Wrestlemania and the Baby Off

Genesis 29-33: Let’s just finish the Jacob story in one post, even if it will be the longest one in a while. It’s just bumming me out that I’m not Tim Keller. Seriously. His Jacob sermon series. Listen to the whole thing if you haven’t already. I’m going to rush the rest of this because my lack of Tim Kellerness is making me not want to blog at all. I want to get to Joseph, if only for the musical theater references.

Jacob arrives at his destination and sees Rachel, Laban’s daughter, before any of his other kin. Interestingly, she’s a shepherd. You mostly see male shepherds in the Bible. It’s love at first sight. Jacob shows off how strong he is to Rachel by rolling the stone from the well’s mouth, right after he sends all the shepherd boys on an errand to get her alone. Jacob kisses her and starts crying. Jacob stays with Laban for a month before Laban offers Jacob a job as a hired laborer. Jacob says he will work for seven years for Rachel. Seven years was more than the usual dowry offer, so Laban saw that Jacob was desperate and could be taken advantage of. 

Jacob didn’t want her older sister, Leah, because there was something unattractive about Leah’s eyes. Maybe they stuck out too far or she was cross-eyed. Leah seems to be in love with Jacob in this whole story. Laban gives a non-committal answer and Jacob hears a “yes.” The seven years Jacob served seemed like only a few days to him because of his love for Rachel. Then Jacob said to Laban, “Give me my wife. My time is completed, and I want to make love to her.” Tim Keller points out that this is a crude way to put it for the time. Jacob’s patience is at an end.

After his wedding, Jacob awoke the next morning to find out that Laban tricked him and he had married Leah. Let that be a lesson to you guys: always take a flashlight/candle to bed when you sleep with someone, and raise that veil during the wedding ceremony. This is karma because Jacob similarly tricked Isaac. God is correcting Jacob. Don’t worry. Laban reaps what he sows as well. Jacob has to work another seven years to get both women, and once he did, “his love for Rachel was greater than his love for Leah.” God saw that Leah was not loved, so he closed Rachel’s womb, but made Leah pregnant.

Leah gave birth to three sons, named them, and spoke words of yearning for Jacob after the birth of each boy, naming them according to her wish that her husband would love her too. When the fourth, Judah, was born, she said, “This time I will praise the Lord.” Judah is the child from which Jesus’s line came. Jacob can still have sex with Leah, though his heart remains far from her. This is not a foreign experience for lots of modern women. One of Leah’s sons was also the root of the line of Jewish priests. Those came from Levi.

The grass is always greener on the other side. Even though Rachel is loved and beautiful, unless she can achieve the success as measured by her culture, she feels she will die. Rachel has Jacob sleep with her servant, Bilhah, to bear a child so that Rachel could build a family through the servant. Bilhah bore two sons. Rachel says, “Bilhah will bear a child on my knees.” This means that Jacob will impregnate Bilhah while Bilhah lies on Rachel’s lap, making the offspring Rachel’s legal child.

Once again, I reflect on how interesting it would be to practice law if these kinds of laws were still the norm. Ancient law seems to be done with actions, rituals, cutting animals in half, and other things that make contracts. They didn’t just write stuff down or shake hands. To emphasize the legal aspect of this situation, when Dan (meaning “judgment”) is born, Rachel says, “God has judged my case; and He has also heard my voice and given me a son.”

Rachel’s next baby is named “wrestle.” Guys, we have a Baby Off. It’s a baby competition between the sisters, and it’s not even a semi-secret one. Rachel said, “I have had a great struggle with my sister and I have won.” Nice sibling relationship there. They have no sibling code. The competition brings Leah from the place of worshipping God right back to the place of envy and discontent.  Leah did the same thing with her servant, Zilpah, and Zilpah had two boys as well.

Later, Rachel wants some mandrakes (mandrakes were supposed to increase fertility), so she trades a night with Jacob in exchange for them, and Leah gets pregnant. What, was he on some full booty embargo (no sex unless both wives agree)? Did their sibling code forbid him from having sex with his wives? Rachel thinks Leah stole Jacob from her. Was Rachel not fully in on the plan to swap? Did she run to stop Jacob from marrying Leah? Did she tell him about the trick? Did she try to? Did they guard Rachel in the tent? Leah had yet another son after that and a daughter named Dinah. God then remembered Rachel and gave her Joseph. Joseph means “may he add.” Rachel has had her first biological son, but she wants to keep the contest going.

Rachel said, “God has taken away from me my disgrace.” Lots of Christians worship traditional values, but you can see that when they are elevated beyond their purpose, they distort lives and become people’s reason to be proud of their lives. Ugh. We don’t see in excruciating detail the hurt, bitterness, jealousy, anger, and competition of this family, but we get more than we usually get from Biblical accounts. Just imagine living in that family. You think you have a rivalry? You think your family treats you unfairly? Get a load of this one. Remember that children are growing up in this house. The boys’ futures reflect this strife-filled past. Thank God Leviticus banned the polygamous marriage of two sisters in the future.

Jacob thinks it might be time to go home. Laban practiced non-Jewish divination and found out by this process that God has been blessing Laban for Jacob’s sake. Laban wants Jacob, so Jacob agrees to stay in exchange for all the spotted and speckled goats. The methods Jacob used with his flock, along with God’s blessing, netted Jacob more animals. Laban’s sons start to see Jacob as a thief because they feel like they deserve to be the wealthy ones, not Jacob. Laban starts to believe he got the short end of the stick too, even though the original deal favored Laban. Jacob’s wives, to their credit, see their father for who he is and have cleaved to Jacob.

God tells Jacob to go home. The sisters unite and support the move. They don’t warn Laban that they are taking off. They all just leave, even though God promised Jacob that he would be with him and his safety was divinely guaranteed. This showed fear. Rachel got some back-up gods by stealing her father’s household idols. Her motives are unclear. Maybe she believed in them or maybe she wanted to keep Laban from using them (as a last parting gift of concern for her father). Maybe she did it out of fear that her father would succeed in catching them if he had the strength of his gods.

Laban came after them and caught them in seven days. But God came to Laban in a dream and said, “Be careful that you speak to Jacob neither good nor bad.” God doesn’t’ want Laban affecting Jacob in any way. He’s protecting Jacob. At the end of their wordy confrontation, they make a deal to stay on their own sides of the country. Their relationship has broken down in such a way that they realize it’s best to just stay away from each other. Sometimes you have to just kiss the in-laws goodbye.

Angels had been with Jacob on his journey, and God lets him see them on his way to meet Esau. This is nice, but it doesn’t do that much to diminish Jacob’s fear. This confrontation will be different. With Laban, Jacob was in the right. With Esau, Jacob is the new Laban. Would God let Jacob win a battle with Esau? Jacob takes measures to mitigate Esau’s anger, and fortunately those include a prayer to God.  God waits until Jacob is alone and then attacks him…literally and physically. God likes wrestling with us. He doesn’t like robots.

God has to beat the crap out of Jacob in order to conquer him and send the message, “No, I’m God, not you. I love you and I’ve got this. You’re fighting to know me and have the blessing I made you for. I’m going to give it to you, but you can’t walk away from an encounter with me unscathed.” It reminds me of the final battle in Warrior where the older brother in the movie has to beat some sense into his younger brother. Sometimes fights are conversations.

A Man attacks Jacob and wrestles with him until daybreak. Jacob is winning, so the man touches the socket of Jacob’s hip, dislocating it. The man said, “Let me go,” but Jacob refused to do so until the man blessed him. The man renamed Jacob “Israel” because he “struggled with God and with humans and overcame.” Jacob’s old name meant “trickster,” but God decided that part of his life should be over. Israel is two words put together. They are Sarah and El. Sarah means “struggle” or “rule” and El means “God.” Jacob asked the man’s name. The man replied, “Why do you ask my name.” Maybe the Man didn’t tell Jacob his name because Jacob already knew who it was. Then he blessed him there. The words of the blessing are, unfortunately, unrecorded.

Tim Keller has this to say about this story: “Jacob recognized who he was wrestling with—God himself. When he realized this, and saw the sun coming up, Jacob did the most astonishing thing he had ever done. He did not do the rational thing, which would have been to cry out, “Let me go! Let me go! I don’t want to die!” Instead he did the very opposite. He held on tight, and said, “I will not let you go until you bless me!” Jacob was saying something like this. What an idiot I’ve been! Here is what I’ve been looking for all my life. The blessing of God! I looked for it in the approval of my father. I looked for it in the beauty of Rachel. But it was in you. Now I won’t let you go until you bless me. Nothing else matters. I don’t care if I die in the process, because if I don’t have God’s blessing, I’ve got nothing. Nothing else will do. Jacob called the place Peniel because he “saw God face to face, and yet [his] life was spared.” Peniel means “face of God.”

Esau met Jacob with 400 men. After facing God, Jacob leads the procession to Esau. Facing a really scary, big fish makes the lesser (yet still big) fish easier to face. That’s one of the scariest things to learn through experience, but it’s one of the most useful hard lessons in life. Jacob puts the maidservants and their children in front with him. Leah and her sons get the medium amount of protection. Rachel is placed in the position of the most protection. 

Instead of trying to kill him, Esau ran to Jacob, hugged him, and kissed him. Jacob gave Esau gifts, called himself Esau’s servant, and his people bowed to Esau. Esau only accepted the gifts because Jacob insisted. I love this happy ending. I love when siblings love each other.  Jacob doesn’t go all the way to Bethel, where God wanted him. He stops short of that area, still a little afraid of Esau and not wanting to encroach on his territory. Jacob bought a plot of land, pitched his tent, set up an altar and called it El Elohe Israel, meaning "God of Israel."