Confessions of a Shiftless Mind

A bit of a snowball led me back to a subject I ran across a few months ago when working my way through Genesis again.

I wrote a piece about how people today demand rights to self-abuse so much that in our time it is becoming wrong to care for people - to care for them is equated with judgement, while to not care is equated with “support” for their lifestyle choice. A troll came along and spouted off about polygamy in the Bible, and good old Mark, he pulled a treatise on Biblical polygamy out of his hat.

I read through it, and there was a pile of theology I disagreed with. But it did remind me of something I ran across about Jacob and the mistakes he made, and how, at the end of his life, I believe he repented over.

Mockers of Christianity and Judaism’s stance against polygamy like to point to people like Jacob as cases of “the faithful” who were polygamists. They love to completely overlook the sections of the Bible that clearly teach that this is wrong, and ignore the reality that much of the Bible is an historical narrative, and thus describes the good and bad behaviour of its subject. History is meant as a cautionary tale, not as a prescriptive.

But beyond that, the Jacob story is very interesting. You all are probably familiar with how Jacob met his cousin Rachel, thought she was hot, and committed to work for her father for 7 years to earn the right to marry her. He did so, then his father-in-law snookered him by slipping her older sister, Leah into the sack (consummation was the marriage ceremony in those days apparently). He then promised to give Jacob Rachel for another 7 years of work. Jacob worked, and earned Rachel, despite being already married to Leah.

Yeah, it was wrong for Laban to break his word to Jacob. However, by the custom of the time, Jacob had his wife: Leah. His job was to love her, and he clearly did not. However, he did his “husbandly duty” with her, getting 5 children ultimately from Leah. All the way through the story of his life, we see this family paying a price for Jacob’s favoritism - from competition and betrayal between brothers to bitterness between the sisters over their husband who clearly favoured Rachel over Leah. This was not a happy home with 3 in a marriage.

What I found significant though is the end of the story. When Rachel died in childbirth with Benjamin, she was buried by the road (Gen 35:19). Sounds pretty ignominous for the favoured wife.

When Leah died, the unloved wife, she was buried in the tomb of Jacob’s father and grandfather, with Abraham and Sarah, with Isaac and Rebekah. She was given the place of his primary wife. She was given the resting place of honour. As his dying wish (Gen. 45:31), he asked his sons to bury him with her.

I think there is a message of repentance in that. I don’t think we can say that it was about when they died - that there wasn’t time to put Rachel into his family’s tomb, and they weren’t about to dig her up many years later. However, if we look at the surrounding chapters, we can clearly see that for the important people, there were methods of body preservation at their disposal that would enable transportation, and they would travel many miles to ensure that the honoured dead were buried correctly. This was true for Leah and for Jacob. It was not true for Rachel. I think we can draw some conclusions from that. Jacob sought to honour God’s command of one wife, like his father and grandfather did. He let his lust for Rachel drive him past the wife that God provided for him, and fell in with the ungodly polygamist ways of his Uncle, Laban.

One last note though. The article above suggests that the strife in Jacob’s household was God’s punishment for his sin. I disagree with this theologically. God is not vindictive like this - it is clear from the lessons of Job that we cannot assume that bad things happen to us because of sin. I believe that Jacob’s trouble was the result of the natural consequences of living out of sync with God’s order. There is a world of difference in that.