Jacob Part 14: Jacob vs The Narrator

Jacob verse the Narrator

We're turning a significant corner right now in the story of Yaaqov. We followed him into exile because of the mess of he and his mom's making.

And it's been, as I said, a hall of mirrors of the deceiver being deceived mirrored by the sisters deceiving and tricking, the rivalries, and the nephew and uncle. 

Where we just left was the story of where Jacob strikes back, as it were. Against his deceiver.

Yaaqov was deceived with the two daughters, Lamb and Calf. And now with those same animals, of the same man, Yaaqov deceives his uncle Lavan. 

As we're gonna see, just here on the macro chart here, we started with Yaaqov's vision dream at Bethel, and that was on his way to exile. 

Then it was the three parts of the triple deception of everybody in the 20 years we're gonna see of Yaaqov's exile.

There's gonna be a pivot in this sentence we're about to read next, where Yaaqov is going to make mention of that dream that he had and say, "You know, I am tired of this. Let's get outta here." And this is gonna begin his exodus from exile in three steps. 

It begins with a story of him recalling the pillars and the promise of Bethel. And it's going to conclude with Yaaqov and Lavan making peace by some pillars and a covenant that they make on a mountain halfway between Canaan and Haran. And in the middle is a really exciting chase scene. 

We're beginning that section right now. We're gonna turn to chapter 31

Genesis 31:1–16 CSB

1 Now Jacob heard what Laban’s sons were saying: “Jacob has taken all that was our father’s and has built this wealth from what belonged to our father.” 2 And Jacob saw from Laban’s face that his attitude toward him was not the same as before. 3 The Lord said to him, “Go back to the land of your ancestors and to your family, and I will be with you.” 4 Jacob had Rachel and Leah called to the field where his flocks were. 5 He said to them, “I can see from your father’s face that his attitude toward me is not the same as before, but the God of my father has been with me. 6 You know that with all my strength I have served your father 7 and that he has cheated me and changed my wages ten times. But God has not let him harm me. 8 If he said, ‘The spotted sheep will be your wages,’ then all the sheep were born spotted. If he said, ‘The streaked sheep will be your wages,’ then all the sheep were born streaked. 9 God has taken away your father’s herds and given them to me. 10 “When the flocks were breeding, I saw in a dream that the streaked, spotted, and speckled males were mating with the females. 11 In that dream the angel of God said to me, ‘Jacob!’ and I said, ‘Here I am.’ 12 And he said, ‘Look up and see: all the males that are mating with the flocks are streaked, spotted, and speckled, for I have seen all that Laban has been doing to you. 13 I am the God of Bethel, where you poured oil on the stone marker and made a solemn vow to me. Get up, leave this land, and return to your native land.’ ” 14 Then Rachel and Leah answered him, “Do we have any portion or inheritance in our father’s family? 15 Are we not regarded by him as outsiders? For he has sold us and has certainly spent our purchase price. 16 In fact, all the wealth that God has taken away from our father belongs to us and to our children. So do whatever God has said to you.”

"Yaaqov heard the words of Lavan's sons." Remember Lavan's sons? They were just mentioned one other time, when Yaaqov said, "Hey, give me these particular animals." And Lavan said, "Yeah, great idea." And then  He rigs it by taking some of those out and giving them to his sons.

And so against all odds, he's a trickster, he's clever. He finds a way even to produce abundance when he's being deceived. 

So Lavan's sons hear about all of this abundance that Jacob has produced, and he hears Lavan's sons saying, "'Yaaqov, he's taken away everything that belongs to our dad, and from what belongs to our dad, he's made all of this wealth.' And Yaaqov could see the face of Lavan, and it was not like it used to be towards him."

That's such a great turn of phrase. And this is gonna begin a whole motif in the narratives that follow about seeing people's faces. He sees Lavan's face, it's not like it used to be. He's going to wrestle with Elohim and say, "I've seen Elohim face-to-face."

And then he's gonna meet Esau again and talk about what it's like to see his face. So he's beginning to see the faces of all of the people that he's been trying to swindle. 

It's much easier to deceive someone if you don't look them in the eyes. I'm kind of just working the metaphor here, but there's something like that going on where he begins to have to face everybody that he's wronged, including Elohim.

So Yaaqov, he looked Lavan in the face and could see, "Oh, I don't think he likes me anymore." "So Yahweh said to Yaaqov, 'Hey, time to go back. Return to the land of your fathers and to your birth family, and remember what I said at Bethel. I will be with you.' And Yaaqov sent, and he called Rakhel and Leah to his flock out in the field." It's the clandestine meeting out in the field.

"And he said to them, 'Ladies, I've seen your dad's face recently. It's not like it used to be towards me. But here's the thing, the God of my father, he has been with me.'" And is he wrong about that? Is he wrong about that? No, that's what God said. God just repeated it, "I am with you." "'So the God of my father has been with me.

Now you know that I have served your father with all my strength.'" Yeah, you have. "'And you know your father, he has cheated me. He's changed my wages 10 times, but God didn't allow him to do any ra, bad, towards me.

So if your dad said, "The speckled, that will be your wage." Then here's what's crazy. The flock would just bring forth speckled animals. I was, I couldn't believe it. And if Lavan said, "Well, the striped, that'll be your wage," the flock would just give birth to striped animals. It's like magic. God has delivered the livestock of your father and given it all to me.'"

Do you see what's happening here? Do you trust this guy?

God works in mysterious ways.

What he just said was, "You know, your father's been cheating me all along, but God has been with me.

And when Lavan said, 'Yeah, okay, you can have the speckled ones as your wage,' it's so remarkable, the flock just gave birth to speckled animals.

God has delivered me."

Now, you just read the story of what happened with those speckled and striped animals, yes? So you have the ability to evaluate the truthfulness of his comments.

That's what I mean. Do you trust this guy?

Do you trust his interpretation? And who's he trying to persuade here?

His wives.

His wives.

So he's saying that God just granted him this blessing, where actually he worked for it.

He schemed for it.

Were his wages really changed 10 times too? Makes me wonder.

verse 10. So here's the thing, you know how just the animals magically produce the ones that Lavan said would be my wage? "'Well, it came about one time when the flock were mating and I lifted up my eyes and I had this dream. And look, the male goats, which were going up onto the flock, well, they just happened to be the striped and speckled and mottled ones, the ones that Lavan said could be my wage. And the angel of God said to me in a dream, "Yaaqov." And I said, "Here I am." And he said, "Lift your eyes and see all of the male goats that are going up onto the flock are striped, speckled, and mottled, for I have seen everything Lavan has been doing to you. I'm the God of Bethel. You know, where you anointed that pillar, where you made a vow to me. So get up, go from this land and return to the land of your birth family."' And Rakhel and Leah said to him, 'Wow, it's a persuasive case, you know?

Do we have any portion or inheritance left in our father's house? I mean, aren't we actually considered foreigners to him now? I mean, he sold us, and he's consumed all of our silver.

I guess all the wealth God has delivered from our father, and now it belongs ...'" They don't say, "It belongs to you." They say, "'It belongs to us and to our sons.'" Ah. "'You know, whatever God has told you, let's do that.'"

And that's the story.

Isn't this remarkable?

What are two ways of reading Genesis 31:1-16? How can we discern between the two?

You could read the story two very different ways,

So let's talk about those two ways, and let's talk about how you would discern between the two different readings.

Do You believe that he had this dream or not?

let's notice that the narrator takes a back seat here, and Jacob is the big talker in this whole section. So the narrator, when the narrator tells us what God said to Yaaqov, what God says is, "Hey, go back home. I'm with you." And then in Jacob's report, that oracle becomes this whole big, long dramatic dream, and a dream about how the goats that just happened to multiply are the ones that I have a lot of right now. 

So it was clearly God delivering all of it to me. And this is all in Jacob's report, not the narrator's account.

And so it really, it becomes about the narrator versus Jacob. 

how do you get leverage on one interpretation or the other? Well, the narrator just straight up told us the story. And this was Yaaqov's scheme from beginning to end. 

Jacob never mentions Yahweh, and Yahweh, the narrator doesn't attribute Yaaqov's abundance to Yahweh at all. 

It's to his scheme. But Yaaqov wants to attribute his scheme to Yahweh because it suits his purpose to persuade his wives to get outta Dodge, "Because I don't think Lavan likes me anymore."

How many times do we say it was God’s will, or it God’s fault, or God provided, God gave me this vision/dream or something like that when it was our scheming, our plans, our desires.

God is putting up with Jacob but In not too long, God's gonna show up and pick a fight and hurt him.

 And by that point in the story, you're kind of like, "Yeah, this guy has it coming, you know."

this is gonna be a major motif. 

In the prophets, in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Micah, there's whole sections devoted to these stories or poems about trying to discern which prophets really speak for Yahweh, who's really telling the truth. And Ezekiel will be, "Yeah, and there's these prophets who say, 'I had a dream, I had a vision. Yahweh said this to me.'" And Ezekiel will just say like, "Man, they don't, the Spirit hasn't said one word to them."

The Hebrew Bible's really interested in trying to give us sophisticated categories, wisdom about how to discern when people are really representing God's purposes and God's voice. And this is the most elaborate case so far in Genesis.

This is a story about a man who cannot tell the difference between his own self-preserving schemes and God's blessing or between his own will and God's will. -Tim Mackie, Bible Project

The two are fused. He can't tell the difference between his own will and God's will, but in the bad sense. Like, there could be a good sense, where my will is so merged with God's will, they're one and the same. I mean, that's what Ezekiel prays for when God's Spirit is put in his people so that they do the Torah.

But this is like this weird version of the snake, where I mistake my own schemes for God's will.

These two different interpretations, possible ways to read the story, it's surely on purpose. Think all the way back to the garden. It's about who gets to tell the truth about what God said. Like, that's what that whole story is about. 

I guess I think another factor in this too, is how much of our traditions equipped us to see the biblical stories as capable of this kind of subtlety? This is very subtle storytelling to set you up to not trust what a character says. You know, you have to have a pretty keen radar for how narratives work to see that. And if you're raised to see all of these stories as children's literature anyway, and as moralistic tales that you take isolated from any kind of larger narrative arc, then yeah, you'll totally walk away and be like, "God told Jacob to leave, and so he did." He had this dream, and that's the week's lesson, or something like that. 

but when you have a sustained reading of the whole Jacob story up to this point, to me it's unavoidably the conclusion that he's using God's name to legitimate his own scheme once again. 

In the narrative portrait, Yaaqov may believe what he's saying because of self-deception, and he can't see the difference between his twisting of God's reputation and his own agenda.

What we see in the Bible is often more the result of what we have been trained to see or not see. And I think that's the challenge of being located in a tradition, but that's also part of the gift, is that traditions help teach us how to see. And so I think the opportunity before the body of the Messiah is to really lean on 2,000 years of history and a diverse multicultural body, that we need each other's ways of seeing and reading Scripture to keep us from being locked in our own cultural prisons, so to speak. this narrative is a great example of that.

But I think that in my own life experience, who doesn't know the feeling of not understanding your own motives for doing something? Like, we all have our own versions of this many times over, let's be honest. You know what I mean? And you're doing some good thing and it's, you know, sometimes it feels really good to tell yourself about how good you feel about doing that good thing. You know what I mean? You're like, "Well, I'm sure God's very pleased with me." And then, you know, so there's that. And then there's this other angle about mistaking my agenda for God's.

And if it works, I mean, there were more sheep.

So if it works, it must have been God, you know?

And you know, we know that's not always a formula that tells the truth. There's so many ways this can go.

Laban Pursues Jacob

Bibliography

https://bibleproject.com/classroom/jacob

Freedman, David Noel, Gary A. Herion, David F. Graf, John David Pleins, and Astrid B. Beck, eds. in The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary. New York: Doubleday, 1992.

Freedman, David Noel, Allen C. Myers, and Astrid B. Beck. in Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2000.

Mathews, K. A. Genesis 11:27–50:26. Vol. 1B of The New American Commentary. Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2005.

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Barry, John D., Douglas Mangum, Derek R. Brown, Michael S. Heiser, Miles Custis, Elliot Ritzema, Matthew M. Whitehead, Michael R. Grigoni, and David Bomar. Faithlife Study Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012, 2016.

Cotter, David W. Genesis. Edited by Jerome T. Walsh, Chris Franke, and David W. Cotter. Berit Olam Studies in Hebrew Narrative and Poetry. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2003.

https://hebrew4christians.com/Scripture/Parashah/Summaries/Vayetzei/Leah_s_Eyes/leah_s_eyes.html

https://biblepure.com/tender-eyed-meaning-in-the-bible/

https://www.logos.com/grow/tender-eyed-leah-meaning/

John D. Currid, A Study Commentary on Genesis: Genesis 25:19–50:26, EP Study Commentary (Darlington, England; Carlisle, PA: Evangelical Press, 2003), 97–98.

Abraham Kuruvilla, Genesis: A Theological Commentary for Preachers (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2014), 374.

John D. Currid, A Study Commentary on Genesis: Genesis 25:19–50:26, EP Study Commentary (Darlington, England; Carlisle, PA: Evangelical Press, 2003), 97–98.

Abraham Kuruvilla, Genesis: A Theological Commentary for Preachers (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2014), 374.

Scott Noegel's “Sex, Sticks, and Tricksters in Genesis 30:31-43: A New Look at an Old Crux” in Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society, vol. 25 (1997), p. 7-17.