Biblion Bible Commentary
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The speckled and the spotted
Genesis 30:25-43
25 When Rachel had borne Joseph, Jacob said to Laban, “Send me away, that I may go to my own place, and to my country. · WEB
Two men try to outmaneuver each other over livestock for six years, and the increase turns out to have been arranged by neither.
With Joseph born, Jacob asks to go home, and Laban's reply is the most honest thing he says: I have divined that Yahweh has blessed me for your sake. He does not want a nephew; he wants the blessing that follows him, and he says so in the vocabulary of a man who consults omens.
Jacob's own accounting is equally frank. It was little which you had before I came, and it has increased to a multitude. Yahweh has blessed you wherever I turned. Now when will I provide for my own house also? Twenty years of labor and he owns nothing.
The wage he proposes sounds absurdly modest. He will take the speckled, spotted and black animals — the off-colored minority in flocks that ran predominantly white sheep and dark goats — and everything ordinary stays Laban's. He even builds in an audit: any normal-colored animal found with him counts as stolen.
Laban agrees instantly, which tells the reader it is a bad deal, and then improves it for himself before the day is out. He removes every marked animal already in the flock, hands them to his sons, and puts three days' journey between them and Jacob. The breeding stock Jacob's wage depends on has been stripped out and moved beyond reach.
What Jacob does about it is the part everyone remembers and nobody can quite explain. He peels white streaks in rods of poplar, almond and plane, sets them in the watering troughs where the flocks come to drink and conceive, and the animals produce streaked, speckled and spotted young. He also does something less picturesque and more effective — he separates the flocks so the strong breed for him and the weak for Laban.
Whether the rods worked as folk breeding lore held is not a question this chapter answers, and it is answered flatly in the next one. Telling his wives what happened, Jacob reports a dream in which God showed him the flocks and said I have seen all that Laban does to you, and he states the outcome without any mention of sticks: God has taken away your father's livestock, and given them to me Genesis 31:9 Genesis 31:12.
So the increase is credited by Jacob himself to God, and the rods are left as what a clever man was doing while God did something else. Genesis reports the technique and then, a page later, reports the cause, and the two are not the same.
That is the shape of Jacob's whole life. He schemed for the birthright and it had been assigned before his birth. He schemed for the blessing and his father gave it to him properly a chapter later. He schemes now with peeled sticks and is told in a dream that God had already moved the flocks. He never stops contriving, and he is never once the reason things go his way.
The man increased exceedingly. After twenty years of unpaid labor he has flocks, servants, camels and donkeys — and a father-in-law who has changed his wages ten times and is about to notice.
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