Leaving Laban and Drawing a Boundary

“Glory” is kavod, which at root means weight or heaviness; wealth is the weight a man carries. The same word will name the glory of the LORD filling the tabernacle (Exodus 40:34). Laban’s sons count Jacob’s success as a sum taken from their inheritance.

“As before” is the Hebrew idiom kitmol shilshom, “as yesterday and the day before”. Laban’s face has changed, and the change is described in the language of daily routine: the look that used to greet Jacob each morning has gone.

This is the first time God is recorded speaking to Jacob since Bethel, twenty years earlier. “I will be with thee” repeats the promise of 28:15 and fixes the destination: the land of his fathers, not merely away from Laban.

Jacob calls the sisters out to the open field, away from the tents and from anyone of Laban’s house who might overhear. He names Rachel first, though Leah is the elder and the mother of most of his children.

“The God of my father” is how Jacob still speaks of God here. His vow at Bethel ended “then shall the LORD be my God” (28:21), on the condition of a safe return, and that return has not yet happened; the connection is an inference, but the wording is careful.

“With all my power” is be-khol kochi, with all my strength. Jacob appeals to what the sisters have watched for themselves: “ye know”. The whole speech rests on their witness, not on his word alone.

“Ten times” is aseret monim, ten counts, a round number meaning over and over, as in Numbers 14:22 and Job 19:3. “Deceived” is hetel, to trifle with or make a fool of, the verb Samson uses of Delilah’s tricks: “thou hast mocked me” (Judges 16:10).

In Jacob’s telling there are no peeled rods and no troughs. Whatever Laban named as the wage, the flocks produced it. He gives the sisters the outcome, and in the next verse the cause, and leaves his own method out.

“Taken away” is natsal, to snatch away or rescue, the verb used when Israel “spoiled the Egyptians” as it left (Exodus 12:36). Some readers see Jacob’s departure from Laban as a first sketch of the exodus: service, unfair wages, flight with wealth, pursuit. The parallel is a reading, but a well-grounded one.

“Grisled” is beruddim, dappled or flecked, perhaps from barad, hail, as if the coat were spotted with hailstones. Zechariah 6:3 uses the word of the “grisled and bay horses” of his vision. This dream belongs to breeding time, possibly years before the command to leave.

Jacob reports two dreams as one, or one dream in two parts: the rams at breeding time, then the call to leave. An angel of God speaks, and in verse 13 the speaker says “I am the God of Beth-el”, so messenger and sender are one voice, as on Moriah.

“Lift up now thine eyes, and see” are the words God used to Abram in 13:14 when he showed him the land: “Lift up now thine eyes, and look.” Here the eyes are lifted to the rams, and what God reports seeing is Laban’s conduct.

God recalls the details himself: the pillar anointed and the vow vowed. The Greek smooths the title into “the God who appeared to thee in the place of God”; the Hebrew is simply “the God Beth-el”. Jacob is held to a promise he made at twenty years’ distance.

The verb “answered” is singular and feminine, so the Hebrew grammar has Rachel speaking and Leah joining. “Portion or inheritance” is cheleq ve-nachalah, the pair used of the Levites, who have “no part nor inheritance” among their brothers (Deuteronomy 10:9).

“Strangers” is nokhriyyot, foreign women, the word Ruth uses of herself in Ruth 2:10. “Sold us” means the fourteen years of labour were a bride-price, and custom would return part of it to the brides; “devoured our money” says Laban kept it all.

The sisters use Jacob’s word, natsal, “taken”, and claim the wealth as their children’s due. It is the only time in Genesis they speak with one voice, and the last thing they say is an instruction to their husband: whatever God has said, do it.

Rashi noted the order: Jacob sets his sons on the camels first, then his wives, while Esau in 36:6 takes “his wives, and his sons”. He read Jacob as putting the children first. The camels of 30:43 are now loaded for the road.

The Hebrew piles up words for property, goods he had gotten, cattle of his getting, which he had gotten, like a legal inventory: Jacob takes only what he earned. The destination is “Isaac his father”. His mother is not mentioned, and Genesis never records that he saw her again.

Sheep-shearing was a working festival with feasting that kept a man away from home, as with Nabal in 1 Samuel 25 and Absalom’s feast in 2 Samuel 13:23. The images are teraphim, household gods. Michal’s teraphim in 1 Samuel 19:13 were large enough to pass for David in bed; these are small enough for a saddle.

“Stole away unawares to Laban” is literally “stole the heart of Laban”, the heart being the mind: Jacob kept him in the dark. Some scholars hear a pun in “the Syrian”, arammi, and rimmah, to deceive, the word of 29:25. The man who asked Laban “wherefore then hast thou beguiled me?” now keeps Laban in the dark.

“The river” is the Euphrates. Joshua 24:3 recalls that God took Abraham “from the other side of the flood”, the same river, and some connect the word “Hebrew”, ivri, with ever, the other side. Jacob crosses back over the line his grandfather crossed.

The report takes three days to reach Laban at the shearing. A household moving with flocks and small children would travel slowly, so the whole of Jacob’s chance lay in those three days.

Seven days’ journey to Gilead from Haran would mean over three hundred and fifty miles, hard for men riding hard and impossible for flocks in ten days. Some scholars think the numbers are schematic, others that Jacob’s camp lay south of Haran. Laban brings his kinsmen, a party able to fight.

The Hebrew is “from good to bad”: say nothing at all, neither persuasion nor threat. God speaks to a man outside the covenant line in a dream, as he spoke to Abimelech in 20:3. Laban keeps the command only in part: he talks at length and does nothing.

“Pitched” is taqa, to drive in the tent pegs. The two camps face each other on the same heights, the verse carefully giving each its tent and each its mountain before a word is spoken.

Laban accuses Jacob of stealing his heart, the phrase Genesis used of Jacob in verse 20. The verb ganav, steal, runs through the whole chapter, eight times in all. “Captives taken with the sword” is Laban’s version; his daughters gave theirs in verses 14 to 16.

“Tabret” is the toph, a hand drum, the timbrel Miriam plays at the Red Sea (Exodus 15:20). “Harp” is kinnor, a lyre, the instrument of Jubal in 4:21 and later of David. Laban describes a farewell no one had asked for.

“My sons” are his grandsons. “Done foolishly” is sakhal, the verb Samuel uses when he tells Saul, “Thou hast done foolishly” (1 Samuel 13:13). Laban turns a flight from him into a breach of manners.

“It is in the power of my hand” is yesh le-el yadi, literally “there is el to my hand”, using el, strength, a word that also means God. Deuteronomy 28:32 uses the same idiom. Laban boasts of his el and in the same breath admits that the God of Jacob’s father has tied his hands.

“Sore longedst” doubles the verb, nikhsof nikhsafta, from kasaf, to long for, the root of Psalm 84:2, “My soul longeth”. Laban grants the homesickness, then saves the real charge for last: “my gods”. Genesis calls them teraphim; Laban calls them elohai, my gods.

Jacob answers only the first charge. “Take by force” is gazal, to rob, the word for seizing what is not yours in Leviticus 19:13. He calls his flight self-defence against robbery, and says nothing yet about the gods.

“Discern” is hakker, to recognise, a verb that runs through Jacob’s life: Isaac “discerned him not” (27:23), Jacob’s sons will say “know now whether it be thy son’s coat” (37:32), and Tamar says “Discern, I pray thee, whose are these” (38:25). Here the object will not be found.

Laban searches in order: Jacob’s tent, Leah’s, the two maids’, and then Rachel’s, the favourite last. The Hebrew repeats his going in and out, drawing out the search tent by tent.

The “camel’s furniture” is kar ha-gamal, a riding saddle, a framed and cushioned seat strapped to the camel. The images must have been small. Laban goes over the whole tent with his hands and never touches the one thing his daughter is sitting on.

“The custom of women” is her period. Leviticus 15:20 later makes anything a menstruating woman sits on unclean, so the household gods sit under her, unclean, a satire on idols like Isaiah 46:1–2, where idols are a burden on weary beasts. Whether she was telling the truth, Genesis does not say.

“Chode” is chided, and the Hebrew is riv, a legal dispute, the word the prophets use for God’s lawsuit against his people (Micah 6:2). “Hotly pursued” is dalaq, to burn, to chase in heat. Jacob, who has not answered back in twenty years, answers now.

Jacob asks for a court on the spot: the stolen goods set out before both families, and the kinsmen to “judge betwixt us”. He is certain there is nothing to find, because he does not know what the reader knows.

“Cast their young” means miscarried. A shepherd could customarily eat from the flock he tended; Jacob says he did not even take the rams. He begins his case with the number, twenty years, and returns to it in verse 41.

The later law releases a shepherd from paying for an animal “torn in pieces” if he brings the remains as evidence (Exodus 22:13). Jacob paid anyway. “Torn” is terefah, and in 37:33 Jacob will cry over Joseph’s coat, “Joseph is without doubt rent in pieces”, from the same root.

Heat by day and frost by night are real in the steppe, where nights can freeze after scorching days. Jeremiah 36:30 pairs the same two words for the exposure of a king’s corpse. “My sleep departed from mine eyes” is a shepherd’s night watch, kept for someone else’s flock.

The ten changes of wage were first told to the wives in verse 7; now they are said to Laban’s face. Twenty years is set out as a sum: fourteen for two daughters, six for the flock. The verse is Jacob’s ledger.

“The fear of Isaac”, pachad yitschaq, is a title for God found only here and in verse 53. It may mean the God whom Isaac feared; W. F. Albright proposed “the Kinsman of Isaac” from a related word, and the question is still open. “Rebuked” comes from the same root as “judge” in verse 37: God has already given the verdict.

Laban says “my” four times, daughters, children, cattle, everything, and then asks what he can do. He does not mention the gods again. The search failed, and the claim he now makes is of ownership in general rather than of theft in particular.

“Let us make a covenant” is literally “let us cut”, karat, the verb that remembers the animals cut in two in 15:10. Laban proposes the treaty, and the witness he wants is to stand “between me and thee”, as if the two men need something standing in the space between them.

Jacob answers without a word by setting up a pillar, matsevah, his second, after the one at Bethel (28:18). There he raised a stone after God spoke to him; here he raises one after a man has.

“His brethren” here must mean the whole party, since Jacob had no kinsmen with him but his sons and servants; Laban’s men are included. The covenant meal is eaten on the heap itself, so the stones are witness to the eating.

Jegar-sahadutha is Aramaic, heap of witness, and Galeed is Hebrew for the same. These two words are the first Aramaic in the Bible. The two branches of Terah’s family now name one heap in two languages.

Galeed, gal-ed, is the explanation Genesis gives for the name of the whole region, Gilead, where the pursuit ended. Laban adds “this day”: the witness begins now, and it will outlive them both.

Mizpah means watchtower, from tsafah, to watch. The same Gilead has a Mizpah where Jephthah lives and makes his terrible vow (Judges 11:29–34). The watch Laban asks of the LORD is a watch set between two parties who will not see each other again.

Laban’s first term protects his daughters’ standing against further wives, the only stipulation of its kind in Genesis. “No man is with us” means there are no human witnesses to what Jacob will do far away, so God is named as the witness.

“Which I have cast” claims the heap and the pillar as Laban’s own work, though Jacob set up the pillar (verse 45) and Jacob’s party gathered the stones (verse 46). Laban has the last word on the memorial as on everything else.

The heap and pillar mark a line that later history kept: Gilead became the disputed ground between Israel and Aram, and Ahab died fighting the Arameans at Ramoth-gilead (1 Kings 22). Genesis states only the private terms: neither passes “for harm”.

The verb “judge” is plural in the Hebrew, as though Laban were calling on more than one god. “The God of their father”, meaning Terah, is missing from the Greek. Jacob does not swear by Nahor’s god or Terah’s; he swears by the one his father feared.

“Sacrifice” is zevach, a slaughtered offering eaten by those who offer it, the first time the word appears in the Bible. “Bread” means the whole meal. Enemies who eat together in the evening can part in the morning.

In printed Hebrew Bibles this verse is 32:1, so every verse of chapter 32 is numbered one higher there than in the King James. It is Laban’s last appearance: the kiss and the blessing he complained of missing in verse 28, and he “returned unto his place”.