Bible in a Year January 9: Gen 27 – 29

 

January 9: Gen 27 – 29

These chapters hurt my heart! It’s hard for us to understand the depths of Esau’s pain over Rebecca and Jacob’s deception, but it’s pretty easy to comprehend the way Leah must have felt. All of her life she was the lesser when compared with her beautiful sister. We don’t know how she felt about the deception when marrying Jacob instead of Leah. Did she love Jacob silently up to this point? Was she forced into the marriage by her father who convinced her she would be an old maid otherwise? Or was she a willing participant (like Jacob was when deceiving Esau)?

Regardless of the circumstances of the wedding, I can’t imagine the pain she must have felt when less than one week later her new husband took Rachel, whom he loved, as his second wife. We know that Jacob and Leah continued to have relations since she bore four sons in relative succession. Did she feel used?  How did the relationship between the sisters change as a result of this new situation? Oh, as usual so many questions and very few answers.

I really enjoyed Liz Curtis Higgs book, Thorn in My Heart, which is a fictional novel about this story. She sets it in the Scottish Highlands, but it offers a potential glimpse into the possible emotions of the players.

TOMORROW’S TEXT: Gen 30:1 – 31:42