Jacob wrestled an angel, and the angel was overcome

"[Jacob] fixed the peeled rods upright in the troughs at the watering-places where the flocks came to drink; they faced the she-goats that were on heat when they came to drink. They felt a longing for the rods and they gave birth to young that were striped and spotted and brindled." --Gen. 30:38-39

Old Testament
Book 1: Genesis
Jacob and Esau (cont'd)
Chapter 29: Jacob falls in love with Rachel, has five children with her sister Leah
Chapter 30: Jacob has children with Bilhah, Zilpah, and Rachel, then proves evolution
Chapter 31: Rachel has her period
Chapter 32: Jacob tries to make up with Esau

Jacob's story is really great. It has everything--wild sex, intrigue, deceit, chases, fights.

Jacob meets Rachel in much the same way his father met Rebecca--at a watering hole. Rachel is totally hot and he falls in love with her immediately. But he's not half the man his father was--rather than dragging her off to a tent and taking her virginity right then he actually introduces himself and asks to meet her father! What a wuss. Well, no good deed goes unpunished, and Laban (Rachel's father) makes him work for him for seven years before he can have sex with her! Don't worry, God makes it up to him, and after that seven year wait he has more sex than any mortal man could survive.

Laban is as deceitful as any of the Abraham clan (but he is part of the Abraham clan after all--he is Abraham's nephew--his brother Nahor's son, right?) After Jacob works for SEVEN YEARS in order to win Rachel's hand in marriage, Laban sends his daughter to Jacob. Once again, of course, they don't get MARRIED--she just goes into his tent to have sex. But Laban, it turns out has two daughters, Leah and Rachel. Leah is older and plain, Rachel is younger and hot.

I love that this unfortunate girl is named Leah. In my whole life I have known exactly one girl named Leah. I went to grade school with her, and every time I read this story I laugh at how the Leah I knew fit the Leah in this story. It is amazing, isn't it, how even in grade school, there are the cool kids, the nerdy kids, the pretty girls, the plain girls, and the role we adopt in grade school continues through our entire lives. What a sad tragedy of human existence that is, isn't it?! Anyway, Leah was a very plain girl in grade school. I have no memory of what happened to her after that, if she moved away, or perhaps we even went to high school together, but one thing I know without a doubt is that she's still the plain girl.

Of course this rule isn't universal. Another kid I went to grade school with was named Harvey. Want to take a guess which group he belonged to? With a name like Bible Toenail, which group do you think I belonged to? I was one one of the nerdy, dorky kids. I wasn't horribly disliked, but I was never exactly popular. Anyway, one of the low points in my entire life--to this day I don't know what made me do this. The bullies were always threatening to beat me up, and so one day I picked Harvey and threatened to beat him up! It's so bizarre, I would never do something like that today. But then, I think, I got a rush of reversing roles--terrorizing someone else instead of being terrorized. I don't know what poor Harvey thought--"wtf is going on? Now my fellow dorks are beating me up?!" Anyway, unlike Tim and Andy, the head bully and his retarded sidekick, I actually did hit Harvey. To this day I feel immensely guilty about it. It's an interesting moment in my life for me to contemplate--I think it shows how unformed our psyches are as children. We all have the capacity to become good or bad people, and any one of us can easily fall on either side of that fence. Tim may be a great guy now, who knows. This incident with Harvey may be the moment of truth in my life, when I teetered and did fall onto the good side. When Harvey's dad came down the hill to complain to my dad about what his son had done, I couldn't even explain why to my dad--I didn't know why. Because of how you treated me, Dad? Or Tim? Who knows?

Anyway, several years later, one summer when I was back from college, I saw my grade school friend Brent at a record store talking to this muscle bound guy who reminded me of Max Weinberg. It was Harvey! He had enormous muscles, and could have squeezed me like a pimple. Was it that time I hit him that made him decide he needed to be able to defend himself? Or what other indignations had he suffered? Or was it just to get girls? That day probably 10 years after hitting him I was so uncomfortable. I still knew what I had done, and I'm sure he did to. The point is, Harvey turned out not at all to be the dorky kid he had been in grade school. I have probably changed a lot less than Harvey! So maybe Leah is hot now, who knows.

But anyway the tradition in Laban's culture was that the older sister had to get married before the younger. So after Jacob had worked for him for seven years, Laban sent a woman into Jacob's tent to have sex, only Jacob discovered the next morning it was not Rachel! Laban made a deal with Jacob that if he would work another seven years for Laban, he could have Rachel too. Jacob agreed, and after the wedding started sleeping with Rachel too.

God saw that Leah was not loved, and made Rachel barren. Here's another great moment in the bible. You'd think that meant that Jacob was ignoring Leah, and only sleeping with Rachel, right? No, no, no. Remember this is the bible we're reading. Jacob never stops sleeping with Leah, he just doesn't love Leah! So Leah immediately becomes pregnant.

Ultimately Jacob ends up with 12 children, who become the twelve tribes of Israel. This story might be the greatest male fantasy of all time. Rachel and Leah are both jealous of the other. Leah is jealous because Jacob doesn't love her, so she has children. Then Rachel is jealous because she can't have children, so she sends Bilhah her servant to Jacob so he can have sex with her. Bilhah gets pregnant, then Leah gets jealous of that because she stopped having kids, so she sends her own slave girl Zilpah. So Jacob has FOUR women vying for his affections! He spent those seven years running from one tent to the next trying to keep all of them satisfied.

Since it's probably important, here are Jacob's twelve children, by four different women, in order:
Leah: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah.
Bilhah: Dan, Naphtali
Zilpah: Gad, Asher
Leah: Issachar, Zebulun.
That's ten. Then Leah also bore Dinah, another important figure for a feminist reading of the bible.
Rachel: Joseph

Now, those are, or become, the twelve tribes of Israel. The only problem is, there are only eleven of them (Dinah of course doesn't count). Rachel has one more child, Benjamin, but not until much later, in chapter 35. Benjamin is the only full brother of Joseph, and plays an important part in Joseph's story.

Now we really get into it. Jacob goes to Laban and says he wants to take his wives, slaves, children, and flocks and leave. The question is how to split up Jacob's flocks from Laban's? Jacob makes Laban what is ostensibly a very generous offer--he says he will take only the black sheep, and the "spotted and brindled" goats, Laban can have the rest. Most sheep are white, and most goats are black (according to the note), so this was hugely in Laban's favor, and he accepts right away.

The time frame here is confusing to me, apparently after the deal Jacob stays with several more years with Laban before leaving. In the mean time, Jacob is still in charge of Laban's flocks. What does he do? This is very important. Read Gen. 30:35-43. This story simultaneously destroys any claim Christians have that evolution does not exist, and at the same time belies the complete lack of real science in the bible. For some reason I've never heard a fundamentalist Christian discuss this story.

What Jacob does is he takes long sticks, and whenever one of the sheep is in heat, when the sheep comes to the watering trough he put the sticks in front of the sheep. Then the sheep "felt a longing for the rods and they gave birth to young that were striped and spotted and brindled" (Gen. 30:39). According to the note on this verse, "many people, ancient and modern,
have believed that a fetus can be affected by the visual impressions of the mother" (Emphasis added, Gen. 30:39n). By showing the sheep stripes when she became pregnant, the author of the bible believed, Jacob could make striped sheep!

How could the God who designed and invented our reproductive systems believe in something so outlandish? How do people who think the bible is literally true explain this? It's not simply poetic license like the windows in the sky letting in the rain. These actions of Jacob's are central to the story--they are the turning point of the story. I imagine some Christians might say something along the lines of "God works in mysterious ways," meaning it was really God who made the sheep striped. God could certainly do that, but the story doesn't make sense, for a couple reasons. First, why? Why did Jacob do this, rather than just praying to God? Why have Jacob go through the exercise at all? But more importantly the narrator of the bible is omniscient--she knows the thoughts of God as well as those of the characters on the ground. (Examples are God's feelings about A&E eating from the tree, his reaction to the Tower of Babel, his reaction to Sodom and Gomorrah, his heart softening toward Hagar, etc.) If it is true that God did this with the stripes, why doesn't the bible say so? It would be completely out of whack for God to have had a hand in this particular episode and the bible not to have mentioned it. Furthermore, the point the fundamentalists make is that we are wrong to read into the bible or extrapolate, or take the stories figuratively rather than literally. But that works both ways. If we can't claim a story is only a parable, we certainly can't claim God did something the bible didn't tell us about!

Anyway, that's only the first part of it. Let's grant to Jacob that he can make striped sheep by showing the mothers the rods. What he does next, I think, is even more significant. He doesn't show the rods to all of the sheep that are in heat. He only does so for the strong sheep. The weak sheep he leaves alone, so that in a couple generations all the strongest sheep were striped and brindled, and all the white sheep--Laban's--were weak.

Has the significance of this passage sunk in? Even 5000 years ago, when the people were so ignorant they believed absurd wives' tales about visions affecting pregnancy, even these people already had observed that strong parents have strong offspring, and weak have weak: even during the time of Genesis, when the people and the authors knew almost nothing about real science, for even them natural and artificial selection was so obvious that they could use it for breeding purposes. Fundamentalist, "intelligent-design" Christians deny that even this process is possible. It's right there in black and white, Gen. 30:41-42: Jacob put the rods in front of the more vigorous goats, and did not for the weaker goats, "Thus the weaker came to be Laban's and the stronger Jacob's." The entire point, the driving narrative force of this story is evolution.

I'm rather astounded no one ever talks about this passage in connection with evolution. (Of course there are such conversations on the internet! Here's an interesting one: http://www.iidb.org/vbb/archive/index.php/t-38678.html but I've never heard it mentioned in the popular press. [At the same time, none of these wonderful stories are mentioned in the popular press--they are something of an embarrassment, I imagine. Although, none are significantly more "embarrassing" then chapter 1 and 2, so why are they so willing to embrace those stories?])

I'll stop here. I didn't have time for Rachel's big moment, and the big camel chases a la Seven Pillars of Wisdom. They will have to be in the future, along with Jacob wrestling an angel (Gen. 32) Here is U2 singing about that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J2uYVdC6S4


--bibletoenail


Future topics:
Laban chases after Jacob in the desert like T.E. Lawrence. --Gen. ch. 31
Rachel's big moment, and Laban's "household idols." --Gen. ch. 31
Jacob tries to make up with Esau. --Gen. ch. 32
Jacob wrestles with an angel, and changes his name to Israel. --Gen. ch. 32