Genesis 24:15-27
The jar at the well
She comes out before the servant has finished praying, and offers to water the camels as well. Ten camels after a journey is hours of drawing water.
People of the Bible
Rebekah
Said yes to a stranger and a country she had never seen, then spent her life deciding things for other people.
Rebekah is introduced doing more than she was asked. A servant prays for a sign and she gives it without knowing, watering ten camels by hand, and when her family stalls she is the one who says she will go. The longest chapter in Genesis is about her arrival. Later, pregnant and in pain, she asks God directly what is happening and is told the older will serve the younger, and she is the only person in the family who knows it. When Isaac begins to bless the wrong son she acts on that knowledge, and it costs her the son she did it for.
Scroll down to the story
The movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Rebekah
- 01
- 02
Genesis 24:54-61
Will you go with this man
Her family asks for ten days. She is asked directly and answers in two words, and leaves with a blessing about thousands of thousands.
- 03
Genesis 25:19-28
Two nations in the womb
The struggle inside her is unbearable and she goes to ask why. The answer is about two peoples and a reversal, and she carries it alone.
- 04
Genesis 27:5-17
The plan in the kitchen
She overhears, cooks, dresses Jacob in his brother’s clothes and puts skins on his hands, and takes the curse on herself if it fails.
- 05
Genesis 27:41-46
Sending him away for a few days
She tells Jacob to flee to her brother until the anger passes. It lasts twenty years, and she is dead before he comes back.
Why it matters
Rebekah is where the promise stops travelling by birth order. She is given an answer from God that the head of the household never receives, and the rest of the story turns on what she does with it. Genesis neither praises nor condemns her method. It simply records that she was right about the outcome and that she never saw Jacob again.
4 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
