Jacob and Laban

Gen 29: 14-15. Upon coming to Laban, Jacob lives with Laban for a month. It is reasonable to suppose that Jacob works for room and board during that time, since Laban says “You shouldn't work for me without pay just because we are relatives.” In other words, if Jacob is working for Laban, and if Jacob gets room and board, then Jacob’s labor is benefitting Laban at least somewhat above, and possibly far above, Jacob’s own keep.

But, when Jacob declares his ‘wages’, they are only the hand of Rachel in marriage after seven years of Jacob’s profitable labor. Laban does not tell Jacob that Laban is going to trick Jacob into marrying Leah, but seems simply to agree to Jacob’s terms. But, what Laban actually says seems to portend the trick, because what is recorded of Laban’s reply is not a simple express agreement by modern thinking, but seems to be an attempt on the part of Laban to make Jacob think that Laban has simply agreed when Laban has, in fact, allowed himself a hidden clause known only to him.

Some commentators suggest that the seven years of Jacob’s laboring for Laban is actually payment for a privilege conferred by Laban to Jacob to try to convince Rachel to agree to marry Jacob. In other words, Jacob has to convince Rachel to agree to marry him as the final stage in a rather complex, if tacit, set of prerequisites that allow Laban to responsibly give Rachel in marriage. By such reasoning, this means that there was opportunity for Rachel---and even Laban, if things turned out too disagreeably in Laban’s mind---to decide to refuse Jacob’s wish to have Rachel to wife. Of course, many modern commentators, so used to the rather lax modern methods of courtship, find the idea that even six-weeks of the profit from a young man’s labor is too steep a price for him to pay merely for the privilege to court a young lady. But, in virtually all but modern days, the formation of stable and prosperous couples (that is, the joining of a man and a woman as the dual core of domestic and sexual partnership, and any natural potential offspring therefrom) was far too important to be left to anything that was remotely ‘casual’.

So, whether Jacob obtained Rachel’s assent some time after the fixed agreement with Laban, or sometime prior, the main point may well be that the price for Rachel’s hand in marriage seems to have been the same either way. And, while it seems to be the maid’s right to refuse her suitor, at some point, as unsuitable to her, the actual beginning of the entire process ideally is a very ‘casual’ or ‘mundane’ association between the soon-to-be prospective suitor and the father of the maid. In the case of the process whose end was the marriage of Adam and Eve, that association was blissfully mundane. The principles of that original process may have been necessary merely because Adam and Eve began to exist as adults, the latter being so because the state of marriage, and the means which that state requires, is the true state of the nature of human beings, so that children ideally merely grow into that state. But, that true state of the nature of human beings has a logical pattern or structure, so that, in a fallen world, that structure is the guide to the process of its replication. And, since, in a fallen world, juveniles by definition cannot maintain that structure, then juveniles must be so directed as to prevent them from acting on the instinct to form any of the final and best parts of that structure until they have learned to maintain at least its critical prerequisites.

Now, it appears that the practice of typical modern parents toward the formation of couples among their children is a practice which reflects the worst that Laban could have done to Jacob and Rachel: encourage them to suppose themselves engaged to become, to some extent, a functional couple, and then, for either or both just and unjust reasons, prevent Jacob and Rachel from attaining that function at the natural or appointed stage in their romantic involvement. Such an encouragement is properly termed ‘Indian giving’: seeming to grant a right which its grantor has no simple intention to grant.

The term comes from a misunderstanding between European settlers of North America and its original occupants. The latter assumed that the request was merely to occupy-and-use certain portions of their accustomed terrain, as tenants paying rent or lease to proper land-holders. The Europeans believed that their proposed exchange was understood as the most simple and un-complex kind of exchange, so that they were paying a one-time sum to become the sovereigns over those portions. But, the original ‘possessors’ felt a most simple connection to that land, just as was invoked by God to each tribe of Israel for their respective portions of the land of Canaan. The difference is that the original-established occupants of North America were nearly in stasis in relation to the vastness of the land, so that the land was never improved to support more life despite that those occupants reproduced themselves. With too little connection to the best of the culture of the Old World, those occupants were just getting by. But, they were not meant to be wiped out, only thinned due to the worst of their ways, and so it is: they remain, and are even accorded special status as sovereigns of the lands to which they were driven, because they were observed to be far more enlightened and gentle than were so many of those who commanded their ultimate driving. They had inherited a certain feebleness of body, but also a much more ancient strength of spirit; and who knows from whence the later came? I say it came from the most physically and, or, psychologically feeble descendants of Shem, having alone been driven out of the Old World by the same greedy kind of men who ultimately drove them onto the lands now reserved for them by their all-but-unwitting beneficiaries. They could not tolerate the greed of those like Laban, nor the aggressiveness of those like Jacob, so they alone were driven to the path to the final reserve, and became its original sovereigns. Now the circle is completed, and the feathers proclaim its special glory. And, not long after its completion, the wood of that circle shall burn because of the evil domestic and international ways of the current occupants: a new Rome invaded and brought to its knees, far worse a fate than what those original sovereigns suffered by the more greedy of the European settlers. As to persons, so to peoples: none have a right to put God’s glory even on pause. Many things comprise true prosperity and true righteousness, and anything consistently short of it is doomed even within itself.

So, Laban was doomed until Jacob arrived, and by Jacob was Laban made to increase in one narrow measure of prosperity. But, Laban looked not to the benefit of Jacob at all, except as a merest means to his own aggrandizement. So, Laban determined to gain as much of an inroad to Jacob’s resources as he had any power to do: through both of his daughters. But, since Jacob was already God’s sworn---and most blessed---servant, all of Laban’s contrivances became failures even to keep Jacob’s civil wishes, and Jacob was the true man. It seems to me that what God Himself in the end forced on Laban was to speak neutrally toward Jacob, removing from Laban even Laban’s love of his own pretense of good wishes by civil flourish and generous words: in essence, it seems to my initial reading, God said to Laban, ‘Shut up, you conniving windbag!’ Laban was a type of proverbially dishonest ‘used car salesman’ and ‘contract lawyer’ (and the arrogant, ostensibly 'called', 'evangelistic' preacher and his door-to-door cronies).

So, too, is any set of elders doomed who, by their ways, cause what otherwise would be healthy and prosperous young men and women, young men and women who fear God more than they fear disapproval for failure to attend such elders assemblies, even if those elders suppose that their assemblies are basically just or gracious. A way of knowledge which severely oppresses one, though it moderately enlightens a hundred, is a way which only spiritual vipers can favor. Love does no harm to its neighbor. Some pastors are a complex tangle who have the spirit of Laban. They build little bubbles of prosperity that are doomed to deflate! Woe to those who are faithful to such pastors! They and them shall be burned, and raped, and bled to death upside-down! And upon such men shall the world cast a weary eye, as a drunk looks upon his vomit!