The saga continues.
Our hero, Jacob (Hebrew - heel or deceiver) the birthright stealer, has left town for fear his brother will make real his threat to kill him.
He heads back to his grandfather's and mother's family homestead - Haran where his uncle Laban resides.
Along the way, he camps out at Bethel. Using a rock for a pillow, he has a dream of a ladder extending to heaven, with God at the top. God reiterates the promise made to Jacob's grandfather and father - "You're gonna have a big family, I'm giving you this land, I will protect you, the world will be blessed through you."
This gets us to Chapter 29 - another chapter of drama. Be sure to read it.
Jacob falls in love with Rachel - Laban's daughter - his cousin (don't ask).
He agrees to work for Laban for seven years in order to marry her
"But his love for her was so strong that it seemed to him but a few days."
That's TRUE LOVE!
On the wedding day (actually night), his wonderfully trustworthy uncle pulls a bait and switch and subs in his older daughter Leah on the wedding bed (no wedding ceremony - the two become one when they consummate their marriage). Now Leah, well she wasn't the cute one - she had no "sparkle in her eye."
So surprise, surprise the next morning. Seven years and no Rachel.
Deceiver Jacob is incensed. Laban blames it on custom - have to marry the older daughter first. "Wait a week, and then you can marry Rachel, but you'll need to work another seven years."
Jacob's in love, what's another seven years? A week later Jacob has another wife and these ominous words . . .
"He (Jacob) loved her (Rachel) much more than Leah."
How do you think this house is gonna function - only in love with one of his two wives.?
And so begins the children "arms" race. The "multitude promise" begins in earnest. God blesses unloved Leah with four boys - Rueben, Simeon, Levi, Judah. But loved Rachel remains childless.
(So (and this is dicey), even though Jacob doesn't love Leah, he has no trouble being physically intimate with her?)
This (actually these) chapter(s) is good place to reflect on the difference between universal truth and local-cultural custom and truth. In so many ways the world that we are reading about here is foreign to us.
Deceit rewarded. Polygamy normative. Marrying cousins. Working to pay for your wife - she's property.
We have to be careful. Certain sects of Mormons use texts like these to endorse modern polygamy. Slave owners in the 1800s used passages in the Bible to endorse their ownership of slaves. Could we use the call (by God?) to wipe-out the Canaanites to endorse genocide? or war? Should we feel free to use deceit like Laban and Jacob to get what we want? Of course not!
Intuitively, and with the help of the Holy Spirit, we end up in a different place and cannot justify this thinking. I suggest that much of what we learn about our ourselves before the fall informs our ethic and ultimately, the revelation of Jesus Christ changes everything. In the OT, it isn't hard to see that as God is seen in greater ways, the ethic changes and finds its fulfillment in Christ.
I know this is a very short answer to a very complicated issue. But I would suggest that each OT (and NT) text needs to be interpreted in the light of what we know about Jesus Christ. The Bible is rooted in history. Cultural ethics are woven into its pages. It will take a community to drill down below the cultural stuff to get to the universal truths that informs what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.
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