Deception

Why then have you deceived me?

 - From Genesis 29

I've always felt like Bible teachers, and preachers, fall way short of expounding sufficiently on what just happened to Jacob.

"God's plan was greater than Jacob's."

"Wow Jacob really got what he deserved, hehe!"

"Deception was part of the culture."

No one seems to stop to realize what an awful experience this had to have been for Jacob. There might have been weeks, months even, of bitter anger between Jacob and the entire family of Laban! And what about Leah! How do you think she felt as all this was going on? And of course, there's Rachel! 

Was Jacob's love for Rachel reciprocated? I'm not sure we know. What if they were two young, passionate lovers, in the throes of hormonal surges . . . and all they can think about is when they can finally marry. By the time they finally do . . . Jacob is like 35, and Rachel, probably early 30s, and for their times, they are way past that phase of being head-over-heels in love.

We can assume with confidence, that they . . . yes . . . saved themselves for all of seven years. But for Rachel, it ended up being fourteen years total. She had to sit by as her sister Leah started having kids, and as Jacob began to kinda like Leah and their family.

What about Rachel's goals? What about her independence? Why didn't she stand up to her Dad? (Oh really, because she could have gotten herself executed? So this is the culture we're lifting up as an example?!")

I simply don't think we give stories like this the appropriate treatment. 

So I say, take it on face value. Let the account be exactly as it says, and let our imaginations fill in the blanks . . . for chances are, since the players in the narrative are human, as we are, they reacted pretty much as we would. 

The Promise to Adam, to Noah, and to Abraham, is going to come true. And it's going to be messy. There is going to be a lot of family drama. There will be a lot of bad people, and a lot of good people doing bad things. And it's really not appropriate to make trite little ironic jokes about it; if we do that I think we still don't really get it. 

Jacob was treated horribly, horribly, by his father-in-law. Without benefit of cell phones, or any phones, his father Isaac had to sit back and grow old for fourteen years, as his estranged son, the one hated by Esau, Isaac's other son, ventured off into a distant country . . . barely heard from, if ever. 

There are layers, and layers of tragedy in the narrative. And yet . . . one of Jacob's sons, Judah . . . would come out of all of this. And his mother was . . . Leah. So yes . . . there is an element of God taking control here. We needed Leah to have the son, Judah . . . out of which would come the messianic line. There's something about Leah, that we can speculate about today; but that may be one of the first things we go ask about, in eternity.