Rebekah Chooses the Journey

“Well stricken in age” is literally “come into days”. Isaac marries at forty (25:20), so Abraham is about a hundred and forty. “In all things” renders a single word, bakkol, and the verse sums up a life before its last errand: nothing is left to Abraham but to see his son married.

“Eldest” is zaqen, elder, a title of rank rather than a statement of age. The hand under the thigh is an oath gesture found only here and when Jacob makes Joseph swear to bury him in Canaan (47:29). The thigh stands for the loins, so the oath is likely sworn on Abraham’s descendants; that is an inference, but a common one.

“The God of heaven, and the God of the earth” is a title found nowhere else in this form. “God of heaven” returns in verse 7 and then grows rare until Ezra, Nehemiah and Daniel, which use it often. Genesis gives no reason here for refusing a Canaanite wife; the grief Esau’s Hittite wives cause in 26:35 shows what the fear looked like.

“My country” and “my kindred” are the very words of 12:1, where Abraham was told to leave his country and his kindred. The servant is sent back to exactly what Abraham left, to bring one person out of it on the same road.

“Peradventure” is the word Abraham used six times bargaining for Sodom (18:24–32), perhaps. The servant’s question has two halves: the woman may refuse, and if she does, may he take Isaac back to her? It is the second half Abraham answers first.

“Beware thou” is the first word of Abraham’s reply, and it is a sharp one. Whatever else fails, the son of the promise is not to leave the land of the promise. Abraham never went back to Haran himself.

“Took me” is laqach, the same verb the servant is told to do with the wife, take. “Sware unto me” reaches back to the oath of 22:16. These are Abraham’s last recorded words in Genesis, and he gives the LORD’s part in the errand before the servant’s part.

“Clear” is naqi, innocent or free of liability. The release covers only the woman’s refusal; there is no release from the second condition, which Abraham repeats as the last line he speaks in the book: only bring not my son thither again.

The oath is sworn in exactly the terms of verse 2, the hand placed where Abraham asked. “Concerning that matter” binds the servant to both conditions at once, the wife from the kindred and Isaac kept in the land.

Ten camels is wealth on display, and the gifts they carry are meant to be seen. Mesopotamia is Aram-naharaim, Aram of the two rivers. “The city of Nahor” may mean the town where Nahor lived, Haran, or a town named Nahur, which appears in texts from Mari on the upper Euphrates.

“Made his camels to kneel” is barakh, from the same root as “bless”, since the Hebrew for knee is berekh. Evening was when the day’s water was drawn, and the servant waits where he knows the young women will come.

“Send me good speed” is hiqreh, make it happen, from the root that describes Ruth’s “hap” in lighting on Boaz’s field (Ruth 2:3). He asks for kindness, chesed, not to himself but to Abraham, and he addresses God as his master’s God.

A stranger meeting a young woman at a well recurs with Jacob and Rachel (29:2–12) and Moses and Zipporah (Exodus 2:15–21), each ending in marriage. Robert Alter called it a betrothal type-scene, a literary reading, but the repeated elements are plainly there in all three.

The Hebrew consonants for “damsel” here are naar, the masculine form, while the vowels read naarah. The Five Books of Moses spell the word that way almost everywhere, a scribal peculiarity the reading tradition corrects. “Appointed” is hokhachta, adjudged or decided, a word more at home in a court than at a well.

Her pedigree is given before her name has finished being spoken: Bethuel, son of Milcah, wife of Nahor. That route runs through the principal wife and not the concubine Reumah of 22:24. The pitcher, kad, sits on her shoulder, the way women carried water jars across the region.

Betulah could mean a young woman of marriageable age as well as a virgin, so the verse adds “neither had any man known her” to settle it. “Went down... came up” shows the kind of well it was: a spring reached by steps cut down into the ground.

“Let me drink a little” is hagmiini, let me sip, from a verb found elsewhere only in Job 39:24, of a warhorse that swallows the ground. He asks for the smallest thing possible. The servant runs; the rest of the chapter’s running belongs to Rebekah and Laban.

“My lord” is adoni, the courtesy she gives a stranger she has never seen. She lowers the jar from her shoulder “upon her hand” so he can drink from it directly. Two verbs of speed, hasted and let down, mark her from the first.

She waits until he has done drinking before she offers more, so the offer is not a reflex. A thirsty camel can take in over twenty gallons, so ten could need a couple of hundred; if her jar held perhaps three gallons, that means dozens of trips down the steps. The figures are estimates, but the scale is real.

“Emptied” is arah, to pour out or lay bare, and it is a vivid choice: she tips the whole jar into the trough rather than filling it by cupfuls. “Ran again” turns the offer of verse 19 into labour. Jacob will water flocks at troughs in 30:38.

“Wondering” translates mishtaeh, gazing, staring in astonishment, a rare form of the verb. “To wit” here means “to know”. He watches the whole process through in silence, and his question is about the LORD, not about her.

Half a shekel is a beka, the exact weight later set as each Israelite’s half-shekel for the tabernacle in Exodus 38:26. The bracelets weigh ten shekels, twenty times as much. The gifts are measured out before he knows whether she is kin.

Two questions, and the first is the one that matters: whose daughter? The second asks for a single night, lun, to lodge; the servant will end up eating, staying and taking the daughter away, all before a week has passed.

She answers with three generations and names her grandmother. That is the name Abraham’s household would recognise, since Milcah was Abraham’s niece, the daughter of his brother Haran (11:29). Rebekah is his kin on both sides of her father’s family.

Straw, teven, was chopped straw used as fodder and mixed with barley; it is the same word as the straw Israel has to gather for bricks in Exodus 5:7. She answers the question he asked and then offers more room than he asked for.

“Bowed down his head, and worshipped” pairs two verbs, qadad and shachah, a pairing that recurs when Israel hears of its deliverance in Exodus 4:31 and 12:27. He has not yet told her who he is.

“Mercy and truth” is chesed ve-emet, the first appearance of a pair that becomes a fixed description of God, as in Exodus 34:6, “abundant in goodness and truth”. The Hebrew of the last clause puts “I” first: I, being on the road, the LORD led me.

“Her mother’s house” is the term used in Ruth 1:8 and Song of Solomon 3:4 for the women’s side of a household. Rebekah’s father is barely present in this chapter; her mother and brother act for the family throughout.

Laban’s name means white, and it is how the reader meets a man who will take up much of chapters 29 to 31. His first act is to run, like his sister before him. Whether he runs for the man or the gold is the question verse 30 leaves open.

The order is jewels first, words second, which makes readers suspicious of Laban. That suspicion comes from what he does to Jacob later, not from anything this verse says. The servant, meanwhile, has not moved: he is still standing by the camels at the well.

Laban uses the divine name, the LORD, as does his family in verse 50; the same Laban will invoke it at Mizpah in 31:49. “I have prepared” is pinnah, to clear or turn out, the same verb as “prepare ye the way” in Isaiah 40:3.

The Hebrew “he” who ungirds the camels is most naturally Laban, acting as host. Water for the feet is what Abraham offered his visitors in 18:4. This is also the first mention that the servant had men with him, who have been there all along.

“Meat” in 1611 meant food of any kind, not flesh; the “meat offering” of Leviticus is grain. The man who has travelled for days and watered ten camels refuses to eat, and Laban’s “Speak on” is one Hebrew word, daber.

Three Hebrew words, “servant of Abraham, I”. He begins with whose he is and never once gives his own name. After the questions about whose daughter Rebekah is, he answers the same question about himself.

The inventory of flocks, herds, silver, gold, servants, camels and asses echoes the wealth Pharaoh gave Abram in 12:16, but the servant credits all of it to the LORD. He is describing the household Rebekah would enter.

“When she was old” is “after her old age”, the miracle told in four words. “Unto him hath he given all that he hath” is a statement about inheritance, and 25:5 confirms it. For a family weighing a marriage, this is the sentence that counts.

The servant tells the household that he is under oath. That changes their position: if they refuse, he goes home released, and they know it. He leaves out Abraham’s grand title for God in verse 3.

Abraham said “my country, and my kindred” in verse 4. The servant makes it “my father’s house”, narrowing the command until it points at this family and no other. The change is small, and it is well aimed.

He repeats his worry that the woman may not follow, but drops the question about taking Isaac back and Abraham’s refusal of it. Telling this family that the groom will never come to them would not help; that is an inference, but the omission is certain.

“Before whom I walk” is new here and echoes 17:1, where God told Abraham to walk before him. The angel sent “before thee” in verse 7 becomes an angel “with thee”, and a promise that he will “prosper thy way” is added.

A new condition appears: “if they give not thee one”. In verse 8 the refusal was the woman’s; here it is the family’s, and the family is listening. The word for “oath” also changes, from shevuah to alah, an oath that carries a curse.

“This day” covers the whole journey from Canaan in a phrase and puts him at the well today. His prayer is retold as a condition, “if now thou do prosper my way”, which makes the household the witnesses to how it was answered.

The word for “virgin” here is almah, not the betulah of verse 16. Almah means a young woman of marriageable age, and it is the word in Isaiah 7:14 that the Greek rendered parthenos, virgin. Genesis uses both words of the same girl within a few verses.

“Both drink thou” uses gam, also, twice: also you, also your camels. “Appointed out” is again the court word, hokhiach, adjudged. The servant presents Rebekah to her family as a verdict already given.

The account of what happened is compressed. In verse 17 he ran to meet her; here he simply speaks. He leaves out his long silent staring from verse 21, which would do nothing to persuade the household.

The labour of watering ten camels shrinks to four Hebrew words, “and the camels she watered too”. The family has seen the camels in their yard and can do the arithmetic themselves.

“Upon her face” shows that the “earring” of verse 22 was a nose ring, nezem, like the nose jewels of Isaiah 3:21. He also names Nahor before Milcah here, where Rebekah put Milcah first: the household hears the lineage in the order it would give it.

“The right way” is derekh emet, the way of truth. “My master’s brother’s daughter” is loose, since Rebekah is Nahor’s granddaughter; “brother” covers a kinsman in Hebrew, as when Lot, Abraham’s nephew, is called his brother in 14:14.

“Kindly and truly” repeats chesed ve-emet from verse 27, asking the family to do what God has already done. “Right hand, or to the left” is an idiom for a new direction. Rashi read it as the servant going to seek a wife from the families of Ishmael or Lot.

Bethuel speaks only here, after his son, and then vanishes from the account. “We cannot speak unto thee bad or good” is an idiom for having nothing to say against it. God uses the same idiom to warn Laban not to speak to Jacob “either good or bad” in 31:24.

“Take her, and go” uses the same two verbs as Pharaoh handing Sarah back to Abraham in 12:19: “take her, and go thy way”. There a wife was restored to Abraham’s house; here one is given to it.

This is the servant’s third act of worship in the chapter, after verses 26 and 48, and the fullest: he bows himself right down to the earth. Each one comes at the moment the answer arrives, not later.

Rebekah receives silver, gold and clothing. Her brother and mother receive “precious things”, migdanot, choice gifts, the customary presents to the bride’s family. Bethuel is not among them, and some readers take that as a sign he was aged or that his name in verse 50 is a later addition.

“Send me away” is shalach, and the verb runs through the next few verses: send me away, send me away, they sent away. Only now does the servant eat the food he turned down in verse 33. By morning he is ready to leave.

The Hebrew is “days or ten”, yamim o asor. The King James takes it as a few days, at least ten; Rashi read the days as a year and the ten as ten months. Either way, the mother and brother want time with her before she goes.

“Hinder me not” is al teacharu, do not hold me back. His reason is theological: the LORD has already prospered the way, and delay would treat the answer as provisional.

“Enquire at her mouth” is literally ask her mouth, hear it from her own lips. Some scholars have cited contracts from Nuzi, where a woman given in marriage by her brother states her own consent; E. A. Speiser drew that comparison, though how far it applies is debated.

“I will go” is a single Hebrew word, elekh. The question has the same verb, “wilt thou go?”, so her answer takes it and gives it straight back. She does not ask for the ten days.

The nurse goes unnamed until she dies, when 35:8 calls her Deborah and records her burial under an oak below Bethel. She was still with the family when Jacob returned from Haran, a lifetime later.

“Thousands of millions” is literally “thousands of ten thousands”, myriads, the largest Hebrew number word. The second half, possessing the gate of the enemy, repeats the oath God swore to Abraham in 22:17, spoken by a family who had not heard it.

“Her damsels” shows Rebekah went with maids of her own, as Leah and Rachel later go with Zilpah and Bilhah (29:24, 29). “Followed the man” is literally went after him. She rides the camels she watered.

Lahai-roi is the well where Hagar met the angel in 16:14, “the well of him that liveth and seeth me”. Isaac settles there after Abraham’s death (25:11). The “south country” is the Negev, the dry land south of Hebron.

“At the eventide” is literally the turning of the evening. The servant reached the well at evening in verse 11, so the chapter’s two meetings happen at the same hour. “Lifted up his eyes, and saw” is how Abraham saw the ram in 22:13.

“Lighted off” is 1611 English for alighted, getting down; the Hebrew verb is naphal, to fall, and it is abrupt. She is down from the camel before she has asked who he is.

The word for vail, tsaiph, appears only here and in 38:14 and 38:19, where Tamar veils herself. A bride came to her husband veiled, which is part of how Laban’s switch of Leah for Rachel in 29:23–25 goes unnoticed; that link is an inference.

The servant tells Isaac “all things”, and the reader is spared a third telling. His name has never been given, and this is his last appearance.

The Hebrew reads awkwardly, “into the tent, Sarah his mother”, and some scholars think the name was added to clarify. This is the first time Scripture says a man loved a woman; the earlier “love” in 22:2 was Abraham’s for Isaac. “Comforted” is nicham, the root in Noah’s name (5:29).