Genesis30chapter 30

Genesis 30:1-2

Rachel is the third barren matriarch in the book, after Sarah waited twenty-five years and Rebekah twenty. She makes her demand to her husband rather than to God, and Jacob's answer is that the withholding is God's doing and not his. His son Joseph asks the same question at the end of Genesis, whether he stands in the place of God, and asks it in forgiveness of the brothers who sold him. Rachel's words are answered in a way she did not ask for, since she dies bearing the second son she demands here.

Genesis 30:3-5

Rachel's proposal repeats Sarai's almost word for word, since Sarai had told Abram to go in unto her maid in chapter 16, and both times a childless wife hands her husband a servant. Bearing upon the knees is the language of adoption, so the child would be counted the mistress's from the moment of birth. Genesis reports the arrangement without approving it, and the first attempt at it had produced Ishmael and a divided house.

Genesis 30:6-8

Rachel names the first boy Dan, judged, as though the birth were a verdict handed down in her favour. The second she names Naphtali, and her sentence over him is that she has wrestled with her sister and prevailed. The same word for prevailing comes back at the ford of Jabbok, where Jacob is told he has power with God and with men and has prevailed, so the wrestling inside this tent runs ahead of the wrestling in chapter 32.

Genesis 30:9-11

Leah answers a maid with a maid of her own, so four women are now bearing children into the same quarrel. Her first name for a son is Gad, and the word carries the sense of fortune or of a troop arriving, which Jerome and Clarke both take up. Rachel had named her sons after God's judging and her own wrestling, while Leah here names hers after luck, and God is not in the sentence.

Genesis 30:12-13

Asher is named from Leah's word for happiness, and the reason she gives is that the daughters will call her blessed. Jerome notes that Scripture supplies the etymology itself in the same breath as the name, which is how nearly every birth in this chapter is reported. Jacob's blessing on Asher in chapter 49 and Moses' in Deuteronomy 33 both come back to bread and to favour, keeping the sense the mother put in the name.

Genesis 30:14-16

Reuben brings his mother a plant out of the harvest field, and the two sisters trade it for a night with their husband. This household bargains for what it wants, since Jacob had bought his brother's birthright with a pot of stew and now his wives buy time with him for fruit. Leah's word to him as he comes in from the field is that she has hired him, using the root that will name the son conceived that night.

Genesis 30:17-18

The text credits the birth to God hearkening rather than to the plant that was traded for it, and it says so in the verse straight after the bargain. Leah names the boy Issachar, hire, and reads him as payment for having given her maid away. Henry takes that reading as a warning, since a mercy received is no licence for the thing that came before it.

Genesis 30:19-21

Zebulun carries the sense of dwelling, and Leah's hope with it is that her husband will now live with her because she has borne him six sons. Then a single line reports a daughter, Dinah, with no speech from anyone and no explanation. She is the only daughter named in this family, and chapter 34 turns on what is done to her at Shechem.

Genesis 30:22-23

God remembered is the phrase used of Noah when the waters began to go down, and it marks God moving on a promise rather than recalling something he had lost track of. The same words open the exodus, where God remembers his covenant and hears the groaning in Egypt. Rachel's barrenness ends as Sarah's and Rebekah's had ended, by God opening a womb that had stayed shut for years, and she calls it the taking away of her reproach.

Genesis 30:24

Joseph means he shall add, so she asks for another son in the act of naming the one she is holding. The request is granted at Benjamin's birth in chapter 35 and it costs her her life, which answers the cry she made in the first verse of this chapter. Joseph is the eleventh son born, and the birthright passes to him rather than to Reuben, which Chronicles states plainly when it explains why.

Genesis 30:25-26

The moment Joseph is born Jacob asks to be sent home, and he calls Canaan his own place though he has not lived there for fourteen years and owns no ground in it. Henry reads the pull as the promise working on him, since a man who believed that land was his could not settle down in Haran. He has to ask for his wives and children as though they were still to be released, because by the terms of his service they were Laban's.

Genesis 30:27-28

Laban's word for learning by experience is the root that stands behind divination, which Clarke points out and which suits a man who later hunts the house for his missing gods. What he admits is that the LORD has blessed him for Jacob's sake, and this is the third time in Genesis a foreign householder says it. Pharaoh had to be taught it by plague, Abimelech told Isaac we saw certainly that the LORD was with thee, and Laban says he watched it happen and worked it out. The promise that all families of the earth would be blessed in Abraham's seed is landing on a grasping uncle in Haran.

Genesis 30:29-30

Jacob answers the offer with an account of his service, little before he came, a multitude now, and the increase dated from his arrival. His closing question is the one the chapter has been building toward, when shall he provide for his own house. He has four women, eleven sons and a daughter, and nothing of his own to keep any of them on.

Genesis 30:31-33

Jacob asks for no wage at all, only the marked animals out of a flock that has few of them, and he leaves what he is paid to what is born later. He offers his own righteousness as the audit, so that any unmarked beast found among his own counts as stolen. It is the kind of proposal a man makes when he has learned not to trust the other party's arithmetic.

Genesis 30:34-36

Laban agrees at once, and Wesley reads the speed as a man who thinks he has taken the better half of the deal. He then strips out every marked animal that same day, hands them to his own sons, and sets three days of travel between the two flocks so nothing marked can breed with Jacob's. The man who had swapped one daughter for the other on the wedding night alters the terms again before the ink is dry.

Genesis 30:37-39

Jacob peels white stripes into fresh rods and sets them in the watering troughs where the flocks breed, and Genesis describes the method closely without ever saying it was the cause. In the next chapter he credits the increase to an angel who showed him the marked cattle in a dream, which is why Jamieson, Fausset and Brown say something beyond husbandry was at work. Ambrose and Cyril of Alexandria read the peeled rods at the troughs as a figure of the Scriptures the flock drinks from, and that is offered as their reading rather than as what the verse states.

Genesis 30:40-42

Jacob keeps his own flock apart from Laban's and works the rods only when the stronger animals breed. Gill reads the restraint as deliberate, since leaving the feebler to Laban stopped short of stripping the man bare. The wages Laban meant to pay for almost nothing came to Jacob anyway, and in the next chapter Jacob says God took the cattle from his father in law and gave them to him.

Genesis 30:43

The line is built like the one said of Isaac in chapter 26, that the man waxed great and grew until he became very great, so the same sentence follows both men after a household outside the covenant tried to hold them down. What Jacob now owns is listed the way Abram's goods were listed when he came up out of Egypt, cattle and servants and camels and asses. A man goes down into a foreign country with nothing, serves a hard master, and comes away rich, which is the shape Israel's own departure from Egypt will take.