Genesis29chapter 29

Genesis 29:1-3

Jacob arrives at a well in a field, which is where the last wife brought into this family was found. A great stone lies on the mouth of it, and the custom is that nobody moves it until every flock has gathered. Genesis has just left him at another stone, the one he slept on and set up as a pillar at Bethel, and now a stone stands between him and the water.

Genesis 29:4-6

He asks the shepherds three questions and gets three short answers, and the third answer arrives with Rachel walking toward him. Laban is named as the son of Nahor rather than of Bethuel, since the grandfather was the man who gave the city its standing. The reader has met this Laban before, in chapter 24, where what he was shown was a man who ran out to a stranger after seeing the gold on his sister's wrists.

Genesis 29:7-8

Jacob tells working men how to do their work before he has been in the country a day. They answer that they cannot move the stone until every flock is there, and the rule they state is what makes the next scene worth noticing. He has been told plainly that shifting it takes all of them.

Genesis 29:9-11

Rachel appears and Jacob rolls away the stone the shepherds had just said needed all of them, then kisses her and weeps out loud. The shape is the one chapter 24 used for his own mother: a traveller reaches the ancestral country, stops at a well, a woman draws water, and she runs home with the news. Moses meets his wife at a well in Midian the same way, and John puts Jesus at a well in Samaria asking a woman for a drink.

Genesis 29:12-14

she ran and told her father: Rebekah ran home from a well in chapter 24 and Rachel runs home from the same kind of scene here, and both times Laban comes out fast. The difference is what he found when he got there. The servant had arrived with ten camels and gold for the family, while Jacob arrives with nothing, and surely thou art my bone and my flesh cools into a conversation about wages after one month.

Genesis 29:15-17

Laban opens with the word brother and closes with the word wages, and the offer sounds generous until you notice that he has asked Jacob to set a price on himself. The verse that follows names the two daughters by birth order before it says anything else about them, the elder Leah and the younger Rachel. That ordering is the hinge the chapter turns on.

Genesis 29:18-20

Jacob identifies her twice over, by name and by birth order, so that there can be no confusion about which daughter he is buying. He has no herds to offer as a bride price, having left home with what he could carry, so he offers seven years of his own labour instead. That the years seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had to her, is one of the tenderest lines in the book, and it stands immediately before the ugliest thing anyone does to him.

Genesis 29:21-22

Seven years are counted out and Jacob asks for what he has paid for. Laban answers by gathering all the men of the place and making a feast, and the word behind feast is a feast of drinking. Nothing in either verse says the bride was named to the guests.

Genesis 29:23-24

Genesis says only that it was evening, and Adam Clarke supplies the veil and the dark chamber that made the substitution hold until morning. The man being fooled had once gone in to a blind father with goat skins on his arms saying I am Esau thy firstborn, and now a firstborn is brought in to him in the dark without a word spoken. Laban hands Zilpah over in the same breath, and she will bear two of the twelve tribes.

Genesis 29:25-26

Jacob's protest, What is this thou hast done unto me, is word for word the rebuke Pharaoh gave his grandfather in chapter 12 and the one Abimelech gave his father in chapter 26. Twice it was a pagan king saying it to a patriarch, and this is the first time a patriarch says it to anyone. Matthew Henry put the answer to it plainly: he had cheated his own father when he pretended to be Esau, and now his father-in-law cheated him. Laban's excuse names the rule about the younger and the firstborn, and the commentators doubt any such custom existed in Haran, since he had seven years in which to mention it.

Genesis 29:27-28

Jerome reads the week as the marriage week, and the verses bear him out, since Jacob fulfils it and is given Rachel before the second seven years are served. He does not wait fourteen years for the wife he wanted; he receives both sisters inside a fortnight and pays for the second one afterwards. Laban has now sold the same daughter twice and collected fourteen years of labour for her.

Genesis 29:29-30

Bilhah joins Zilpah, and between them these two handmaids will bear Dan, Naphtali, Gad and Asher, a third of the tribes of Israel. The next line says Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah, which sets the temperature of that household for the rest of his life. He will tell Laban to his face in chapter 31 that he served twenty years in the house and that his wages were changed ten times.

Genesis 29:31

Hated here means loved less, which the verse before it has just said in so many words. God moves toward the woman nobody chose and opens her womb, while Rachel is barren, the third time in three generations that the wanted wife cannot conceive. Genesis sets the obstacle in front of the promise every time, and Jacob had been told at Bethel one chapter earlier that his seed would be as the dust of the earth. Sarah waited twenty-five years and Rebekah twenty, and Rachel's answer comes in chapter 30, where the text says God remembered her, the same verb it uses of Noah.

Genesis 29:32-33

Reuben means see, a son, and Simeon means hearing, and both names are arguments Leah is making about her marriage rather than praises she is offering to God. She says the LORD hath looked upon my affliction and then adds now therefore my husband will love me, which is the ache underneath the first three births. Reuben is the firstborn of Israel, and Jacob will strip the birthright off him at the end of the book for what he does in chapter 35.

Genesis 29:34-35

Levi means joined, and the tribe named out of one woman's hope of being joined to her husband is the tribe later joined to the priests in the service of the sanctuary. With the fourth son she stops asking for her husband and says now will I praise the LORD, and Judah means praise. The son of the wife Jacob never chose is the one Jacob blesses over three elder brothers in chapter 49, and that line runs down to David and to Jesus.