46 GOODBYE RACHAEL AND ISAAC

Bethel was a wonderful place and had an altar and a spiritual history with great meaning to Jacob. Yet it too was only one of a number of places where Jacob the traveler moved to and then from. No matter how much we love a place and the memories of the spiritual lessons we learned and fruit we bore there, it it still not our final destination. We need to be willing to move on until our final move to our eternal home. I once sat next to an esteemed man of God and scholar for whom I had great respect. He had served his denomination well in an exceptionally large number of capacities, missionary, pastor, supervisor, general supervisor, supervisor again and then author. I asked him about his feelings regarding all this variety and can still remember now the words he used in his meaningful response. “I never figured I had the right to assume that I would always be in the place where I was.” I have never forgotten his wisdom and have needed to apply it many times as I traveled through my own life’s journey. Our final home is in heaven. We are not there yet. We are only temporally living wherever we are now. We should be emotionally, psychologically and spiritually prepared to move when God directs us.

Jacob and his company left Bethel and moved south towards Hebron where his father, Isaac, now lived. Jacob had left Canaan land from Beersheva and while Jacob was gone, Isaac evidently moved to Hebron. Rachael was Jacob’s beloved daughter of Laban and then his beloved and favorite wife. She began to travail in childbirth as they approached Bethlehem. She was not able to reach it, the next town, though they were near it. As you know, the pains of a woman in travail may come suddenly. She cannot escape, or put it off. We may suppose Jacob quickly set up a tent convenient enough for her privacy. But her pains were violent. She had hard labour, harder than usual. The origins of travail at childbirth was due to sin. Genesis 3:16A says, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children.” Human life begins with sorrow, and the roses of its joy are surrounded with thorns. Surely Jacob would have arranged that a midwife was ready should her services be needed, but that did not preserve Rachael’s life. According to verse 17, in those painful moments the midwife remembering what Rachael had said when Joseph was born, tried to encourage Rachael by saying “Don’t despair, for you have another son.” Rachel had said, when she bore Joseph, God shall add another son, which now the midwife remembers, and tells her that her words were made good. Yet this did not maintain Rachael’s life. Only God can do that. Unless God command away fear, no one else can. Unless God command away death, no one else can. He only has that authority. We are apt, in extreme perils, to comfort ourselves and our friends with the hopes of a temporal deliverance, in which we may be disappointed, but we had better base our peace and contentments on what cannot fail us, the hope of eternal life. Her travail was for the life of the child and, sadly, also to her own death. Though the pains and perils of childbearing were introduced by sin, the history of the human race indicates that they have sometimes been fatal to very holy women, who, though not saved in childbearing, are saved through it and by it pass into their everlasting salvation. Rachel desperately wanting to have children had passionately said to her husband, Jacob, Give me children, or else I die; and now with the birth of her second one, she died.

Her dying lips called her new-born son Ben-oni, The son of my sorrow. Sadly, many a son, not only those born in such hard labor, proves to be the son of his parent’s sorrow, and the heaviness of her that bore him. Children are enough the sorrow of their poor mothers in the carrying, bearing, and nursing of them; that it would be nice therefore, if when they grow up, they would attempt to be their joy, and so, if possible, to make them some repayment. But Jacob, because he evidently did not want to recall the sorrowful memory of the mother’s death every time he called his son by his name, changed his name, and called him Benjamin, The son of my right hand. That was a faith-related name, a forward looking name “very dear to me, set on my right hand for a blessing, the support of my age, like the staff in my right hand.”

Jacob buried his beloved Rachael near the place where she died. As she died in a bed, it was convenient to bury her quickly; and therefore he did not bring her to the burying-place of his family. If the soul be at rest after death, it matters little where the body lies. In the place where the tree falls, there let it be. No mention is made of the mourning that surely accompanied her death. We the readers of this narrative might easily take that for granted. Jacob, no doubt, was a true mourner. Great afflictions sometimes come our way immediately after times of great joy and victory. God seems to be able to mix the two using one to remind us that He is to be praised when He pours out His gracious blessing on His dear children and the other to remind us that He can also be trusted to carry us through the deep and dark valleys. Lest Jacob should be lifted up with the visions of the Almighty with which he was honored, this was possibly sent as a difficulty in the flesh to humble him. Anyone who enjoy the favors peculiar to the children of God must yet expect the troubles that are common to the children of men.

Deborah, who, had she lived, would have been a comfort to Rachel in her travails, died just a little before back at Bethel. When death comes into a family, it sometimes strikes twice. Were the deaths of Deborah and Rachel so close together arranged by God to to show His displeasure regarding the murder of the Shechemites, occasioned by Dinah, a daughter of the family? We don’t know but that is worth considering.

What we do know is that Jacob set up a pillar on her grave, so that it was known, long after, to be Rachel’s burial place. Interestingly, God so ordered it so that when Joshua afterwards divided the land for the tribes of Israel, this place fell in the lot of Benjamin. Not very long ago at Bethel, Jacob had set up a pillar in remembrance of his joys, “Jacob set up a stone pillar at the place where God had talked with him, and he poured out a drink offering on it; he also poured oil on it” (Genesis 35:14) and here very near what would become Bethlehem he sets up one in remembrance of his sorrows. Both types of memorials are valuable to us. They may be of use to ourselves to keep both in mind. When you are going through a valley, remember what God showed you on the mountain top. When on the mountain top make mental notes so you remember what you experience there to brace you for any difficulty you may encounter. Hosea speaks about this period of Jacob’s life in Hosea 12:4, “He struggled with the angel and overcame him; he wept and begged for his favor. He found him at Bethel and talked with him there—” 

“Israel moved on again and pitched his tent beyond Migdal Eder” (21). Jacob also, as his fathers, traveled in the land of promise as though in a strange country, and was not long in any one place. Immediately after the story of Rachel’s death he is called Israel. Genesis 35:21 & 22 say.  “Israel moved on again and pitched his tent beyond Migdal Eder. While Israel was living in that region, Reuben went in and slept with his father’s concubine Bilhah, and Israel heard of it.” It was a difficult time to loose Rachael and, in a sense, to loose Ruben too. Yet God honored Jacob in that Moses, who wrote this narrative, referred to him as Israel three times in two verses. Through all of this Jacob remains in control of his emotions. Anyone is a true Israel indeed, genuine princes with God, who control their own passions. He who has this rule over his own spirit is better than the mighty. Israel is a prince with God yet dwells in tents; the city is reserved for him in the other world.

The sin of Reuben surely added to Jacob’s grief. A piece of abominable wickedness it was that he was guilty of that very sin which the apostle says even pagans do not do. “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father’s wife” (1 Corinthians 5:1). It happened according to verse 22 “ . . . while Israel was living in that region” which may hint that Jacob was not at home. Absence from his family may have contributed to the ease with which Reuben could approach Bilhah. Bilhah, evidently compliant, of course was also guilty in this affair and it is probable that she was abandoned by Jacob for it. Yet Reuben’s crime was so provoking that, for it, he lost his birthright and blessing. Later near the end of his life as he blessed his sons, Jacob would declare of Reuben: “Turbulent as the waters, you will no longer excel, for you went up onto your father’s bed, onto my couch and defiled it” (Genesis 49:4). The first-born is not always the best, nor the most promising. This was Reuben’s sin, but it was also a burdensome source of grief to Jacob. What a sore affliction it was is suggested in this very short phrase; “and Israel heard of it.” No more is said—that is enough; he heard it with the utmost grief and shame, horror and displeasure. Reuben thought to conceal it, that his father should never hear of it; but those that promise themselves secrecy in sin are generally disappointed; a bird of the air carries the voice.

And now that Benjamin the youngest was born, a complete list of the sons of Jacob is possible. This is the first time we have the names of these heads of the twelve tribes together; afterwards we find them very often spoken of and enumerated, even to the end of the Bible. The new Jerusalem is described this way: “It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. On the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel” Revelation 21:12). 

The visit which Jacob made to his father Isaac at Hebron is also recorded. “Jacob came home to his father Isaac in Mamre, near Kiriath Arba (that is, Hebron), where Abraham and Isaac had stayed.” (27). We may suppose Jacob had visited Isaac before, possibly during his Shechem as well as his Bethel years, for surely he had sorely longed for his father’s house; but never, until now had he brought his family to settle with or near him. Possibly he did this now when Rebekah died leaving Isaac alone, solitary, and not disposed to marry again. The age and death of Isaac are here recorded. He died at age 180 at Hebron, was buried there and his tomb remains there even to our modern current generation. It appears, by mathematical computations, that Isaac did not die until years after Joseph was sold into Egypt, possibly much about the time that Joseph was being lifted to a high political and administrative position there. Assuming those calculations are correct with years (considering the age of Benjamin recently born here, but a grown young man when Joseph’s brother meet him in Egypt) passing between verse 27 in which we have the record of Jacob’s family’s arrival at Hebron and verse 29 which records the death of the 180 year-old Isaac, we can know that not very long passed between the time Esau and Jacob buried their father and Jacob and his family traveled to Egypt because of a long and severe famine. (Also remember that Joseph had already been prime minister of Egypt more than 7 years when  his brothers came to Egypt for grain.) Isaac, a mild quiet man, lived the longest of all the patriarchs, for he was 180 years old; Abraham was only 175. Jacob was 147 years old when he died.

Just as Ishmael and Isaac were evidently on good speaking terms and work together in the burial of Abraham, so Esau and Jacob cooperate to bury their father Isaac. Think about death with me. We will not die an hour the sooner, but abundantly the better if we will set our hearts and affairs in order before we die. Particular notice is taken of the amicable agreement of Esau and Jacob, in arranging and conducting their father’s funeral “Then he breathed his last and died and was gathered to his people, old and full of years. And his sons Esau and Jacob buried him” (29).  This verse briefly shows how wonderfully God had changed Esau’s mind since he vowed to kill his brother immediately after his father’s death. “Esau held a grudge against Jacob because of the blessing his father had given him. He said to himself, ‘The days of mourning for my father are near; then I will kill my brother Jacob’” (Genesis 27:41). God has many ways of preventing bad men from doing the evil they intend; he can either tie their hands or turn their hearts.