Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67 Commentary

Last week we looked at the exceedingly fraught and difficult story of the binding (and near sacrifice) of Isaac in Genesis 22.  We noted how maddeningly spare that narrative is.  The story cries out—nearly screams out—for more details.  Instead we get a crisp, bare-bones narrative that dispatches with the whole terrible story in a short 15 verses.

This week we get a vastly more straightforward story, and yet the author of Genesis 24 takes forever and a day to spit it out already.  Even the Lectionary skips the entire first half of the chapter and once it picks things up in verse 34, the RCL shows a bit of its own narrative impatience by chopping up the remaining 33 verses into three chunks so as to delete at least a dozen or so verses to speed things along.  Not only is the story told twice in this chapter—once in the narration of the actual encounter at the well and then a second time as the servant re-tells that whole story in the second half of the chapter—we also linger on all kinds of details until mercifully the whole thing ends after a whopping 67 verses, making this the longest chapter in Genesis, the second longest chapter (by just 2 verses) in the whole Pentateuch and one of the longest in the whole Bible, eclipsed only by chapters like Luke 1 and 2.

Devoting that much narrative real estate to this story may or may not signal anything of significance.  Still, for some reason the author and redactor(s) of Genesis clearly believed that this story was important.  It needed to be a tale told in full.  Theologically, though, it is difficult to see this.  It is key that Isaac is going to carry forward the covenant God established with his father Abraham.  And although in the future there will be plenty of foreign influence on and even participation in the covenant people of Abraham and Isaac’s descendants—including Canaanites who will even later get listed in the family tree of Jesus in Matthew 1—for now it appears to be important that this remain a kind of “all in the family” affair such that Isaac’s wife had to come from back home and not from the land to which God had directed Abraham.

There is not a lot of indication God had commanded this per se.  Abraham predicts earlier in the chapter that God would send an angel ahead of the servant to help ensure his success in finding the right woman for Isaac to marry but it’s not clear God had revealed that to Abraham or if Abraham assumed this (and maybe after that bad business God had put Abraham through on Mount Moriah back in Genesis 22, Abraham figured God owed him one!).  In any event, Abraham for sure sees everything as riding on the success of this wife-finding mission, and the narrative itself thus lingers on every little detail to show exactly how it all panned out that Rebekah was found.

Isaac is quite passive in the whole story, never speaking a word even at the end when he meets Rebekah and promptly “marries” her (which seems to mean he made love to her on their first date and that was that in terms of de facto marrying her).  Indeed, Isaac is just generally a fairly passive figure in Genesis.  The only narrative in which he is more active and says a few things is in Genesis 26 where he participates in a parallel story to what happened to also his father when once in Egypt he lied about Sarah being his wife.  Otherwise the last we see of him is when he is so old and nearly blind as to be easily duped by his crafty son Jacob in cheating dim-witted Esau out of the paternal blessing.

Rebekah on the other hand brings into the story what appears to be an old family tradition of pulling dirty tricks on folks.  Crafty “Heel-Grasper” Jacob will come by his crooked and scheming nature honestly, inheriting it from his mother.  Eventually Jacob will meet his crafty match in his mother’s brother Laban (though Uncle Laban will in the end lose out to the superior trickster in the person of his nephew Jacob!).

Despite the somewhat repetitive nature of how this story spools out in Genesis 24, however, it is a charming story in its own way and the wise preacher will know to just let the story be the center of the sermon.  Don’t boil off the characters, the dialogue, the drama, and the color of the narrative in favor of reducing the whole thing to a concept or idea that then becomes the whole sermon.  Let the story be told.  Re-tell it and embellish it a bit.  See in it the hidden hand of God’s providence, which we all hope and believe is active in also our lives today even if nine times out of ten we recognize it best only in retrospect.  We could all wish our lives unfolded as clear cut as someone’s saying, “Dear God, make the person I am looking for do exactly X, Y, and Z” and then, voila, someone does exactly that before our very eyes.  Mostly God’s directing of our own lives is a bit more subtle.  Still, we believe it’s there.

And although Isaac himself is not at the well to meet Rebekah, this is even so the first such encounter at a well that becomes what Robert Alter calls a “type scene” in the Bible.  When a man meets a woman at a well, marriage is almost always in the offing.  This will be repeated several times in the Bible, all the way down to a hot day in the noonday sun in a place called Sychar when a man named Jesus has a conversation with a certain Samaritan woman at a well.  The resulting “marriage” in that case is a spiritual one but the idea of a union forming between God and a despised “foreign” people with whom pious Jews wanted no part is still the bottom line of the story in John 4.

In any event, the Genesis 24 narrative is the first major shift to focusing on Isaac and soon enough we will carry on from here in telling these early stories of Israel’s founding fathers and mothers.  They are finally stories of faithfulness but also fitfulness as the Bible does not generally cover up the foibles and faults of Abraham and his kin.  But as in this story, God sticks with them through it all as God presses on toward the goal he first articulated to Adam and Eve moments after they messed up: God will save the whole lot of us eventually and he’ll do it by grace alone.

Illustration Idea

This story is from long ago and far away and so no doubt strikes us now as odd and vaguely inappropriate.  A woman is basically bought here from her family who is rewarded for giving her up with loads of treasures of significant value.  Rebekah is passive in most of the narrative until her family’s plea to give them ten days to say goodbye is turned down rather flatly by Abraham’s servant.  So they ask Rebekah if she is willing to take her leave right then and there.  She was willing and so then she left.

The whole story has about all the romance of a business transaction.  Until the very end anyway.  Then we are told that Isaac genuinely came to love Rebekah and in one of the most humanizing touches of this whole section of Genesis, we are told Isaac was comforted after the death of his mother.  There is something lovely about that.

We are also told that for some reason Isaac had gone to live in the Negev but it’s not clear why.  His father was still alive after all, though we are told in the next chapter Abraham re-married after Sarah died and who knows if maybe it was hard for Isaac to see his mother replaced like that.  And as I (somewhat wryly) mused last week, maybe after that near-death incident on Mount Moriah some years before, Isaac had a hard time trusting his father.  Between his grief over losing his Mom and the spectacle of his father’s having taken on a new woman as his wife, maybe Isaac just needed some distance.

So when we are told Rebekah was a comfort to him in the midst of all this, that is actually a more meaningful line than we might at first suspect.