Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
She became his wife, and he loved her
Genesis 24:61-67
61 Rebekah arose with her ladies. They rode on the camels, and followed the man. The servant took Rebekah, and went his way. · WEB
The two meet in a field at evening, and the chapter closes on a sentence Scripture has not said before.
The caravan turns for home and the narrative changes vantage. For sixty verses we have followed the servant; now we are with Isaac, who knows nothing about any of it.
He is at Beer Lahai Roi — the well named by Hagar, where the God who sees found a runaway slave Genesis 16:14. It is a small detail and a deliberate one. The son of the promise is living at the place where the son who was not the promise was rescued.
Isaac went out to meditate in the field at the evening. The verb is uncommon and its exact sense is uncertain; the English translations divide between meditating, walking, and something like brooding. What is not uncertain is the situation. His mother has died, the text has just said he was still unconsoled, and he is out in a field alone at dusk.
Then the two lift up their eyes in successive verses, which is this book's phrase for a moment of recognition. He lifted up his eyes and looked. Behold, there were camels coming. She lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac, she got off the camel.
Her question and her gesture are both exactly right. Who is the man who is walking in the field to meet us? — she asks before assuming — and on being told, She took her veil, and covered herself, which is the customary act of a bride and is her own decision, made on a road, without instruction.
And the servant, whose journey this was, gets his last line: The servant told Isaac all the things that he had done. Then he leaves the narrative and is never mentioned again. He is not named, is not thanked in the text, and receives no reward; what he has is a completed errand.
The closing verse does four things in one sentence, and each is worth its own weight. Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah's tent — the tent has stood empty since the death three years earlier, and bringing her into it is an act of succession as much as of marriage. And took Rebekah, and she became his wife. Then: He loved her.
That is the first time in Scripture a husband is said to love his wife. Love has appeared once before in Genesis, in the command to sacrifice a beloved son Genesis 22:2, and now it is said of a marriage that began as an errand, an oath, and a stranger's prayer at a well.
So Isaac was comforted after his mother's death. The chapter that opened with an old man arranging his affairs closes with a grieving son consoled, and nothing in the whole long account was arranged by either of them.
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