Genesis24chapter 24

Genesis 24:1-2

This is the last act of Abraham's life that the book describes at length, and it is about the marriage of the son rather than about himself. Sarah has been buried in the previous chapter, Isaac is forty, and the only ground Abraham owns in the land of promise is her grave. He puts his oldest servant under oath with a gesture tied to the sign of the covenant carried in his own body, which is the sign the promised seed was to come through.

Genesis 24:3-4

The bar on Canaanite wives becomes house policy for three generations. Isaac lays the same charge on Jacob in chapter 28, and Esau does the opposite in chapter 26 by marrying two Hittite women who are a grief of mind to his parents. Abraham is guarding the line the promise runs through, and the family he sends back to is no purer in its worship, since Joshua says plainly that the fathers beyond the river served other gods.

Genesis 24:5-6

The servant raises the one practical problem and Abraham answers it with an absolute. The woman may refuse and the oath lapses with her refusal, but Isaac is never to be carried back. God will say the same thing to Isaac himself in chapter 26, Go not down into Egypt, and Isaac becomes the only one of the three patriarchs who never leaves the land of promise.

Genesis 24:7-8

Abraham quotes his own call back at the servant, the same separation from country and kindred and father's house that chapter 12 opened with. He rests the whole errand on the oath about the land, and he has seen none of that land come to him except a burial plot he paid four hundred shekels of silver for. Hebrews says these men died in faith without receiving the promises, having seen them afar off.

Genesis 24:9-10

The oath is sworn and the man leaves with ten camels and all the goods of his master in his hand. Rebekah's birth had already been reported to Abraham back in chapter 22, in the short notice about Nahor's children that follows immediately on the binding of Isaac. The bride was named to him in the same breath as the son he had received back.

Genesis 24:11

This is the first of the well meetings in Scripture, and the shape of it repeats afterwards. A traveller comes to the ancestral country, stops at a well, a woman draws water, she runs home with the news, and the traveller is taken into the house. Jacob meets Rachel that way in chapter 29 and Moses meets Zipporah that way in Exodus 2, and John opens his fourth chapter with Jesus sitting at a well asking a Samaritan woman for a drink.

Genesis 24:12-14

This is the first prayer in Genesis that asks God for a specific sign of guidance, and the man praying asks nothing at all for himself. The sign he proposes tests character rather than looks, since watering ten camels after a long stage is hours of hard work at a stone trough. He asks God to shew kindness to his master, and the word behind kindness is the covenant word for steady loyal love.

Genesis 24:15-16

The answer arrives before the prayer is finished. The writer gives her whole descent in the same sentence that introduces her, born to Bethuel, son of Milcah, the wife of Nahor, so the reader knows she is inside the family before the servant does. She is described as very fair and a virgin, and she goes down to the well without a word to the stranger standing beside it.

Genesis 24:17-20

the servant ran to meet her: He runs, and after that every verb of action belongs to her. She hasted, let down her pitcher, gave him drink, emptied the pitcher into the trough, ran again to the well, and drew for all his camels. She offers the second half before he asks for it, which is the exact thing he had prayed for, and the labour behind that offer is measured in trips rather than in words.

Genesis 24:21-23

He says nothing while she works, watching to see whether the sign was answered or accidental. When the camels have finished he puts a gold ring and two heavy bracelets on her before he has asked one question about her family. Only then does he ask whose daughter she is, and whether there is room in her father's house to lodge.

Genesis 24:24-25

She names Milcah, and Milcah is the link the reader has already been handed twice, at the end of chapter 11 and again in the notice at the end of chapter 22. Then she answers a question he had not repeated, offering straw and provender and room to lodge on her father's behalf. The hospitality is hers before anyone in the house knows a stranger is at the well.

Genesis 24:26-27

He worships at the well, before anything is arranged and before anyone has agreed to anything. His blessing speaks of his master's God keeping mercy and truth rather than of his own success in finding her. The phrase he uses for the leading, I being in the way, describes guidance given to a man who was already walking.

Genesis 24:28-31

Laban enters the book here, and the writer is careful about the order of it. Laban ran out to the man, and the sentence explaining why comes next, that he saw the earring and the bracelets upon his sister's hands. Then comes the welcome, Come in, thou blessed of the LORD, from the man who will spend twenty years bargaining over Jacob's wages in chapters 29 to 31.

Genesis 24:32-33

The camels are unloaded, feet are washed, and food is set in front of a man who has ridden a long way to get there. He will not touch it until the errand has been spoken. Genesis records the whole refusal in one short exchange, and the answer he gets back is two words, Speak on.

Genesis 24:34-36

I am Abraham's servant: He opens with his master's name and never gives his own, and the chapter calls him only the servant or the man from beginning to end. The name Eliezer belongs to chapter 15 and the writer does not repeat it here. Origen and the older readers built on that silence, taking a servant sent by a father to fetch a bride for the son, carrying the father's goods and speaking only of the son, as a picture of how the church is brought to Christ.

Genesis 24:37-41

my master made me swear: The retelling runs to nineteen verses in a book that can cover a century in a line, so the writer wanted this errand heard twice. He repeats the terms exactly, including the clause that releases him if the family says no. He is laying a case before the people who hold the answer, and he lets them hear that he came with permission to go home empty.

Genesis 24:42-44

He gives them the sign he asked for before he tells them how it turned out. Laid out in that order, the family hears a test no traveller could have arranged and then hears their own daughter fulfil it word for word. Every detail he reports matches what the reader watched happen at the well.

Genesis 24:45-48

One detail is added in the retelling that the first account did not carry. He prayed in his heart, so nobody at the well heard the words and nobody could have been coached to answer them. He then tells the family that he bowed and worshipped on the spot, which puts his thanksgiving on the record before he asks them for anything at all.

Genesis 24:49-51

He asks for kindness and truth, the same pair he had blessed God for at the well in verse 27. Laban and Bethuel answer that the thing proceedeth from the LORD and that they cannot speak unto him bad or good. The brother is named ahead of the father, which is how this household is described whenever it acts.

Genesis 24:52-53

He bows himself to the earth before he opens the bags, and worship comes ahead of the gifts both times in this chapter. Then the jewels of silver and gold and the raiment go to Rebekah, and precious things go to her brother and her mother. Bethuel does not appear anywhere in the list of who was paid.

Genesis 24:54-56

He eats only once the matter is settled, which is the other half of the refusal he made the night before. In the morning he asks to be sent away and the family asks for ten days. His answer is that the LORD has prospered his way, so a delay now is a delay set against something already granted.

Genesis 24:57-58

The question is put to Rebekah herself and her answer is a single word in the Hebrew. She leaves country and kindred and her father's house on the word of a stranger, which is the same three separations Abraham had been commanded to make out of that same country in chapter 12. She has never seen the man she is going to, and all she holds is the report of the servant who came for her.

Genesis 24:59-60

The nurse goes unnamed here and is named Deborah in chapter 35, where she dies and is buried under an oak that is given a name of its own. The family blessing repeats what the angel had said to Abraham on the mountain, that his seed should possess the gate of his enemies. They call her the mother of thousands of millions, and the very next chapter reports that she was barren for twenty years before Esau and Jacob were born.

Genesis 24:61-62

She rides south with a man she met the day before, and the chapter records nothing more from her until she sees Isaac. Isaac is coming from the well Lahai-roi, the well Hagar named in chapter 16 when the angel found her in the wilderness. The son the promise runs through is living beside the well where God was called the One that seeth, and a story that opened at a well now closes at another.

Genesis 24:63-65

Isaac has barely spoken since the mountain in chapter 22, and here he is walking alone in a field at dusk. He lifted up his eyes and saw, which is what his father did twice on the day of the offering. Rebekah gets down off the camel the moment she learns who he is, and covers herself with a veil.

Genesis 24:66-67

The servant makes his report and leaves the book without ever being named in it. Isaac brings her into his mother Sarah's tent, three years after Sarah was buried at Machpelah, and the writer says he loved her and was comforted. This is the first place in Genesis where a husband is said to love his wife, and the word love had first appeared in chapter 22, of a father for the son he was about to offer.