Two Weddings & a Betrayal - Genesis 29:15-30

Bible Study Lesson for March 17

At the beginning of this story, what started off as one big happy family quickly begins to show cracks. Jacob lived in Laban’s house a month. Apparently he was not idle, as Laban’s question to Jacob implies that the young man has been working to help his host. Laban asks Jacob what he wants, and Jacob tells him he will work for seven years to marry his youngest daughter Rachel. Remember, Jacob and Rachel met at the well in the last chapter, and it was apparently love at first sight.

Laban agrees to give his daughter as a wife for his nephew. Jacob serves the seven years and then brings up the agreement. It is at this point that Laban’s scheme is laid out for us. Because it is not the custom to marry the younger daughter before the older daughter, Laban substitutes Leah for Rachel at the wedding, and Jacob is none the wiser until morning, when the marriage has been sealed and consummated. 

Scholars and interpreters have lots of interpretations for why Jacob might not have recognized Leah. Some argue that Jacob must have been too drunk to recognize who his father-in-law brought to him at the end of the feast. Others make much of the darkness of evening obscuring Jacob’s sight. A common assumption is that Leah must have been in on the deception. The story itself doesn’t give many clues, but I will point out that Jacob doesn’t blame Leah. He places the blame squarely on the shoulders of Laban.

When Jacob confronts his uncle about this deception, Laban offers Jacob a new agreement: serve seven more years in exchange for Rachel. As a gesture of good faith, Laban seems to offer Rachel “on credit.” Jacob has to wait a week, but he marries Rachel at the beginning of the seven years of work for her. As he enters his eighth year of exile in Haran, Jacob now has two wives.

The text does not dwell on the emotions or the reactions of the women in this story. How does Leah feel when her father grabs her to give to Jacob? Was she aware of the plan before the wedding feast or does she just go along because her father told her to? Does she want to marry Jacob? Leah is a kind of tragic figure in the story because she seems to love Jacob and desire his love. But his love is reserved for her sister Rachel.

Likewise we wonder what Rachel thinks and feels and how she reacts. Having watched Jacob serve for seven years to win her hand, I imagine Laban locking her away in her room the night of the feast. The rivalry over Jacob will from this point forward be the defining aspect of her relationship with her sister. There is so much tragedy from the fallout of Laban’s deception and Jacob’s lack of attention. But perhaps we have clues in an earlier story.

In Genesis 27, we had the story of Isaac’s blessing of his sons. You will recall that Jacob tricked his blind father into blessing him by pretending to be his brother Esau. Jacob dressed in Esau’s clothes to take his scent. Jacob put goat pelts on his arms so they would feel hairy like his brother. He presented a dish prepared by his mother to taste like the wild game his brother would have prepared. And Jacob’s deception was successful, just as Laban’s is in this story.

The Genesis 27 story helps us understand Genesis 29 because, like Isaac in the earlier story, Jacob is deceived into taking an oath binding himself to the wrong person. Both of these stories are, in a sense, about the power of words and commitments. Neither Jacob nor Isaac feels able to reverse the commitment just because they were entered into in bad faith. For Jacob to divorce Leah would have left her in dire straits, as culturally she would not have had value as a wife for another man. Though Jacob is the primary target and victim of Laban’s scheme, Leah is the most vulnerable to victimization. Jacob is not perfect in his relationship to her, but his keeping Leah as a wife instead of trying to back out in regret the next morning at least ensures her a future.

Reading this story today, one of the things that stands out to me is that we live in a society where we often do not honor our commitments. Part of this is a reflection of a good thing in our culture: divorce no longer leaves women completely helpless and unable to care for themselves or participate in society. But we should take our commitments more seriously. The psychological and relational costs of casually breaking them can be severe, to say nothing of the spiritual costs. There is always grace available to us in divorce or otherwise breaking a covenant, but we sometimes allow that grace to numb us to the real pain we ought to feel. Jacob’s faithfulness to his accidental marriage should cause us to reflect on our own casual treatment of very serious covenants.

A larger question we have to ask ourselves is how we treat vulnerable people in our midst. How are we like Laban? It might seem strange as Laban is almost a caricature, playing his own game and using his own daughters as pawns to gain an advantage over Jacob. But Jacob, Rachel, and Leah all possess less power than Laban. Jacob is a foreigner living on Laban’s hospitality. Rachel and Leah are daughters, who serve as property in Laban’s schemes to advance the family through marriage. It is not clear what Laban is after, but that almost makes his abuse of power seem worse. Who are the people who we have authority over? How can we make sure that we do not misuse that authority? If we have employees, we need to treat them well. If we have children, we need to avoid taking advantage of them, realizing that we likely have more influence over them than we realize. We need to be aware of our power when we go out on missions or into situations where we are trying to help, because our failures to recognize our own power can result in hurting the very people we are trying to uplift. If the philosopher Immanuel Kant was right about anything, it was his argument that human beings should always be seen as “ends in themselves” and never “means to an end.” All people have value as children of God: nothing about their position in society changes this inherent worth. We are never supposed to use other people to accomplish our goals, even if we believe our goals to be good or even holy. Acting in love towards another person means treating them like people equal to us, not like things to be used.

Laban’s deception, like Jacob’s in Genesis 27, leads to real family conflict. We see it in the final verse of our passage: “and [Jacob] loved Rachel more than Leah.” Later, when the law is set down in Leviticus, a case like this one is forbidden: “And you shall not take a woman as a rival to her sister, uncovering her nakedness while her sister is still alive” (Leviticus 18:18). In the next story, the conflict between Rebekah and Leah will take the form of a competition to have the most sons. These sons will be the fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel. Israel, born in conflict, will emerge from the exile in Haran as a nation beloved of God. But the conflicts between Esau and Jacob and between Rachel and Leah will have long lasting consequences for the story of Israel.