Diggin' Back In

I stopped my chronological Bible reading for a while, as BSF and - uh - everything else took over my time. So now that summer's here and my schedule has calmed down, I'm hoping to get back into my plan to read the Bible cover to cover this year.

Tonight, I read about Jacob and Esau. Usually when I read about these brothers, I'm annoyed by Jacob and Rebekah and confused about the whole "tricking Jacob by giving him the wrong wife" thing. This time, I noticed a few things I hadn't paid attention to before, like...

1. Esau's first two wives - Beeri and Basemath - were "a source of grief to Isaac and Rebekah." In the next chapter, Rebekah says to Isaac that she is disgusted with living because of these Hittite women, and she doesn't want Jacob to marry one of them. Now, she probably says this in part to cover her own guilt from the part she played in deceiving her husband into giving his blessing to the wrong kid. However, I can't help but wonder if Esau - who presumably knew how much his mother favored his brother - married those Hittite women to spite her, if only a little bit. The thought amuses me...

Later, though Esau does take a non-Canaanite wife when he realized the Canaanite women were displeasing to his father, not his mama.

2. Poor Leah seemed to get the short end of the stick since Jacob favored her sister. (However, how appropriate is it that Jacob himself was the target of a life-altering, deceptive plot?) And when the text begins to list off the names of her sons one by one, and their meanings - He has seen my misery, He hears, attached, and finally praise - my heart just breaks for her. Who wants to be married to a man who had to be tricked into marrying her, then bear him four sons - the best thing a woman could expect to do for her husband - only to see his affections for her have (I'm assuming, here) not altered? Not I. But here's the part I like? After Judah was born, she stopped having children. The Lord didn't close up her womb or come to her in a vision, and she wasn't necessarily done fulfilling whatever wifely duty Jacob or her culture may have expected from her. She just stopped having children full stop. I imagine her in a "Big Love"-type scene wherein Jacob comes into her room for some married-folks-business, and she looks at him and says, "It's Rachel's night." Well done, Leah. And well played. (Mind you, a quick peek into chapter 30 shows that Leah does indeed have more children, but at least the woman took a break...)