Day 9 -- Genesis 29-30

Human nature is a constant--it does not change. We recognize in these Bible stories the very same human needs and joys and fears we also experience.

But these ancient stories about the forefathers and foremothers of Israel do reveal that, although human nature does not change, family structures and cultural mores do.
Polygamy and concubinage, for instance, were practiced in Judaism throughout the Biblical period--although they had become markedly less common by the New Testament period.

There is much that is strange in these stories. The reference to mandrakes in 30:14-16 is an example. Mandrakes are roots highly prized by the ancients as aphrodisiacs, and therefore a valuable weapon in the "baby war" going on between Leah and Rachel. In that war, no holds are barred. Jacob's love is both the prize and also a means to be exploited in the power struggle between the two sisters.

A power struggle is going on between Jacob and Laban as well. Each men uses craftiness on the other. We would call it cheating. But deceit is simply a part of a game, the rules of which we do not always understand. They belong to a culture from which we are separated by a vast gulf of time.

But the point of these stories is very clear. The Lord is at work in all this human confusion, keeping his covenant with Abraham, which he renews with Isaac, and now with Jacob. God's favor is demonstrated in the fertility of Jacob's cattle as it is in the fertility of Jacob's wives.
Jacob is the chosen one. All that he touches is filled with life. As he says to Laban--"You yourself know how I have served you, and how your cattle have fared with me. For you had little before I came, and it has increased abundantly; and the Lord has blessed you wherever I turned" (30:29-30). There is a sort of magic in this man, because God is working through him.

And God is at work in our lives as well, working undercover--through both strange and very ordinary means. God's will at work in our lives does not exclude anguish, failure, and tension from marriages and families. But in looking backward at our lives, as the
the writer of Genesis looks backward upon the struggles and triumphs of Israel's first family, we can say--Aha! so that's what was going on. So, in the midst of all that confusion, that was what God was up to after all.