and has also heard my voice and given me a son.”
Therefore she named him Dan.
Rachel’s maid, Bilhah, conceived again and bore Jacob a second son.
Then Rachel said, “With mighty wrestling I have wrestled with my sister and I have prevailed.”
So she named him Naftali.
So this is the beginning of the rest of the chapter as you can maybe imagine what is going to come next.
But Rachel here,
interesting,
the one who began the story as the one who was loved,
Leah, the one who was sort of left out,
Leah has had children and now Rachel feels that
role of being left out.
She feels that she’s not fulfilled her purpose.
She is upset.
She demands a child.
Jacob says, “That’s not in my power to give you.
That is not something I can control.”
And so here we have this alternate arrangement where the maid,
Bilhah, then becomes a surrogate
for Rachel and those two sons she takes as a kind of way of fulfilling her duties to
Jacob and she celebrates both of them but interestingly enough she brings her sister into it.
“I have wrestled with my sister and I have prevailed.”
And the words wrestle and prevailed as it pertains to siblings are going to circle
around again and we’ll try to remind you when that happens.
But keep,
put a mark here because those are very important words in a story down the road
a little ways.
So Clint, you mentioned here this connection that we have to the Hagar story.
What’s interesting here is whereas in the Hagar story you’re dealing with the question
of will the line continue,
that was the explicit question that was at play for Abram and Sarai.
You know, would they even have an heir who would carry on this great promise that God
had given Abram.
Here we don’t have a question of will the line continue because there are sons all over.
It seems like there’s more sons every verse.
So it’s not here a question of will the line continue but rather a question of rivalry
between these characters.
I mean who is the one who is loved?
And one of the things that’s so striking is the very thing that we mentioned previous
is that it’s out of character for the Old Testament to speak of emotions quite as often
as what we have at this part of the Jacob story.
Here again,
right here in verse 1,
Rachel is envying her sister.
We literally have envy.
Then verse 2,
Jacob is angry.
We have all of these emotions being called out in the middle of this story.
It accentuates what is very clearly a spiraling situation.
So that even as we go further in the story,
we’ll talk you through here in just a moment
how this proceeds.
But as this story continues on,
we’ve got such a powder keg already.
It is just going to continue to explode because you have this situation where we saw in Jacob’s
own family what happens when there’s a kind of competing interest and infighting.
Here this is only multiplying as one wife gives another maid.
Now suddenly you have three,
then you’re going to have four,
and in the midst of all of this situation,
you have the competition for Jacob,
but also the sort of mutual – I’m
not going to say destruction,
that’s an exaggeration, but there is a kind of mistrust,
competitiveness.
The thing that we saw in limited form with Hagar,
I think we see really at a whole other
level in this story like this.
I don’t think that you read any of this and are left with the impression of a
healthy family unit.
Nothing speaks of stability and kind of mutual affection and taking care of one another.
That’s not the aftertaste that this story leaves for you.
And what’s interesting about that is where we’ve seen this kind of story before,
we’ve seen it
summarizing national stories, right?
Remember,
we had Isaac,
who is the
line of Israel, and we had Ishmael,
who is the Ishmaelites,
and we’ve had Midian,
and we’ve had a reference to Canaan.
Here we have these various sons that are all folded within the Israel story.
They all belong to Israel.
They will become the twelve tribes.
And so,
unlike those previous stories that set one nation against another,
here we kind of had factions within the family,
which speaks again to what we might call a kind of
dysfunctional bent
woven into the very fabric of the beginning of
Jacob/Israel story.
Yeah, no family counselor looks to this section to say that this should become a metaphor
for a healthy marriage.
No one looks for wrestling with your sister to find the promise being upheld.
Yet here, these people,
Clint, are, I think it’s worth noting what you said,
and to rephrase explicitly,
whereas in some of these other stories we’ve seen Israel’s relationship
with the other nations are flushed out.
Here we see the tribes of Israel taking shape.
The very kind of conflict that, quite frankly,
is going to get explicit socio-political religious
language given to it in the prophets,
later in the Old Testament,
where tribes set themselves
against tribe and where there are different responses to different problems.
Here we see the genesis,
the start to that.
We see that there is a familial connection,
blood is a strong bond,
yet even in the midst
of that bond, there is severe and extreme kind of discordant tension,
and so this does
in an uncomfortable way, I think,
very accurately portray a kind of ongoing relationship.
This is experienced by those who are reading it in its original context,
it’s just doing so in a way that sort of honors the starting figures,
the fountainhead of how this happens.
And again, part of the practicality of this story,
Michael, is that it explains to us
how there are 12 tribes,
because it has to make a pathway to 12 sons,
but it also speaks
to what we’re talking about,
this kind of tension and friction,
this kind of animosity and struggle.
Right away, the next part of the story,
when Leah,
keep in mind, who has had four sons,
sees that Rachel has given Jacob her maid,
who has given children to him,
Leah’s response
is to take her own maid and give her to Jacob as well,
and that produces another couple of sons.
And so Leah is not content.
You would think,
what difference does that make to Leah?
She’s had children, she has four sons she’s given to Jacob,
but she’s still in competition.
There is this rivalry between them that really dominates this part of the story,
and so her maid has to become a part of this as well,
and now she is producing children also.
Yeah, so I don’t know how much detail we’ll go into here.
There’s a story built into this chapter where these two sisters are explicitly fighting
with one another.
They’re wrestling in a real way where one comes back and has a…it’s a plant.
Is that right?
Yeah, and the idea is called mandrake,
and the idea was it was something that would increase your fertility,
and Leah’s son had picked some, found some.
And Rachel says,
“Can I have those?
I want those.” The idea being that she hasn’t given up on being pregnant herself,
and then I think,
Michael, what you’re referring to next is that they start bartering.
Yeah, right.
So Leah says,
“I’ll give you the mandrake if you let him come into me tonight.”
And out of that bartering,
which Rachel agreed to,
thought that it would be worth getting
this thing that might help her get pregnant,
and, you know, she’ll give up this night.
It turns out that from that,
Leah becomes pregnant, and there’s another son.
There’s son upon son.
This story, I think, is important because you see the characters still vying with one
another.
They’re still looking for the upper hand.
There’s still hope
in both characters’ cases that barring sons is going to fundamentally
change their relationship with Jacob.
I mean, all of these things exist,
but they’re just being blended together in an increasingly
complicated and difficult way.
Yeah, and to your point,
Michael, the text helps us here.
This is literally what she says to Jacob.
“Jacob came in from the field,
and Leah went and met him and said,
‘You must come into
me, for I have hired you with my son’s mandrakes.’
So, he lay with her,
and God heeded Leah, and she conceived,
and she said, ‘God has given me my hire.'”
And notice that that’s the level we’re now at in this story.
I paid for you.
I bartered for you.
You belong to me this evening.
And then she essentially names the child,
“I got my money’s worth.
I received what I paid for.
My hire worked out.”
And then Leah conceived again and said,
“God has given me a good dowry.
Now my husband will honor me.” Remember,
we went from love to be connected.
Now Leah hopes that in this sixth son,
she will be honored.
But then it ends with,
“Afterwards, she bore a daughter also,” naming her Dinah.
So,
it is interesting that the Scripture is masterful at this.
As we’ve moved through the story,
we’ve seen these relationships
sort of degrade.
We’ve seen love hasn’t been mentioned in a long time.
We’ve seen competition.
We’ve seen longing.
We’ve seen jealousy, rivalry.
Now we’re seeing bartering for the husband’s time.
And in the midst of that,
these children are being produced.
But one gets the feeling that’s not all from security and love and connectedness.
It comes from a broken kind of place.
There’s a lot of brokenness in this story.
Yeah, there’s brokenness and there’s also a setup to the big payoff,
which is essential to the later story.
So, you have all of this conflict.
Rachel has yet to have a child at this point in the story.
There’s been all of this with giving a maid.
And she even,
in that speech, makes it sound as if it is her child,
right?
Almost as if she’s content to claim that my maid has done my part in this.
But we know that that has not ended the story for her.
But we have this whole Mandrake story.
We have this clear kind of bartering happening for Jacob’s attention.
So it’s clear that she still has hope that on her own,
she will provide a son.
And when that happens,
we set up the extreme kind of favoritism that we have already sort of seen
hinted at metaphorically in Jacob’s family of origin.
We’re now going to see that explicitly named here in this text.
And to any reader of the Old Testament,
the stories to come hinge greatly upon Rachel’s son.
And that all hinges because of how remarkable,
how miraculous,
yes,
Rachel’s son is.
But even more than that,
all of the conflicts surrounding the fact that she couldn’t have one,
that the favorite wife couldn’t provide an heir,
has now been blown to such extreme high proportion
that we now wonder,
well, what’s going to happen with Rachel?
And the text is going to answer that question as well.
Right.
And again,
keep a bookmark here,
perhaps, because when the favorite wife finally has a son,
that’s going to matter later because that son instantly becomes the favorite.
And that has some implications.
We continue to hear echoes of Jacob’s own story reverberating through the rest of the text.
And we won’t get there for a little while.
But when Joseph is born as the long awaited product of the reunion,
the relationship of the one that Jacob loves the most,
that’s going to unfortunately not be handled well and set up additional heartache later.
And such is the way this story is told.
But keep that in mind because that’s going to matter.
Yeah, the reality here is that what Jacob did as the younger took the place of the older.
He literally changed the order of what should be.
And here,
that reverberation continues to be mimicked in his own story.
As we see him and his life and his wives and his children,
he comes to love the last, not the first.
He gets the son that he was looking for the whole time,
but he gets that son at the end.
And you can imagine what that does to all of the people who are on the front end of it.
We miss some of the force of this text because
in our culture,
the idea of giving all to the first born,
this kind of family hierarchy,
is we see distant vestiges of it in our culture.
But it’s not nearly as prominent as what it is here.
The reversals and upheaval of the social order,
I think, is really well named by Laban in yesterday’s text,
this idea that that’s not how it’s done in this country,
right?
This is the order.
This is the stability.
This is the way that things happen.
And in Jacob’s family,
there’s very little of that order.
There’s wives who are loved who don’t have children until the end.
There’s wives who aren’t loved.
In fact, there are handmaidens of wives who aren’t loved or having children
who would bear the family name before the one who gets favorited in the end,
which is angering.
In fact, it’s so frustrating that it’s going to create massive family conflict
down the road that’s going to set off entire other story arcs.
It’s remarkable how much the biblical story packs in.
It’s remarkable that this is a positive story.
This isn’t the story of the enemies.
This is the story of the family of faith,
the people of Israel.
And it’s very honest about the pitfalls and the difficult roads traveled in getting there.
I think that has something to teach us both about the humility of the people who wrote it, the honesty,
but maybe also a very high view of God and God’s ability to work in all of it.
Yeah, ultimately, it’s a little difficult to know what to do with this story.
It’s messy.
There’s pain in it.
There’s some joy in it.
There’s celebration in it.
There’s promise in it.
But there’s a lot of struggle here.
And it’s hard to know exactly what to do with that.
Do we lay it at the feet of Laban?
Had it not been for Laban’s selfish intervention?
Would it have been Jacob and Rachel eventually having a child and happy?
Would all of this mess maybe not been present?
Is this the way that God was at work in the scenario to try and work for the best?
Opening wounds and blessing people who weren’t blessed and weren’t loved?
This isn’t the kind of story we said this often,
but Genesis gives us so many of these stories
that just aren’t easily wrapped up as one thing.
It’s very difficult to paint this with one color and one brush.
There is a lot of shadow in it.
There’s dark in it.
There’s light in it.
And that is the biblical story.
That’s the story of our lives.
That’s the story of the covenant.
And I think this is a very interesting chapter of it.
But that’s where things stand for now.
All of the children,
nearly all of the children are present.
And yet there is still story to be told primarily now between Jacob and his family
and Laban for a short season.
Well, yeah, we’re certainly glad that you join us for this conversation.
Hope that you are blessed.
We definitely want to remind you that we’re going to be on a one-week hiatus next week.
So we’re glad that you were with us today.
We will be back following next week right back in where we left off today.
So that gives you a little bit of time to catch up if you’re behind.
But we hope you have a great week next week and we’ll see you all really soon.
Thanks, everybody.