An Atheistic Bible Study Of Genesis Chapter Thirty One - Jacob Escapes Laban

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Having systematically taken Laban (his father in law’s sheep and goat herds as his own, Jacob realizes that Laban is wising up to what has been going on. He knows that Laban’s own sons know what he has been up to, and Laban is now looking at him in suspicion. If that is not grounds for running away in itself, Jacob finally decides to go when God tells him to go home to Isaac. God promises to watch over Jacob as he goes. Jacob tells his two non-slave wives Leah and Rachel that he plans to depart. He reasons that Laban has ripped him off financially and tricked him into his marriages and twenty years of servitude. He believes Laban would have killed him, hurt him or ripped him off even more if God had not imposed restraint on Laban. He explains to his wives how he stole the best of Laban’s sheep and goats, repeating events in Chapter thirty. He adds a detail not given before about an angel intervening to make sure the rams with streaks, spots and speckles alone mate with Laban’s goats (Jacob has been granted permission to keep the thus marked goats). Half way through this discourse the angel sent by God suddenly talks in the first person as being God himself. He has ordered Jacob to get away from Laban. Rachel and Leah agree to go with Jacob because Laban, in profiting from Jacob’s twenty years of labour, never shared any of the profit he made with them or their children. Jacob gathers all his family and slaves and leaves with a vast caravan of camels, with all his sheep and goats too. Rachel, just as they leave, steals all her father’s idols relating to his gods. She does not tell Jacob she has done this. Laban only realizes everyone has fled three days after the escape party sets off, and with a large posse of his people he sets off after Jacob in a chase that lasts seven days. As he gets near Jacob, God comes to Laban and warns him not to hurt Jacob or even speak to him too harshly. Laban pitches camp near to where Jacob is resting and goes to parley with him. He claims that he would have arranged Jacob a happy leaving feast if Jacob hadn’t fled without saying goodbye. This is clearly due to God ordering him to be nice, it is not sincere. Laban tells Jacob he has spoken with God and accepts that Jacob can go, with the wives, laves and sheep, but he begs Jacob for the return of the idols of the family gods. Rachel has hidden the gods well, and Jacob, genuinely looking for them, fails to find them. They are actually under the blankets on the very camel Rachel is sitting on. She tells Laban she can’t get off the camel because he is having her period. He believes her. Jacob and Laban argue bitterly over the deceptions thy have imposed on each other during Jacob’s twenty year stay with Laban, who sees everything and everyone Jacob has taken, including Jacob’s wives, twelve children and slaves, as his own. Laban suggests a covenant truce treaty between himself and Jacob, who marks the agreement by building an altar. The men give the altar site different names. Laban call it Jager-Sahaduta. Jacob names it Galeed. Laban expresses a wish for Jacob’s God to watch over both himself and Jacob even in their different lands. He also demands that Jacob never remarries, even though Jacob now has four wives already. Laban sees the altar heap and a pillar he builds near it as a border line that neither men should cross against the other in anger. The men swear on God and the soul of old Isaac (who isn’t even with them) that the peace will be upheld between them, and they sacrifice an animal on the stone, and eat bread together. The next morning, Laban offers a kiss of blessing to each of Jacob’s son (though not the daughter, Dinah. Laban now goes home to his own country. Much of the story is two con-men growing to like one another with Jacob as the ultimate victor in their Dirty Rotten Scoundrels scams. Laban only makes peace because God orders it which is odd given that Laban maintains his own beliefs and culture. He is genuinely upset by the loss of the statues of his family gods. Rachel’s motives for the theft are never explained. That Laban gives Galeed a name of his own shows a similar reluctance to embrace early Judaism. The odd part of all this is that Laban has spoken to Yahweh personally, so he knows the Jewish God exists, despite which he sticks to his own gods. This suggests that Monotheism has not yet kicked in even for the Old Testament writers. The other gods are seen as still existing, not jut being believed in. Rachel’s theft of the idols suggests that despite adhering to faith in Jacob’s God, she is secretly still loyal to her father’ beliefs too. It makes the later Judaeo-Christian rejection of the existence of other gods arbitrary and absurd. Arthur Chappell