In the Morning, Behold, it was Leah!

July 26 sermon by Jamie Howison on  Genesis 29:15-28

Our reading from Genesis tonight begins as follows: “Then Laban said to Jacob, ‘Because you are my kinsman, should you therefore serve me for nothing? Tell me, what shall your wages be?’” Let me bring you up on what has happened since last week’s episode in which Jacob—fleeing from his brother Esau—had his dream of a ladder and angels, and heard the word that promised God would be with him through thick and thin. And frankly, fleeing for his life from his enraged brother made for rather thin times!

His journey has taken him to Haran, to the homeland of his mother Rebekah. He has arrived at a well, where he encounters shepherds watering their sheep, and he asks if they happen to know Laban, his uncle. Oh yes, we do know him well, and look, here comes his daughter Rachel to water Laban’s flock.

At this point Jacob leaps into action, rolling the stone from the mouth of the well and watering the flock that Rachel is tending. And then, in the words of the text, “Jacob kissed Rachel, and wept aloud. And Jacob told Rachel that he was her father’s kinsman, and that he was Rebekah’s son; and she ran and told her father.”

Pause for a minute. Apparently Jacob was quite smitten, and I hope that Rachel was too, as his kiss and tears precede his introduction of himself as being her kin. Different world, remember…

Well, when Laban hears that his nephew has arrived at the well, he races out to greet him, much as years before he had raced out to greet the servant who’d been sent to that territory to find a wife for Jacob’s father Isaac. In that case, though, the servant had come with fine jewelry and a retinue of camels, which was probably what had most caught Laban’s eye! Here now, Jacob is alone and traveling light… but he is welcomed, and he stays and works for Laban for a month, apparently biding his time before again trying to kiss Rachel.

That’s where we pick up in today’s reading. “Laban said to Jacob, ‘Because you are my kinsman, should you therefore serve me for nothing? Tell me, what shall your wages be?’” Well, the text says, “Laban had two daughters; the name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah’s eyes were lovely—older translations say that her eyes were “dim”, but “lovely” is a better translation—and Rachel was graceful and beautiful. Jacob loved Rachel…”

And on account of this love, Jacob vows to work seven years for Laban in return for Rachel’s hand in marriage. Seven years, which suggests he’s in no hurry to go back home and risk the wrath of his brother Esau, who he has cheated and conned. Good deal, Laban effectively says, let’s have a drink to seal the agreement. Notice that Rachel’s voice is absent here; unlike her mother Rebekah, she’s not even asked if she’s open to such an arrangement.

“So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for he,” which is an eloquent and romantic expression of the heart… but again, one hopes Rachel was feeling at least something of the same.

And so the time comes, the wedding feast is set in motion, Jacob is in full celebratory—and amorous—gear, but what do you know? At the final hour Laban replaces Rachel with Leah in the wedding tent; something Jacob doesn’t even clue into until the morning. Here Kathryn Schifferdecker wryly comments, “Jacob's shock is evident in the text: ‘In the morning, behold, it was Leah!’ One could mentally substitute an expletive here for ‘behold’ to get the full effect of the Hebrew text.” The narrative is almost startlingly compact. How could Jacob not realize what Laban had done? Schifferdecker’s comment is that, “The man who deceived his blind father [Isaac] is himself deceived while blinded by night, or by too much celebrating.” I’ll get back to the question of deception and blindness, but let me first focus on that idea of “too much celebrating”. As I did two weeks ago, I want to read to you from Frederick Buechner’s brilliant and earthy novel, Son of Laughter, as it might just clue you in to how Jacob could have fallen for Laban’s plot. Here Buechner adopts the voice of Jacob:

I have long since forgotten the seven years, but the wedding at the end of the seventh I cannot forget. For two days the men feasted. Down to the lowliest water-carrier, Laban left no man out. The dung-gatherers were there, the plough-makers, the brick-makers, the winnowers who with their forks tossed grain and chaff into the sky for the wind to sift them, the shepherds and the goatherds, the one-legged man Laban sent into the city for bartering because he thought the merchant might be less liable to cheat anyone so pitiable.

All manner of races and dances and hand-clapping there were, the whining and mooning of pipes and windy rams’ horns, the slap of goatskin drums, the dithering of baked-clay rattles filled with pebbles. There were fires of brush piled sky-high to shatter the night into flickering shards. Beer and date-wine poured heavy as winter rain. Whole oxen were turned on spits. Wheat loaves overflowed panniers. Ash cakes kneaded with olive oil jostled honey cakes dusted with cinnamon. Laban was everywhere at once—hugging and punching, beer-breathed, sweat-stained. One night he did a high-stepping, thigh-slapping dance next to naked in front of one of the fires with his dugs heaving while overhead the god Sin hid half his pitted face for shame or envy.

When the time came, it was Laban who fetched the bride from his house where she had been waiting with the women. He led the procession. He had ropes of flowers around his neck. He waved his arms from side to side and swung his hips. He shouted greetings. The night was starless. There were torch-bearers. The pipes wailed in a high-pitched frenzy. The women, who had kept out of sight all during the men’s feasting, were so relieved at being allowed to come out at last that many of them spun like tops as they moved. Some of them had tambourines. Children and stray goats ran along beside them.

I waited in the dark bridal tent alone. I was naked except for a shift.

I was half blind with desire as well as with wine. Like one of the torches, my flesh was on fire. When they brought her in to me, all night I burned like a flame with the bride whom my eyes could not see through the darkness.

Early next morning I searched out Laban…

No kidding he searched out Laban! How could you do this to me? Seven years I worked! For Rachel’s hand, not Leah’s!

The deceiver who tricked his blind father into giving him the older twin’s blessing has now been caught up, deceived by an uncle who is even more of a wheeler dealer than he is. But there’s more. Again from Kathryn Schifferdecker:

The sense of poetic justice goes farther than saying the deceiver was deceived. Jacob had broken the law of the firstborn when he tricked his brother Esau out of his birthright and his blessing. Now, Jacob is caught by another “law of the firstborn.” Laban explains that the younger daughter cannot be married off before the firstborn daughter. The trickster is tricked, and the punishment fits the crime.

Laban moves quickly to offer another deal: promise me an additional seven years of work, then wait just a week and we’ll have another wedding, this time to Rachel. Again, in that very different world this all seems to make sense to Jacob, and so with a sigh he agrees. He will marry this woman over whom he has been so smitten with love, but as the story rolls forward it will still be marked with complexities, and most specifically a deep-seated rivalry between the two sisters, now Jacob’s two wives.

Well, there is one very basic insight right off the top. While God had promised to be with Jacob through thick and thin, God had not promised to save him from having to face the consequences of his own sorry decisions and bad actions. Yes, he is accompanied, loved, forgiven by God, yet there are still very real consequences to the way he had been living. That’s a truth that still stands.

But more, as Schifferdecker puts it,

[I]t seems that God is working with this flawed man to re-make him. Jacob, after stealing Esau's blessing, is caught in a net of his own making. The deceiver is deceived, and the one who broke the law of the firstborn is caught by another version of it. Jacob lives in exile from his homeland, and has to work for fourteen years without wages for love of Rachel. All these experiences will help to re-make the shallow young man we first met in Genesis 25 into the father of the nation Israel.

God, it would seem, is able to use all manner of people—in all their choices, sins, shallowness, manipulations, and failings—to still bring about God’s work. That can take a long, slow road, with lots of stumbling along the way. But if God can remake even Jacob—wrestle him to the ground and rename him “Israel”, “God contends,” or “God wrestles”—then God can work with, remake, and call out and call forward anyone… you, me, anyone. It a bit of great, good news tucked in an ancient story.