Genesis31chapter 31

Genesis 31:1-2

The trouble starts with what Laban's sons say rather than with anything Jacob does, and the word they use for his herds is glory, which carries the sense of weight and wealth. Jacob then reads his uncle's face and sees that it has changed toward him. Genesis has watched envy rise at a brother's increase since Cain looked at Abel's accepted offering, and it will watch it again when Joseph's brothers see the coat.

Genesis 31:3

The command sends Jacob back along the exact line Abram was told to leave, since chapter 12 opened with get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred. Here the same two words are reversed into a return to country and kindred, because the family of promise is now the thing being carried home rather than the thing being left behind. God adds the clause he had given at Bethel, I will be with thee, which is the very thing Jacob had asked for in his vow there.

Genesis 31:4-6

He will not hold this conversation in the tents, so he calls his wives out to the flock where nothing can be overheard, and Laban is three days off shearing at the time. What he tells them is that their father's face has changed while the God of his father has not. Clarke reads the choice of meeting place as deliberate secrecy, given how many of Laban's household lived within earshot of those tents.

Genesis 31:7-9

The man who took a blessing by wearing his brother's clothes now says plainly that his uncle deceived him, and that uncle had already handed him a veiled bride in the dark at 29:25. The ten changes of wages are counted twice in this chapter, here and again at verse 41, so the whole twenty years sits framed between them. Jerome reads the switching as a bet against the flock, since the terms moved each time to whatever the ewes were not bearing, and Jacob says God overturned the result every time.

Genesis 31:10-12

Chapter 30 told this story from the outside, with peeled rods laid in the watering troughs and no word from God anywhere in it. Here Jacob tells it from the inside and says a dream showed him the flock already marked before he did anything at all. Commentators divide over how much weight the rods carry after this, with Calvin reading the increase as God's doing and the rods as Jacob's own device, and the chapter itself credits the whole outcome to God at verse 9.

Genesis 31:13

God identifies himself by a stone Jacob set up twenty years earlier and by a vow Jacob made beside it. That vow at 28:20-22 was conditional, if God will be with me and keep me and bring me again to my father's house, then shall the LORD be my God. God now holds him to the condition he set for himself, and the vow is finally paid in 35:1-7, where Jacob is sent back to that same place to build the altar.

Genesis 31:14-16

The sisters answer with one voice, and Rachel is named first though Leah is the elder, in the house of the man who had once insisted the firstborn must be given before the younger. Their charge is that their own father counted them strangers and sold them, spending the bride price he should have held for them. They close by telling Jacob to do whatever God has said, which puts the whole household behind the command of verse 3.

Genesis 31:17-18

The move is described the way a shepherd household actually moves, with the tents struck and the women and children set in panniers on the camels. Everything he owns is counted as gotten in Padan-aram, so the man who came over the Jordan with a staff leaves with the livestock of a small nation. Israel will one day serve a hard master in a foreign country for generations and come out the same way, carrying the wealth of the land it worked in.

Genesis 31:19

Sheepshearing was a feast that pulled a master and his men away from home for days, and Judah goes up to his own shearers at 38:12 and is deceived there by a woman of his household. Under that cover Rachel takes her father's teraphim, the first household images named anywhere in Scripture, and Jerome points forward to the same word in Judges 17. They do not stay in the family long, since Jacob buries the strange gods of his house under the oak at Shechem in 35:2-4.

Genesis 31:20-21

The same verb stands over Rachel in one verse and over Jacob in the next, so the household leaves by stealing in both senses at once. He had already taken a birthright by trade and a blessing by disguise, and he now leaves his father in law the way he left his brother, without a word said. He crosses the river and sets his face toward Gilead, and Clarke notes that the Targum reads the river as the Euphrates.

Genesis 31:22-24

Word takes three days to reach Laban because his shearing was three days off from Jacob's flocks, and the pursuit then runs seven more. God stops him the night before he catches them by coming to him in a dream, which is the second time in Genesis that a man outside the covenant is warned in his sleep to leave the covenant family alone. Abimelech was the first at 20:3, and in both cases the warning goes to the outsider rather than to the man carrying the promise.

Genesis 31:25-28

Laban opens with the same formula Pharaoh used at 12:18 and Abimelech at 26:10, what hast thou done, except that the two kings had a real grievance and he has none. He then describes the send off he says he would have given, with mirth and songs and tabret and harp, to a man he had cheated for twenty years. He calls his daughters captives taken with the sword, though those daughters had just told Jacob that their father sold them.

Genesis 31:29-30

Laban admits in one breath that he meant harm and that God stopped him, and Clarke reads the Hebrew as a vow already made, my hand is unto God to do you evil. Then comes the complaint he actually rode seven days for, wherefore hast thou stolen my gods, spoken by a man who has just quoted the God who speaks in dreams. A god that can be carried off in a camel bag stands here beside the God who overtakes a pursuer on the road, and the chapter simply lets the two sit next to each other.

Genesis 31:31-32

Jacob gives the true reason at last, that he expected Laban to take the women back by force. Then he pronounces a death sentence on a thief he cannot name, and the narrator adds the line that makes it terrible, for Jacob knew not that Rachel had stolen them. Clarke reports the rabbinic reading that the words fell on Rachel and were answered at her death in 35:16-19, and Judah does the same thing at 38:24 when he sentences a woman he does not know is Tamar.

Genesis 31:33-35

Four tents are searched in order and Rachel's comes last, and the search is told slowly enough that the reader watches him get closer. She has put the images in the camel's saddle and is sitting on them, and she keeps her seat by telling her father she cannot rise before him. The daughter deceives her father much as her husband deceived his, by staying still and offering a reason the old man has no way to test.

Genesis 31:36-37

Twenty years of swallowed anger break open here, and what follows is the longest speech Jacob makes anywhere in Genesis. He turns the failed search into his own evidence, asking Laban to set whatever he found in front of both households and let them judge between the two men. Clarke notes that Jacob is standing on the one part of the case where he is entirely clean, since he did not know about the images.

Genesis 31:38-40

Jacob reads out a shepherd's account, no ewe miscarried, no ram of the flock eaten, and every loss to wild beasts paid out of his own herd. The law given later at Exodus 22:10-13 releases a shepherd from exactly that loss, so Laban had been charging him for what no code required him to bear. He worked through the heat of the day and the frost of the night, which is the climate of those uplands rather than a figure of speech.

Genesis 31:41-42

The reckoning is exact, fourteen years for two daughters and six for the cattle, with the wages changed ten times across the whole of it. Jacob then says God hath seen mine affliction and the labour of my hands, which is the language Exodus uses when God sees the affliction of Israel and hears the cry that comes up from its labour. He names God as the fear of Isaac, a title that appears twice in this chapter and nowhere else in Scripture, and Henry notes that he reaches for his living father's reverence while Abraham is already past all fear.

Genesis 31:43-44

These daughters are my daughters: Laban claims the daughters, the children and the cattle in a single sentence and then admits in the same breath that he can do nothing about any of them. From that position he asks for a covenant, which is what a man proposes once he has lost the power to compel. Henry reads the claim as bluster and the proposal as the surrender underneath it.

Genesis 31:45-47

Jacob raises another standing stone, and stones mark every turn of his life, the one under his head at Bethel, the one rolled off the well mouth for Rachel, this one, and the pillar he sets over Rachel's grave in chapter 35. Laban names the heap in Aramaic and Jacob names it in Hebrew, and both names mean heap of witness. Jerome points out that one family has split into two languages inside a single generation, because Laban had taken up the speech of the country he settled in.

Genesis 31:48-50

The Mizpah line is read at partings as a blessing between friends who will miss each other. In the passage it is a watch set by two men who intend never to be in the same place again, and verse 50 says plainly what the watching is for, that Jacob not afflict the daughters or take other wives beside them. Clarke argues the verse division here is wrong and that Galeed and Mizpah were named in one breath.

Genesis 31:51-53

The boundary runs both ways, and neither man is to cross it toward the other for harm. Laban swears by the God of Abraham and the God of Nahor and the God of their father, folding three households into one oath, and Clarke notes that Terah served other gods according to Joshua 24:2. Jacob will not swear on those terms and swears instead by the fear of his father Isaac, so the closing words of the treaty separate the religion of the two families along with their ground.

Genesis 31:54-55

The treaty closes the way covenants close in Genesis, with a sacrifice and a meal eaten together on the mountain. Laban kisses his grandchildren, blesses them and goes home, so the man who set out with harm in his hand leaves having pronounced good on them instead. One border behind Jacob is settled, and the next chapter opens with him sending messengers ahead to the brother he stole from.