Journeys Through the Word
“Wasn’t it enough that you stole my husband?”
Verse(s) considered:
Genesis 30:14-24
(14) One day during the wheat harvest, Reuben found some mandrakes growing in a field and brought them to his mother, Leah. Rachel begged Leah, “Please give me some of your son’s mandrakes.”
(15) But Leah angrily replied, “Wasn’t it enough that you stole my husband? Now will you steal my son’s mandrakes, too?” Rachel answered, “I will let Jacob sleep with you tonight if you give me some of the mandrakes.”
(16) So that evening, as Jacob was coming home from the fields, Leah went out to meet him. “You must come and sleep with me tonight!” she said. “I have paid for you with some mandrakes that my son found.” So that night he slept with Leah.
(17) And God answered Leah’s prayers. She became pregnant again and gave birth to a fifth son for Jacob.
(18) She named him Issachar, for she said, “God has rewarded me for giving my servant to my husband as a wife.”
(19) Then Leah became pregnant again and gave birth to a sixth son for Jacob.
(20) She named him Zebulun, for she said, “God has given me a good reward. Now my husband will treat me with respect, for I have given him six sons.”
(21) Later she gave birth to a daughter and named her Dinah.
(22) Then God remembered Rachel’s plight and answered her prayers by enabling her to have children.
(23) She became pregnant and gave birth to a son. “God has removed my disgrace,” she said.
(24) And she named him Joseph, for she said, “May the LORD add yet another son to my family.”
Thoughts along the road:
In spite of what God was accomplishing through this sibling rivalry, the relationship between the two sisters was poisonous and affected every aspect of their everyday lives. In what seems like an innocent request from Rachel, Leah drips with anger and venom. But part of the blame has to reside with Jacob for allowing the situation between the two sisters to continue to this point. At no time does he seem to try to get to reconcile their differences. Sure, we can blame all of this on the girl’s father Laban. He is the one that set it up. He forced Leah on Jacob as a wife when he had worked seven years for her younger, prettier sister. What he did meant that she was going to have to live with that sense of inferiority for the rest of her life. But it also appears that Jacob did little to nothing to remedy the situation. That is a terribly sad state of affairs.
Where to go from here:
When we are faced with situations that are difficult or just plain impossible that we did nothing to create, how do we deal with them? Do we work at some sort of reconciliation or just try to avoid the unpleasantness?
Another question to ask is just how much responsibility do we bear for situations that we are party to even as an innocent bystander? Let me answer that with a quotation from the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5:9 Jesus says, “God blesses those who work for peace, for they will be called the children of God.” Another good thought on the subject comes from 2 Corinthians 5:18 where, in the King James, it says that we are “called to a ministry of reconciliation” and, in the New Living, it says that “And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him.”
Bringing people together and helping them to reconcile their differences may seem like an odd job for people of faith, but in doing that, we imitate Christ. It also seems that the Bible is telling us that the best way to get people to reconcile with each other is to get them to reconcile with God first. That would then provide them with the common ground necessary to reconcile with each other. It’s sort of a first things first kind of idea.
It does not appear that Jacob attempted any sort of reconciliation. He just maintained his favoritism with Rachel as his favorite wife. In some ways, it is terribly sad that it turned out that way, In another way, God continued to use even that awful attitude of favoritism to make Joseph, the child mentioned last in today’s selection as the instrument of Israel’s deliverance. God makes something good come out of something awful again and again and again in the Bible and in our lives today. He is faithful, just you wait and see.
Journeys Through The Word 