Genesis 31:22-42

Well hey everybody, welcome back.
We are jumping in Genesis chapter 31 verse 22.
We are continuing the story from yesterday,
so if you missed yesterday’s story it may be worth
pausing this here and jumping back to the conversation that started at the very beginning
of Genesis chapter 31.
But now we have the sneaking off in the night and now we get a
chance to see what is Laban going to do about it.
Yeah, so just a quick recap.
Jacob and Laban have
had some tension between them.
Jacob yesterday decides it’s really time for me to leave and he
packs up and without telling Laban takes all of Jacob’s possessions,
including Laban’s daughters and grandkids and all of that and they begin to leave.
Well not begin, they leave.
So we pick up
the story today of what happens when Laban finds out and the,
I don’t know if we call it conflict,
certainly the altercation or the discussion that happens after.
So verse 22 here,
“On the third day Laban was told Jacob fled.
He took his kinfolk with him and pursued him for seven days until he
caught up with him in the hill country of Gilead.
But God came to Laban the Aramean in a dream at
night and said to him,
‘Take heed that you say not a word to Jacob either good or bad.’
Laban overtook Jacob.
Now Jacob had pitched his tent in the hill country and Laban with his kinfolk camped in the
hill country of Gilead.
Laban said to Jacob,
‘What have you done?
You deceived me, carried away my daughters like captives of the sword.
Why did you secretly deceive me and not tell me?
I would have sent you away with much,
with mirth and songs and tambourine and lyre.
And why did you not permit me
to kiss my sons and my daughters farewell?
What you have done is foolish.
It is in my power to do you harm.
But the God of your father spoke to me last night saying,
‘Take heed that you speak to Jacob
neither good or bad.
Even though you had to go because you longed greatly for your father’s house,
why did you steal my gods?’
Jacob answered Laban,
‘Because I was afraid,
for I thought that
you would take your daughters from me by force.
But anyone
with whom you find your gods shall not
live.
In the presence of our kinsfolk,
point out what I have that is yours and take it.’ Now Jacob
did not know that Rachel had stolen the gods.” So we had a little bit of a conversation about this yesterday,
the household relics,
the articles of some sort.
Here we have Laban catching up.
And there is a sort of forcefulness to this.
He pursues him, that language of pursuing him until
he caught up.
He takes others with him.
God has warned him though.
Essentially, do not say, it’s
probably a more,
it’s probably more accurate something like do not do him harm
because he does say words to him.
He does speak to him.
And he says, ‘What you’ve done is foolish.’ Jacob again says,
‘Well, I was afraid.
I thought you would take your daughters.
I thought you would
do something.’ You know,
Jacob is that guy who kind of always has an explanation for what he does.
And but there is an interesting phrase here.
We see it two times where God says,
‘Take heed that you speak to Jacob neither good or bad.’ And so in the front part of the Jacob
story, remember we had this idea of blessing and curse.
And here we have this idea of being in the
middle of those neutral.
And so Jacob is walking between those things and walking between that tension with Laban.
And then the kind of subplot in this story, the kind of
excitement or question mark at the end is Laban says,
‘Well, why did you take my stuff?’ And Jacob says,
‘I didn’t take your
stuff.
And if you find it with anybody,
that person will be put to death.’ And he doesn’t know
that in fact, his beloved wife, Rachel,
is the one who has done that.
So
it sets up a kind of
drama here late in the story.
In the Old Testament,
this actually gets used a few times where a
character will say, you know, test me, try me.
The one who you find will be the one who gets put to
death.
And almost inevitably in those circumstances,
it’s the most beloved person.
So in some ways,
this is not unique to the Old Testament.
But in other ways,
it is unique to Genesis.
I mean, we saw with Isaac,
certainly, Abraham’s willingness to give up his son.
And we talked about
the complicated nature of that.
But that was with the full awareness of what he was doing here.
We have Jacob being tricky,
essentially, you know,
saying,
because out of his honest reality,
he doesn’t know of anyone who stole anything.
So to make his case,
he makes this very flamboyant gesture.
And of course, we know because the text has already told us that Rachel was the one who took them.
So we are set up from the beginning to know the kind of situation that’s being created
here.
And the Old Testament scriptures were written in such a way to make that clear,
right?
We’re supposed to have this foreknowledge.
And because we have it,
the situation gets very tense
very quickly.
That said,
you know, we’re watching as it happens.
And it’s interesting where Laban goes.
First,
it’s to Jacob’s tent.
Then it’s to Leah’s tent.
Then we see the maidservant’s tent.
So we have this idea.
And you can almost imagine that really complicated family relationship when
your dad comes in your tent looking for things.
And you know, they’re not there.
And he goes in
to the maidservant’s tents and even into Jacob’s tent.
You know,
this is a moment which is full of
some really difficult tension because he even says that it’s within his power.
This is verse 29.
It is in my power to do you harm.
But then Laban goes on to say,
you know,
essentially, the reason I wouldn’t even consider that is because your God spoke to me.
Now,
hear that tension there, though, right?
Whose God spoke?
Well,
Jacob’s God.
But whose gods?
And we see that in the lower case G here.
Whose gods did Rachel steal?
Well, Laban’s gods.
It wasn’t his gods that told him what he should or shouldn’t do here.
We’re explicitly told Jacob’s gods.
So we both have this tension,
which we’ve talked at some length about,
but we also have
the reality of some gods being set against one another here.
We have the one stolen versus the
one actually talking to Laban,
the very same one who’s blessed Jacob.
And you know,
that tension
throughout the Old Testament also exists where God always best the little G gods of whoever we’re talking about.
Yeah.
And so the story continues.
We’ll just kind of talk through this part of it.
Laban is looking all over the camp.
He finally goes to where Rachel is.
It says Rachel had taken
the gods and put them in the camel saddle and she sat on them.
And so he comes into the tent
and he’s looking around and she doesn’t get up.
It doesn’t say whether he asks her to or not,
but she says,
“Let my Lord not be angry.
I cannot rise before you,
for the way of women is upon me.”
And so she claims,
and we are sort of led to assume deceitfully that her monthly cycle
is happening and that she can’t
get up, that she’s either bleeding or uncomfortable.
And you know,
this is,
Laban takes this as fact and doesn’t find them.
So that part of the story ends.
So he searched,
but did not find the household gods.
And here again, we have some
recycling of themes that we’ve seen.
A child
deceiving a
father.
In fact, specifically a youngest child
deceiving a father.
We saw that in Jacob’s story.
We see it here with Rachel.
It would be hard to argue that she doesn’t tell him a lie.
I guess we could
speculate whether…
I think the text clearly seems to indicate that she is getting away with something and that she’s
probably deceiving her father.
And there’s,
like we’ve said in parts of Genesis,
interestingly enough,
there’s no value judgment given on that here.
The text
doesn’t seem to care about it at
all.
It’s just telling us
what happened.
And then we get to the moment where there’s a kind of,
it boils over between Jacob
and Laban.
So verse 36 here,
“Jacob became angry and he upbraided Laban.
Jacob said to him,
‘What’s my offense?
What’s my sin that you have hotly pursued me?
Although you have felt
about through all my goods,
what have you found of your goods?
Set it here before my kinsfolk and your kinsfolk that they may decide between us.
These 20 years I’ve been with you,
your ewes and female goats have not miscarried,
and I’ve not eaten the rams of your flock.
That which was torn by wild beasts I didn’t bring to you.
I bore the loss myself in my hand.
You required it, whether stolen by day or stolen by night.
It was like this with me by day.
The heat consumed me in the cold of night when sleep fled
from my eyes.
20 years I’ve been in your house.
Served you 14 for your two daughters and six years for your flock.
And you have changed my way just 10 times.
If the God of my father,
the God of Abraham,
and the fear of Isaac had not been on my side,
surely now you would have sent me away empty-handed.
God saw my affliction and the labor of my hands and rebuked you last night.'” So again,
very interesting that Jacob here really for the first time speaks theologically about
the situation between them.
And to hear Jacob tell it,
and this isn’t surprising given that character,
though it may be close to true in this instance.
He is the one who has acted with integrity.
He has
borne the losses, not passing them on to his father-in-law.
He’s worked diligently.
He’s done all of that.
And Laban has tried to take advantage of him,
and he explicitly says here at the end,
“If it hadn’t been for God,
you would have gotten the advantage over me,
and I would be with nothing.
But God has delivered me and blessed me and helped me persevere through these challenges.”
Clint, isn’t it interesting here?
On the losing side,
much like his brother was in his previous home,
Jacob now suddenly has a far more well-rounded view of the situation.
In other words, you know, he points out, “Hey, I’ve tried my very best.
I’ve tried to be faithful,
and I couldn’t have possibly been able to do so except for the fact that God has been generous
and gracious to me.” Well,
you know, this is the fruit of one who chooses that kind of grasping
and wrestling is that you find yourself in situations where someone has more power or
privilege or the upper hand.
And here we see Jacob attributing to God the reality that despite all of Laban’s advantages,
here he continues to be successful.
He continues to be brought through.
And these are in some ways strong words when you figure that Laban’s gods are indeed in Jacob’s
household, right?
As he’s abrading his father-in-law,
in some ways embarrassing him in front of the entire family clan,
he’s doing so with the reality that the evidence is actually in the camp.
And so even though Jacob is unaware of it because of Rachel’s
trickery,
he is still caught in this
cycle that he’s been in.
You know, all of these family relationships,
a chapter and a half ago
we talked about, where even the wives are against wives,
it continues to be seen in situations like
this where now he’s in conflict with his father-in-law over facts he doesn’t even have all of.
And it’s interesting to see how,
whereas in other places in the Old Testament,
the mere possession of idols is punishable by death,
certainly in the judge’s narrative we have that here,
we don’t have that kind of moralistic reading of the idol here.
Rather we’re almost pointed away
from the things that they have, the actual things,
to the relationships
that are happening in the midst.
We see the wrestling between humans and that seems to be the emphasis of a text like
this, but I find it
purposely ironic that Laban is getting chewed out here by Jacob, really,
and the thing he’s getting chewed out for had Rachel just stood up would be completely
invalid because Laban was in the right.
Yeah,
I think from a sort of psychological perspective,
and this isn’t explicit in the text and we’ve told you that we will always try to tell you when we’re
jumping,
when family arguments go public and they become about who is right,
it is never a kind of healthy situation.
There’s tension here,
there’s hurt feelings here, there’s resentment here.
Jacob clearly feels that for 20 years he’s gotten the shaft
and in fact he may
in fact believe as he states that had it not been for God he would have nothing
and God has favored him.
As God has done throughout this story,
the Bible loves Jacob.
The narrative story of Genesis loves this character for all of his pros and cons,
for all of his good and bad.
The story of Israel is decidedly pro-Jacob as we’ll come to see and as we understand,
but here we have a
very public family squabble and these are painful moments.
This
is not easy for anybody and
albeit Jacob doesn’t know this,
once again in the story,
he is responsible for the removal of someone’s blessings,
the idea that these house gods
that Laban thinks they somehow contribute to his success.
Jacob has taken those from somebody.
Now, he didn’t do it,
Rachel did it, but as an extension of his household,
he now for the first time has
really taken something from Laban and the story seems to be perfectly okay with that.
I think you could go so far as to say maybe the story even celebrates it.
I was going to say Clint,
I’d be interested if you agree with this.
There’s a sense in which maybe as outsiders we come to a
text like this and we are made uncomfortable by the means by which Jacob pursues his ends,
but when you look at the text,
in many ways the means themselves are justified
by the end that we were told from the very beginning.
What I mean by that is the promise was made to Abraham.
We were told that Jacob received the blessing and when we heard that we were supposed to know
once the blessing was given,
it was given by the Almighty God.
There wasn’t any taking it away or
there wasn’t any negotiating out of it.
So Jacob here really by every means that he proceeds is
doing so under the auspice of the blessing of God and so therefore it will only go towards the end
of God’s continued provision and that is uncomfortable to people who are used to looking
at it from multiple perspectives,
but if you look at it from the perspective that Jacob is the
father of the 12 tribes of Israel,
then you realize that ultimately God’s blessing has to come through.
God’s blessing has to shine not because of Jacob’s action,
its moral impact or not,
but rather because of the fact that God has chosen to be faithful,
God has already said that,
then there’s no other way
than but for this to happen and that means that some people lose.
Laban who sets himself out
to try to get a buck off of his son-in-law,
if you want to read it really negatively,
he is going to fail.
In the end, his son-in-law will prosper and he will do so because God has
determined it and at the end of the day that’s all that the text cares about.
Yeah and what’s really
interesting is sometimes in scripture that’s a matter of who’s actually right and wrong.
Who does things
with integrity and who doesn’t,
who sins and who’s faithful.
In the Jacob story,
I’d argue that that’s less a product of those factors and more a product of he is the blessed
one.
He’s the chosen, he’s from the lineage of Abraham.
He is going to be the father of Israel.
His name is going to be changed to Israel and remember that this is a man who on his birth said
he’s the heel grabber,
he’s the supplanter, he’s the one who kind of replaces others,
takes from others and when you’re a people whose heritage is to scrap your way into life day after
day in a desert trying to keep others from taking your land and trying to make for yourselves a
conquest over and over and over again,
you can kind of see how to our modern years Jacob
is a hard guy to like but in their story,
in their context, you can sort of see how
this guy who is shrewd
and always seems to land on his feet ahead of others could be a celebrated character.
I think that’s a really helpful distinction
you just drew there Clint.
I think it’s easy in other scriptural narratives to see how we learn something about the
moral order that God has laid out,
that kind of legal understanding that we’re going to see especially with the giving
of the law but here we’re not concerned about that.
This isn’t a moral lesson,
this is rather an illustration of the
providence and blessing that God has provided and so Jacob is an essential
character because of who he is and who God has blessed him to be.
That is maybe not obvious so
I think it’s important that you say that.
That’s a very important distinction which will shift
especially once we move beyond Moses,
well you know if you read into Exodus,
that’s going to change as we have the giving of the law and then we have lots of questions about what being a person
of the law means but at this stage of the text that’s not the concern.
Yeah I would agree 100%
and I think it’s helpful to know that scripture does occasionally give us both and it helps to
know which one we may be encountering because when we look for something like morality in this text
it’s likely not going to be easy to find and we’re likely going to maybe miss what is there instead
so I think those are helpful words potentially.
If you can join us tomorrow,
a fantastic story.
I love this story and I especially love some of the ways it’s developed.
I don’t want to give it
away but there’s what I would call a huge irony in tomorrow’s narrative and I hope you can be with
us to talk about it.
All right well that’s the best we’re gonna be able to do.
Don’t miss the next one.