Biblion Bible Commentary
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The thing has come from Yahweh
Genesis 24:28-60
28 The young lady ran, and told her mother’s house about these words. · WEB
The servant refuses to eat until he has told his errand, and the family's answer is that the matter is out of their hands.
Laban appears for the first time in Scripture and the narrator introduces him with a detail that tells the reader everything: When he saw the ring, and the bracelets on his sister's hands... he came to the man. The welcome follows the jewelry. Laban will be a fixture of the next ten chapters and he is never once described doing anything that is not to his own advantage.
His greeting is warm and slightly overdone — Come in, you blessed of Yahweh — from a man who has known of this visitor for about a minute.
The servant's conduct in the house is the heart of the chapter. Food is set before him after a journey of hundreds of miles, and he will not touch it: I will not eat until I have told my message. An errand entrusted to him comes before his own hunger, and nothing in the account suggests he found this difficult.
What follows is the longest speech in Genesis, and it retells the whole of the previous scene. Retellings in this book are never mere repetition, and the differences here are all diplomatic. He identifies himself first — I am Abraham's servant — and establishes his master's wealth before anything else, which is what a family will want to know. He mentions that Isaac is the sole heir. He is careful to say that the prohibition was against Canaanite wives, not that their family was second choice. And he tells the story of the well as it happened, including the prayer and the timing, so that the family hears the evidence rather than a claim.
Then he closes with a question that leaves them free: if you will deal kindly and truly with my master, tell me. If not, tell me, that I may turn to the right hand, or to the left. No pressure, and a stated willingness to leave.
The answer is one of the great sentences of the book: The thing proceeds from Yahweh. We can't speak to you bad or good.
They are saying that the matter has been decided somewhere above them and their opinion is not relevant. Coming from Laban, whose opinion is usually very relevant to Laban, it is a striking concession, and it is produced by evidence rather than by piety — the man told them what happened at the well and they could not find a way around it.
The morning brings the family's second thoughts, in the form of a delay: Let the young lady stay with us a few days, at least ten. The servant refuses again, on the same ground he has used throughout: Don't hinder me, since Yahweh has prospered my way.
And so the question is put to Rebekah, which is worth noting in a world where it need not have been. Will you go with this man?
Her answer is two words in Hebrew and it is the hinge of the chapter: I will go. She has met the servant the previous evening, has never seen Isaac, and is being asked to leave her family for a country eight hundred miles away. She says yes without conditions, which is the same thing her great-uncle did in Haran two generations earlier when he was told to leave his country and his relatives and his father's house.
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