Jacob
said to Laban, “Why then have you deceived me?”
Genesis 29:25b
The “Kent Spike Stud.”
A World Cup MVP contender? Tie fittings for an
inter-city British Railways line? A thoroughbred entertaining dreams of the
Triple Crown?
No. No. And no.
The Kent Spike Stud. Manufactured by Kent Stainless,
Ireland’s leading manufacturer of stainless-steel drainage hardware. But the
Kent Spike Stud has nothing at all to do with drainage. That’s because Kent
Stainless has diversified and now makes and distributes the Kent Spike Stud.
Bullet-shaped and three-inches high, when installed
strategically it’s the perfect device to deter people from parking themselves where
they’re not wanted. No wonder they’re also called “anti-homeless spikes.”
Whether or not you sign on to using such tactics to
discourage people from occupying certain public ─ or even private ─ spaces, many argue that, as pure design, the Kent
Spike Stud qualifies as art.
That’s why, earlier this month, a cluster of the spike
studs were installed in a glass case as the latest objets d'art to enter the
permanent collection of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
But the installation’s tastefully antiseptic label
─ Spike Stud, 2014, Stainless Steel ─ notwithstanding, why does the menacing Kent Spike
Stud merit a place in the collection in the first place? Corinna Gardner, a
curator at the V&A, suggests, “Sinister objects demand our attention just
as much as beautiful ones.”
And that’s why, among a handful of other reasons (such
as, getting a handle on the idea of Jewish destiny), Jacob merits a place ─ a prominent
place ─ in
the stories of the origins of the Hebrew people.
Fact is: Jacob is an almost
fatally-flawed patriarch. It really is hard to see much good in him, although I
suppose you have to admire ─ or
is it envy? ─ his
moxie. And reviewing his adventures up to his back-to-back marriages to the sisters Leah
and Rachel, you’re left to wonder what exactly God sees in Jacob as a future
nation-builder.
A reasonable person is left to conclude that ─ except
for the fact that he proves to be an improbable romantic (he’s smitten
with his wife-to-be Rachel) ─ Jacob
is out-and-out sinister. How sinister? Um, how much time do you
have? Well, three offenses leap from his rap sheet:
Come birth-time, just as his twin brother Esau is
about to take first-born honors, Jacob literally tries to claw his way out out of the womb into
the dog-eat-dog world by climbing over Esau. He fails, but never really gives
up trying to trump his hapless elder twin.
Proof? After they’ve grown up ─ in the legendary “stew for stupefying wealth”
scheme ─
Jacob talks Esau into bartering away his twice-as-large inheritance.
And then, as their age-dimmed, functionally-blind
father Isaac lies on his deathbed, the metrosexualized Jacob pulls the wool
over the old man’s eyes by aping Esau’s ferocious butchness. Isaac, taken in by
the ruse, gives his paternal blessing (and the material perks that go with it)
to scheming second-son Jacob rather than to first-born Esau. In effect, as
Isaac tells the soon-livid Esau, the pecking order is now turned on its head:
he ─ the
elder son ─ must
now take his marching orders from Jacob.
Taken together, a theme emerges: Consumed by
jealousy, resentment, and greed, Jacob leverages his survivor’s instinct to
become a master of deception.
But the master deceiver is about to meet his match!
Picture this: Esau is now out for blood ─ Jacob’s blood. Their mother Rebekah, who from the
start has had Jacob’s back, tips him off and encourages him to seek refuge
among her geographically-distant relatives. And in the spirit of “if God gives
you lemons, make lemonade,” Rebekah suggests, “While you’re at it, marry one of
your cousins. A first-cousin will do nicely.” Yes, it sounds weird in the shallow-gene-pool
sense, but that’s the way they did it.
And that’s exactly what happens. Jacob escapes
Esau’s clutches just in the nick of time and soon finds himself at a well on
his Uncle Laban’s sprawling ponderosa.
Now, the minute a well pops up in a story like
this, you should be hearing wedding bells, because time after time after time,
wells in the Bible function as a prototype for Match.com. Meaning: communal
wells are hook-up joints of sorts ─
where a man-on-the-make ─ or
at least, a man-in-the-market-for-a wife ─ can
check out eligible women.
Examples: Isaac meets Rebekah for the first time at
a well. Moses meets one of his future wives, Zipporah, at a well. And that’s why
─ in
John’s Gospel ─ the
disciples get all jumpy when they stumble upon “Eligible-Bachelor-Number-One” Jesus
and a footloose woman chatting it up at a well in taboo Samaria. What else
could it be but a pre-nuptial assignation? The joke is on the disciples, of
course, because, yes, Jesus is
talking to the woman about marriage: her five
marriages! And Jesus clearly doesn’t intend to make it a sixth.
So, we have the well. We have the bachelor. All that's missing is his future intended. Violà! Who should appear but Rachel ─ one of his Uncle Laban’s
daughters ─ a
first-cousin, no less. Jacob tweets, “Victory is mine!”
That prompts Jacob to hang around working for
Laban … for free. Very out-of-character, but a sure-fire way to woo the love of his life while lulling the
father into the reality of a Jacob-Rachel match-up. Clever. You would expect nothing
less from Jacob.
A month of this pre-marital sweat equity goes by.
Laban says, “Jacob, you’re a hard worker. You should get paid. Quote me a
figure.”
Jacob’s answer? “I’ll give you a figure: Rachel. Marriage to Rachel.”
So Jacob and Laban hammer out a deal: Laban gets
seven years' free labor out of Jacob. Jacob gets Rachel when the seven years
are up. Simple.
So, what about those seven years? Agony for Jacob?
Hardly. “Jacob served seven years for Rachel,” Genesis says, “and they seemed
to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.”
Sublime! Too bad things turn sour … because at the
wedding, Laban pulls a bait-and-switch. Meaning: Chalk it up to the open bar,
all the bridal veils, the poor lighting, there’s the morning after. The dawn
long-past, Jacob yawns, rubs the sleep from his blood-shot eyes, and turns to
his freshly-minted wife: “Man, was I drunk last night. You won’t believe this,
but I dreamt I married your sister Leah!” His new wife comes into focus. Pregnant
pause. “Holy moly! I did marry Leah!”
Of course, no one likes being deceived, so Jacob
goes ballistic! And then he goes to Laban: “I thought we had a deal!”
Laban: “Oh, I guess you didn’t get the memo. In
these parts, we marry off the first-born
daughter before any of her sisters.”
Having moved the goalposts, Laban now
negotiates a twofer: Jacob gets to marry Rachel the very next week(!) if he agrees to party-it-up for the customary,
full seven-day wedding celebrations underway as a face-saving gesture to Leah …
and if he agrees to work for Laban ─ free ─ for
another seven years.
In the end, Jacob honors his end of the bargain ─ as does Laban. Love triumphs … along with symmetry. Yes, symmetry. Like: seven
years’ labor, marry Leah … marry Rachel, seven years’ labor.
Another example: Jacob bilks his brother Esau (a
relative) … a relative (his Uncle Laban) bilks Jacob.
Symmetry. In other words, if you take all of the Bible
literally ─
word for word ─ it’s
tempting to read Jacob’s story as history: Jacob defrauds his brother … he
then tricks his father … after that, he gets the woman of his dreams (but
only after failing to get her the first time around) … and (in a future
installment) on a dare he wrestles with God and wins mind-boggling
concessions before the match concludes with God committing a foul. Jacob has
that effect on people.
But history isn’t obliged to be symmetrical. And
what we have here is symmetry on an epic scale.
So what?
It’s the symmetry in these
stories ─ or
the way seemingly unrelated episodes connect to each other, even mirror each other over the long arc of
Jacob’s lifetime ─ that
makes the stories read less like A
History of the Jewish People and more like The Lord of the Rings … more like a morality tale or fable designed
to awaken the moral imagination, while it entertains.
For example, Jacob’s crimes against twin Esau in
the first part of the story resonate later
on, when sinister Jacob is twinned with sinister Laban … and the deceiver is deceived.
Or take Jacob ─ in the heyday of his
skullduggery ─ exploiting
Isaac’s blindness by pulling off a cosmetic-and-costume switch. And then roughly seven years later, blotto-blind on his
wedding night, Jacob himself is blind-sided by the Leah-not-Rachel switch. This
mischief then captures the ultimate in symmetry: second-born Jacob conned by
first-born Leah: a Bizarro-World negative
of Jacob’s own anti-Esau scam.
It’s that symmetry ─ when the other shoe drops ─ that unmasks Jacob’s
own morally-questionable history … symmetry that awakens Jacob’s moral
imagination with one sobering question: “Am I really any different from Laban?”
Bottomline: The stories of patriarchs and
matriarchs in Genesis aren’t just stories. And it would be a stretch to believe
they’re history. They are intentionally-crafted
case studies that encourage us to explore how we might love God better and better … love our neighbor better and
better … and get better and better at even loving ourselves … by teaching us
how to make choices that will determine the people we will become.
But if ─ by
chance ─ we
see a bit of ourselves in Jacob, are we destined to be like him? No, of course
not … if we make better decisions ─
more loving, more neighborly decisions ─ than
he did. Read: Our decisions determine our destiny, just as Jacob’s will determine
his.
That leaves us hanging, as any good morality tale
at this point should: Will Jacob, his unlovely and unloving behavior exposed,
catch a slanting glimpse of the untapped goodness God sees in him?
And given
Jacob’s unsavory history, why should we even care?
Well, sinister people demand our attention just as
much as beautiful people. No question about it: Jacob demands our attention.
Amen.
