When Esau heard of his father's instructions to Jacob, he suddenly realizes his father's displeasure with his pagan wives, then he further complicates things by running to Isaac's half-brother, Ishmael, to get another wife from his family.
While on his way to Haran, Jacob had a dream known as "Jacob's Ladder." He was about ten miles north of Jerusalem when he lay down to sleep and God appeared to him in his dream, along with a ladder going up to heaven with angels going up and down on it. God renews the covenant He made with Abraham and Isaac. God told Jacob He would give him and his descendants the land on which he lay, and that his descendants would be "like the dust of the earth."So Jacob took the rock on which he was resting his head and made an altar to the Lord at Bethel, and, ever the bargainer, tried to make a bargain with God there. God told him in the dream He would be with him and bring him back to that land, but Jacob said, "if God be with me" and if God will give me food to eat and clothes to wear and safety, "then the Lord will be my God."--Genesis 28:21. So he doesn't really have great faith in God at this point.
Jacob reaches Haran at the beginning of Chapter 29 and this is where he also meets the beautiful Rachel, his cousin, with whom he is immediately smitten. Jacob meets his match in Rachel's father, his Uncle Laban, however. They were both hucksters and bargainers.
For Rachel's hand in marriage, Jacob pledged seven years of labor to her father, and he performed it. When the seven years were up, though, Laban substituted his older daughter, Leah, at the wedding. The text says Leah had weak eyes, so we assume she either couldn't see very well or had some other eye problem, and she wasn't as attractive as her younger sister, Rachel, so was not as desirable as a wife.
Questioning people want to know how Laban could have tricked Jacob in this manner, but if you think about Middle Eastern customs even to this day, women kept themselves completely covered and Leah would have been wearing a thick veil. The text says that Laban had a great feast, likely involving some wine, so Jacob would likely have been a little inebriated. It also says Laban waited until evening to give Jacob his daughter. So Jacob and Leah went to the tent in the dark to consummate the marriage.
Jacob was furious the next morning when he realized he was in bed with the wrong woman, and he angrily confronts Laban. Laban just blows him off, telling him it isn't customary for the younger daughter to be given in marriage before the older and that he can have Rachel too, if he will work another seven years.
So Jacob's life has instantly become very complicated with two wives, who are also sisters--a little more than what he bargained for. Nevertheless, his love for Rachel was so great he went for it.
Right away, the problems begin. Rachel is barren, but Leah starts producing sons quickly. By the end of Chapter 29, Leah has had four sons to Rachel's none. An extreme jealousy sets in between the two sisters, and Rachel makes a rash statement, "Give me children, or I'll die!" Little did she know that she would die in childbirth while bearing her second son.
Each of the two sisters were given a maidservant by their family at the time of their marriage, so Rachel cooks up a plan to have Jacob sleep with her servant so she could claim the offspring of that unholy union as her own. Sound familiar? Surely, Jacob knew of his grandfather's mistake in doing the same thing and all the trouble it had caused in the family, but he does so, anyway. Two more sons are added to Jacob's household through Rachel's servant, Bilhah.
Then Leah, whose body had stopped bearing children for a time, followed suit with her maidservant, Zilpah, and Jacob became a man with four wives. Leah did conceive again later and bore two more sons and Jacob's only daughter, Dinah.
Finally, God decided to grant Rachel's prayers for children, and she bore Joseph. Following the birth of Joseph, Jacob begins to long for the old country, and asks his father-in-law to let him go back, but Laban bargains to keep him, his daughters and his grandchildren near.
There is a curious passage in Chapter 30 that tells of the bargain they made for Jacob's labor. Jacob gets all the speckled or spotted sheep and goats, and Laban gets to keep all the solid colored, white animals. That way, they could keep their livestock separate and each would know if the other was stealing from him.
Jacob heard an old wives' tale about placing striped branches in front of the herds while they mated--that it would cause them to have streaked, or spotted offspring, and he did that with Laban's stronger animals. Then he would claim any spotted lambs and kids. I suspect it was God's provision for Jacob that the animals produced spotted offspring, however, and not the branches they saw while mating, and indeed, we see at the end of Chapter 30 that Jacob has become exceedingly prosperous.
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