Genesis 27 - 37

I am now so behind on blogging the Bible that it’s necessary to jump straight in and cover ten chapters in a couple of paragraphs. I can only blame my tardiness on a combination of sickness, a family event in Scotland, and an unwise purchasing of a Netflix subscription.

There is no time for seduction here, people.

No asking ‘how are you, and what have you been up to’?

No trying to link the stories to the events of my own week or attempts at fancy-pants writing.

So, as the Bishop said to the actress, shall we begin?

For this blog post I’ve read Genesis 27-29, Genesis 30-31, Genesis 32-34, and Genesis 35-37 (and if you want to understand what I’ll be talking about, you should too). I’m going to write the following in bullet points as there isn’t really a unifying theme.

• In these chapters, as in several before, we see people making the same mistakes again and again. On first reading this struck me as unrealistic and an indication the writers were simply repeating a theme, or stating the same story twice with slightly different variations. After considering it a while, however, I started to see it as fairly true to life. We do repeat the same mistakes again and again, and no matter how many times we get burned, often seem caught in negative patterns of behaviour. This can be doubly true in families, where the sins of the father are often repeated in the next generation: “Man hands on misery to man” and all that.

• I have no idea why God favours Jacob over Esau. Both seem kind of awful. However, this is illustrative yet again of how God’s covenant is not about the merits of the individual but the grace of God. His covenant continues from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob, and they are under God’s protection as a result (IT’S A POINTER TO JESUS, PEOPLE!)

• Interestingly, the place where Jacob has his dream and states as a holy place of God was actually Palestine (which, spoiler, later on features as an important place of God! That Jacob knew what he was talking about).

• Whilst God protects Jacob, He certainly doesn’t shield him from all hardship or the consequences of his actions. It is a cosmic act of karma that Jacob, who cheated his brother of his father’s blessing, is now cheated by his father in law (Here sing “You reap what you sow” in a deep Lou Reed voice).

• Can I just state that I feel bad for Leah throughout these chapters? She suffers numerous indignations from the menfolk in her life as a result of not being “the pretty one”. It also sounds ridiculous that Jacob wouldn’t have known who he was sleeping with on his wedding night, but I can only assume the combination of no electric lighting and Leah wearing a veil fooled him.

• Next we read about both Leah and Rachel giving their slaves to Jacob to sleep with out of sibling rivalry, in a dysfunctional nuclear arms race to bear him the most children. This is where I lose patience with these people!  This whole chapter is basically like an episode of the Jeremy Kyle show.

• What DOES move me is Esau’s greeting of Jacob after twenty years, which is impressively forgiving. The fact that as I read this part of the story I am yelling at the page “punch him in the nose!” suggests I may have trouble forgiving easily, and this may be something I need to pray about. However, both parties have clearly matured since last they met, as Jacob at least recognises he did his brother wrong, and prepares goods to send to him as a means of apology (although I suspect fear of getting pulverised by his big, hairy brother was definitely a motivating factor)

• The rape of Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, is a horrible chapter, made especially weird when the perpetrator seeks her hand in marriage afterwards. This makes slightly more sense after reading that rape was apparently a Hivite custom and the usual procedure for obtaining a wife in Hivite culture, but I would suggest that flowers and dinner may be a better option.

• Finally, the tension between Joseph’s brothers is understandable when you take into account the favouritism shown to Joseph by Jacob (Joseph is the first natural son by his favourite wife, Rachel) and the competition between all the various wives and brothers of this family. Seriously, these guys are a really good advert for monogamy in marriage if you want to avoid warring factions, jealousy, and avoiding one of your children being thrown into a bear pit then sold into slavery.