Biblion Bible Commentary
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Laban searches the tents
Genesis 31:22-42
22 Laban was told on the third day that Jacob had fled. · WEB
A furious pursuit is disarmed by a dream before it arrives, the search finds nothing, and Jacob finally says twenty years' worth out loud.
Laban gets the news on the third day and pursues for seven, which measures both his speed and his anger. And before he can use either, God intervenes: Be careful that you don't speak to Jacob either good or bad.
The warning is the reason the confrontation stays a confrontation. Laban says so himself, and the admission is remarkable: It is in the power of my hand to hurt you, but the God of your father spoke to me last night. He had the men and the intent and was stopped by a dream, and he tells his victim as much to his face.
His opening speech is a performance of injury. He complains that he was denied a farewell party — with mirth and with songs, with tambourine and with harp — from a man who has just admitted he meant harm. And then the real question, which he has been carrying for seven days: why have you stolen my gods?
Jacob answers both charges. The flight was from fear that Laban would take his daughters by force. And on the theft he is emphatic and, as it turns out, reckless: Anyone you find your gods with shall not live. The narrator adds the line that makes the rest of the scene unbearable: For Jacob didn't know that Rachel had stolen them. He has pronounced a death sentence on his favorite wife.
The search is described tent by tent, which draws it out — Jacob's, Leah's, the two servants', and finally Rachel's. And Rachel, sitting on a camel saddle with her father's gods inside it, does not move: Don't let my lord be angry that I can't rise up before you; for I'm having my period.
The scene is doing something beyond the comedy of a man rummaging through cushions. The gods that Laban divined by and pursued for a week across a mountain range are underneath a woman who cannot be asked to stand, and they cannot make themselves known. Their owner cannot find them, and they cannot help him.
Then the search fails, and Jacob loses his temper — the first time in twenty years — and the speech that comes out is the best thing he says in the book.
It is an itemized account of two decades. The ewes did not miscarry. He did not eat the rams. When an animal was killed by predators he bore the loss himself rather than producing the carcass as the law of that world allowed — Of my hand you required it, whether stolen by day or stolen by night. He worked in drought by day and frost by night and did not sleep. Fourteen years for two daughters, six for the flock, and you have changed my wages ten times.
And he ends where he began, giving the credit away: Unless the God of my father, the God of Abraham, and the fear of Isaac, had been with me, surely now you would have sent me away empty. God has seen my affliction and the labor of my hands, and rebuked you last night.
God has seen. It is the third time in Genesis that phrase carries the weight of a whole life — Hagar's God who sees, Yahweh seeing that Leah was hated, and now twenty years of unpaid labor.
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