God of the Tricksters
Genesis 29:1-30
I know this may be a strange question, but do you ever get giddy reading the Bible? Now I know that biblical giddiness is probably not the coolest thing to talk about. But sometimes I can’t help but marvel at how the stories of the Bible have been crafted in such a superbly excellent way that they transcend 3000 years of history and provide us with insights into our own lives today. In these moments of giddiness with the Biblical text I can truly see how God has inspired the writers of our Bible to form a spiritual book that speaks not only of a reverent side of faith, but also encompasses the entire spectrum of human emotions and relationships—from pain to oppression, from loneliness to joy, from laughter to giddiness.
One of the trademarks of the section of Genesis that we’re going through at the moment, and one that always gives me a bit of giddiness, is an exploration of the trickster character with a strong emphasis on humor. Jacob is one of the leading tricksters in Genesis—his life is filled with accounts of thievery, trickery, subversion, and even magic.
If we look back a few chapters in Genesis we see how Jacob’s trickery all began with his stealing both a birthright and blessing from his twin brother Esau. And how did Jacob go about the thievery of Esau’s blessing? At his own mother, Rebekah’s, instruction, no less! Rebekah prepared the food that Isaac liked and dressed her son with the skin of the lamb on his neck and hands.
Can you imagine this scene? Jacob, the younger brother, comes traipsing into his blind father’s tent dressed in his older brother’s clothes—ones surely way to big for him—and with the skins of freshly slaughtered lambs attached to his hands and his neck. His father, Isaac, even recognizes that the voice is Jacob—but is completely fooled by the simple lambskins, though I’m sure the abundant food and wine may have had something to do with the easy deception.
There is humor intended in this story. Humor that pokes fun at Esau’s descendents, the Edomites, who were the enemies of the Israelites. There is also humor that describes the differences between farmers like Jacob and ranchers like Esau. And there is humor that is intended to inspire the second-born children, like Jacob, and the women, like Rebekah, in a political and economic system that favors the first-born children, like Esau, and men, like Isaac.
We can find another example of Jacob the humorous trickster in the few verses directly before our passage today. In this section we catch up with Jacob after he returned to the land of his extended family so that he can marry a woman from Laban’s family, just as Isaac had gone back to his extended family to find Rebekah.
And the first woman we are told that Jacob sees is Rachel, the second-born daughter of Laban and Jacob’s own cousin. The setting of their meeting is described beautifully by the narrator. Jacob is talking to shepherds at a communal well. The well is covered by a large stone, too big for most men to move by themselves. The reason for this is because there is a tradition of this community for all shepherds to get a fair share of water from the well. So they wait for their entire kinship of shepherds to arrive, and together they move the stone so that no one gets more water than the others.
However, love, or shall we say lust intervenes! And this is where we can find the humor in the story. Rachel, the “graceful and beautiful” second-born daughter of Laban catches the eye of Jacob as she comes to well to water her father’s flocks. Perhaps reacting to the pheromones of youthful virility Jacob takes it upon himself to remove the huge stone covering the well for his blushing new beauty. You can almost picture it, can’t you? Like the cover of a cheesy romance novel. Jacob, showing off his youth and strength, perhaps shirtless and covered with the sweat with exertion, removes the gargantuan stone all by himself, with the shepherds standing aghast not only at the strength of Jacob but at his inconsiderateness for their local customs. And as the stone falls away from the well, we can see Rachel swoon with love as Jacob embraces and kisses her, and demands to speak to her father to ask for her hand in marriage.
It is as humorous as it is serious, because it is so accurate in describing our human reactions to those to whom we are attracted. We want to impress them, we want to be with them, we want to show them how much better we are than those shepherds who just sit around the well waiting for others to help them. This biblical story shares our own human reactions to love and relationships—reactions that have not changed, reactions that connect us with those faithful people living 3000 years ago.
And perhaps the most enjoyable part of trickster tales is when the tricksters themselves receive their fair share of trickery. For Jacob, this comes in the form of Laban, his soon-to-be father-in-law, a man equal to him in deception. Our text for today tells us that Laban agrees to Jacob marrying his daughter Rachel, but only after Jacob works seven years, as Jacob was poor and had no money for a dowry. But to Jacob, as Genesis tells us, those 7 years were not more than a few days because of the intense love he felt for Rachel. So seven years later, blinded by love and tasting the fulfillment of a long-kept promise, Jacob comes to Laban to request his bride. A massive feast and party are had. Good food and good spirits fill the air and when the time comes, Laban brings his second-born daughter to Jacob for their first night of marriage together.
But the trickster becomes the tricked! For when Jacob wakes the next morning he finds that his new wife is not his one, true love Rachel, but the first-born daughter, Leah! Part of the humor in this is found in the simplicity of the deception. All Jacob had to do the night before was to peek under the bridal veil covering Leah’s face. But Jacob let his guard down and was deceived.
But what about the women in this episode. We are told that Leah, Jacob’s first wife, was less loved than her sister, Rachel. She appears to merely be a pawn in her father Laban’s antics with Jacob. She is “brought” to him by Laban on the night of marriage and instructed to be with him with no one consulting her own wishes. She is in a marriage she hasn’t approved of with a husband who loves his other wife, Rachel, more than her. How desperate a situation this seems!
But God has a way of working with those who have been pushed to the margins of society. For God works to open the womb of Leah, the less-loved, and she bears seven children, more than Jacob’s other three wives combined. The writer of Genesis rams this point home to us as the phrase “Again she conceived” is repeated over and over. “Again Leah conceived.” Again Leah conceived.” Again Leah conceived.” And Leah herself, the less loved wife of Jacob, the pawn in her father’s game, went on to be the mother of 6 of Israel’s twelve tribes.
The stories of the tricksters in Genesis provide us with humor, deception, sadness and hope. They show us how we use each other to gain what we want as we gamble with our own selfish desires to make our way in the world and form our future to our own likings. As scholar/theologian Walter Brueggeman put it, all the characters of the story—Leah, Rachel, Jacob, Laban—are part of the same lot and pursue the same issue: they know a future is coming that they can’t control and it frightens them. So they try to manipulate others. They try to control their own lives in the midst of a future that they both “crave” and “dread.” They are trying to be the best they can be by proving that they can control their own lives by controlling other people. But their attempts at control turn to folly as God repeatedly surprises them by creating God’s own will amidst the aspirations of humans.
Are there not many times when we want to control our own future? Are there not times when our own lives echo the actions of these biblical characters? Do we not seek to grasp our lives by the neck and drag them where we think we want them to go, without considering the wishes and desires of other people or of God? Have you ever been like Jacob, both the deceiver and the deceived? Or perhaps you have experienced times like Leah suffering from the push and pull of the deceptions that surround us, suffering from the decisions of people who see us as no more than a pawn in their lives? Or have you acted like Laban, choosing to forcefully direct the lives of other people with little thought for their own emotions, needs or desires. Are we not, at times, both the trickster and the tricked, the one laughing and the one laughed at, the deceiver and the deceived?
Yet God still works through us, nudging our better characteristics farther and resurrecting our lives from the consequences of our deceits. And though there are times we try to take sole control of our future because the unknown days ahead of us are frightening, we can take comfort in the knowledge that God knows who we are as tricksters, and God has not given up working with us in the last 3000 years to create a world where deception is not longer useful and honesty and humility are the hallmarks of humanity. Amen.
