BEMA 13: Grappling with God, Part 1 (2025)

Transcription Status

31 Mar 25 — Initial public release

30 Mar 25 — Transcript approved for release

Transcription Volunteer: Sergey Bazylko

Grappling with God, Part 1

Brent Billings: This is the BEMA Podcast with Marty Solomon. I’m his co-host Brent Billings. Today we’re joined by Reed Dent to begin our look at the life of Jacob, starting with Genesis 5 and moving all the way through chapter 31. We have a lot of ground to cover today, Marty.

Marty Solomon: We do. We got Reed here to help. I’m sure that’s not going to slow us down any.

Reed Dent: Never has!

Marty: Never… has…

Brent: Wow.

Marty: [laughs] Anybody that isn’t listening to this for the first time and knows Reed from the future, that makes that joke funny. We are reviewing, we have three, we’re in the third of four patriarchs here.

We got Avram, we’ve talked about Yitzhak, now we have Jacob is the life we’re looking at, we’re examining now. I’ve always struggled with Jacob. I’m doing better than the first time we did Session 1, Brent years ago.

Brent: Yeah, listening back to those episodes, it’s like, “Whew, okay. Are we gonna say that quite the same way? Are we going to be that way about Jacob?”

Marty: Yeah, I have—since recording that initial round—I have learned so much from Rabbi David Fohrman’s material. We’ve linked him often. We will continue to do so with the Hebrew Scriptures. And he did some work on the life of Jacob that really, really helped, really helped.

I wouldn’t say that I’m like, “Oh yeah, Jacob makes all kinds of sense and I totally love Jacob,” but that material has been super helpful. And so what we’re going to do today, because we’re going to do a deeper dive on this in Session 6.

By the time you’re done with Session 1–5, early in Session 6 we come back through, we do some deeper dive character studies, and we’re going to talk about some of that stuff that I learned. I’m going to try not to ruin that journey by pulling the future into the present.

So we’re gonna talk about Jacob on kind of a larger macro level here today, not a ton of, like, big teachings or thunderous conclusions necessarily. We’re gonna do this in two parts, gonna have a part one and a part two. So part one, we’ll try to have some summary and some reflection points, but we’re gonna kind of leave the life of Jacob hanging.

And then in our next episode, we’ll try to wrap it up. But that’ll be kind of how we’ll deal with this. know that there are some deeper dives and some better material awaiting you in the future if you keep listening to BEMA.

Brent: We’re not here to give you a whole bunch of conclusions. We’re just going to lay a bunch of stuff out and let people come to their own conclusions.

Marty: Absolutely. And with that, Brent Billings, Genesis 25. Start us off in like verse 19.

Brent: This is the account of the family line of Abraham’s son Isaac. Abraham became the father of Isaac and Isaac was 40 years old when he married Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel, the Aramean from Paddan Aram and sister of Lavan the Aramean.

Isaac prayed to the Lord on behalf of his wife because she was childless. The Lord answered his prayer, and his wife Rebekah became pregnant. The babies jostled each other within her, and she said, “Why is this happening to me?” So she went to inquire of the Lord.

The Lord said to her, “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated. One people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger.” When the time came for her to give birth, there were twin boys in her womb. The first to come out was red, and his whole body was like a hairy garment, so they named him Esau.

After this, his brother came out, with his hand grasping Esau’s heel, so he was named Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when Rebecca gave birth to them. The boys grew up, and Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the open country, while Jacob was content to stay at home among the tents. Isaac, who had a taste for wild game, loved Esau, but Rebecca loved Jacob.

Marty: I think I want to start here. We got Reed joining us this time. Reed, how do you feel about the story of Jacob and what kind of things do you hear as we start to get into this guy’s story?

Reed: Generally, I kind of love the story of Jacob. I’m drawn to tragic figures. They feel real to me. So what I hear right from the beginning, the twins are in the womb, they’re struggling. I think that’s a good word for the life of Jacob.

Marty: Yeah.

Reed: It is a lot of struggle, a lot of striving. So I like the arc of it. I see Jacob as this kind of like bizarro Joseph story. And I really like that because I also love the story of Joseph. I love stories about eventual reconciliation and this story—well, we’ll see. It kind of gets there.

So yeah, I like the story of Jacob. And it also causes me to wrestle with the question of why in the world would God use this guy? Because it can be at times really hard to find redeeming qualities like any redeeming qualities about Jacob. In particular on this passage, the grabbing the heel thing always strikes me as a little weird, like what is a heel grabber?

Marty: Cause that’s what his name actually means. Like we’ve all, we’ve often been taught like in Sunday school, like he’s the deceiver, his name means that he’s a liar, which is definitely like a stretch. It seems to imply more of heel, grasper, so, supplanter. I think when they, I think when, I mean, supplant is what’s in the lexicon.

Reed: I read a thing that said over-reacher—

Marty: Oh, okay.

Reed: Like it’s somebody whose reach exceeds their grasp?

Marty: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s, because, because the question has to be, like, everybody gives us always a negative connotation, but the question has to be answered. Why would parents choose to name their son this?

And I remember I chose this for my son’s middle name. But I actually love that. I had not heard that, but overreacher perfectly nails why I wanted my son to always want more. I wanted him to not be satisfied with the status quo. So I like that idea of overreaching.

Reed: I also think there is already an allusion to the pivotal moment in Jacob’s story where he is wrestling in Through the Night and he’s grasping on to this figure that he’s wrestling with and he won’t let go. And so I hear that also from the beginning, so I like that kind of foreshadowing.

Marty: Yep, totally.

Brent: The NET footnote has a theory that it means something like “may he protect” as in a rear guard dogging the heels of everyone else.

Marty: Interesting.

Brent: And they attribute the negative connotation that it has to Esau. Like it was intended to be positive but Esau redefined it as negative.

Marty: Interesting. Okay. Alright.

Reed: There is also ambiguity for me, not just with the name itself, but then in verse 27, I think it is, where it’s talking about Esau is favored by his dad and Jacob is favored by his mother and it’s describing them in the word there. How is it? What was the translation you read Brent? Was it peaceful?

Brent: Where at?

Reed: Sorry. It’s describing that Esau was a hunter, but Jacob was—and there’s an adjective and he stayed among, he stayed in the tent, or he stayed in the camp.

Brent: He was content.

Reed: Content! This word, I’m—so the Hebrew word is tahm, which I don’t have any expertise in, but I’ve seen it translated actually a lot of different, like slightly different ways.

Brent: NET has even-tempered.

Reed: Yeah. Or like mild or simple. The word in Job actually gets used and it means blameless. Like it’s used a lot in Job. And whatever the specific meaning, I think it’s interesting that the connotation is actually not who we find Jacob to be throughout the story.

Brent: [laughs]

Reed: Jacob is not peaceful. He is not mild. He’s definitely not content. He’s always trying to get more. So I find that an interesting, yeah, just an interesting detail.

Marty: I do wonder if that’s the dual nature, like a lot of these names have this like positive and negative rub to them. And I wonder if that is the dual nature of this name. He could have been. He has the tools. the ingredients to be these things. And yet we see the other side of the coin so often in his story.

Brent: My question from this little section is that detail of at home among the tents. it seems like just saying at home would be enough, but why does it specify the tense? And I don’t know if you necessarily have an answer for that, just something that is kind of making me think about it.

Marty: Yeah, that would be a great question for Elle to make sure I wasn’t overreaching.

Brent: Ah! Ah! Ah!

Marty: I have heard people, and I’m not even sure I—ah, yeah, yeah, yeah! I was like, “What? What?”

Brent: [laughs]

Marty: But I have heard people say that there’s—the insinuation here is the idea of a—he’s a busy body. I haven’t always loved how that’s been framed, but I mean, that might give me potentially that impression, but I don’t know if that’s there in the Hebrew or not.

Reed: I also read a thing that there is some rabbinic conversation that he was there, and what this connotes is that he was actually devoted to God and the Text, or devoted to the way of God, to the way that his parents had taught him.

Marty: Sure.

Reed: And so that’s why he’s staying home, because he wants to—he has fervor and zeal about this religion that his parents are giving to him.

Marty: Yeah. Yeah. And I could actually see that. I think a lot of us, as we’re used to this story, would be like, “What? What?!” But I could actually see that. totally see that potentially in this story. Yeah, for sure. Brent, we better keep reading.

Brent: Alright. Once when Jacob was cooking some stew, Esau came in from the open country famished. He said to Jacob, “Quick, let me have some of that red stew. I’m famished.” That is why he was also called Edom.

Jacob replied, “First, sell me your birthright.” “Look, I’m about to die,” Esau said. “What good is the birthright to me?” But Jacob said, “Swear to me first.” So he swore an oath to him, selling his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau some bread and some lentil stew. He ate and drank and then got up and left. So Esau despised his birthright.

Marty: Alright, so we need to talk about this idea of birthright and this idea of the bechor. The bechor, Elle would be quick to remind us that the word simply means “chosen.” The word gets used culturally. Moses frames it as this idea of the male firstborn. So bechor is usually used in the sense of the male firstborn child.

Word technically means chosen, but this firstborn son is the chosen person in this patrilineal society to carry on dad’s lineage. This means that he gets a double portion of the inheritance, but he gets that double portion of the inheritance because he has a double portion of responsibility. So it’s this son who’s going to carry on the legacy, the values, the focus of the father, and because of that, he gets a double portion because he’s got to carry that weight.

The other sons, they can do other things. They can choose to go start their own beit av‘s if they want to. But this firstborn son, he’s responsible for kind of shouldering that and carrying that on. So you get this double portion. So if a father has... We’re so unused to this. Sometimes it’s helpful to explain it, especially for the first time here in Session 1. The father, if he has four sons, would split his estate five ways. And that bechor gets a double portion. Two sons—split at three ways, the bechor gets a double portion, seven sons split at eight ways, and that firstborn son gets that double portion.

So this is what Jacob wants. Now, does Jacob only want the material inheritance? Or I’m thinking of that midrash that Reed even pointed at, that tradition, does he also want the responsibility? Because in the last episode, we ran into Yitzhak, we ran into Dad, and we looked at Dad’s life, his story, which is actually largely in the next chapter in Genesis 26.

But we saw that the mission of God that was handed to his father Avram, that mission of Abraham was realized in a lot of ways in Yitzhak’s life. Isaac carried his father’s legacy really well in Genesis 26. And we ended up seeing how that worked. And now the story needs to be passed on from him to his son. So it’s getting passed on from generation to generation.

So now Isaac needs to do what Abraham did. Isaac needs to pass it on to, and he has a bechor, his name is Esau. He likes him. It’s one of dad’s favorites. He seems to be the kind of son that Isaac thinks that he would want. And it’s evident by the pick and the blessing, he’s prepared, he’s picked this son, but maybe dad’s pick is slightly misguided, it would seem like.

Maybe dad hasn’t quite identified who, maybe through God’s perspective, who’s going to be the one to carry this on. Esau’s supposed to realize, like he’s supposed to realize the weight of this calling and the weight of this partnership that he’s called to. Everything that his dad has accomplished, he needs now to carry it. And yet he despises it in the Text. He despises it. He just doesn’t care, but Jacob wants it.

And this is one of the things we are going to see in the life of Jacob. As much as I find him to be a confusing and a complex character, the one thing we can point out in the life of Jacob, and we’re going to continue, is his fire. We call it chutzpah. We’ve talked about it with Abraham. He’s got this, he’s got the seeds of, he wants it. And that’s what we’re going to see in his life. So I don’t know, Reed, if you see anything, what do you see in this?

Reed: I see that at least at the beginning here, I think you can put kind of as much of the, if you want to call it blame or responsibility on things getting taken away from Esau. I think you could put as much of it on Esau as you would on Jacob. It’s as much being willing to kind of give away, you know, his whole birthright for some stew.

And what does that tell us about Esau? Like, is he kind of a lazy guy? Is he kind of an apathetic sort of figure? And Jacob is maybe here, he’s an opportunist. I don’t really see him as—he’s not really engaging in any trickery yet. And that will come later. But I think right now he just sees an opportunity, and he knows what he’s got to do to take it, and he’s willing to do that.

And he probably knows that he’s in some way maybe swindling a little bit. But I mean, Esau knows the terms. And he agrees to it. And so I see it’s kind of almost absurd, like how Esau’s like, “Man, I’m really hungry. It’s a little bit exaggerated, like I’m gonna die.” And so he gives away his birthright. And that Jacob is willing to give up, you know, sure, I’ll give that up for something as important as the birthright. So that’s what I see.

Marty: Yeah, totally.

Brent: I wonder like how, I mean maybe he is being dramatic, but maybe he actually is like “If I don’t eat, I’m going to die.” Like maybe he was out way longer than he was supposed to be. And something went wrong. Who, who knows how long it doesn’t say how long he was out.

Marty: Yeah.

Brent: And maybe he feels like if I don’t eat now, like there’s no point in having the birthright because I’m going to be gone, but probably dramatic. I don’t know. But then also like, shouldn’t something this weighty take way longer than just like a quick oath? Like, it doesn’t seem like he could get it even done. And then I also wonder, does he even have the right to give up his own birthright?

Marty: Sure.

Brent: Because isn’t that more like Isaac’s responsibility to pass that on? So like, what is like, does Jacob actually expect like, oh, Esau said it. So now I’m set.

Reed: I do think it’s interesting how in this episode the parents don’t factor in at all. And then in the next episode, the parents become—really, both of them are really key players when it comes to Jacob taking away the blessing.

Marty: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, Brent, some of your questions are going to come back here even in the next part of the story. So we kind of jump over Genesis 26. We did that in the last episode.

We jump over to Genesis 27, and now mom has hatched this plot to set up Jacob as the guy who’s going to get the blessing. Now we are dealing with like a trick, a deception. Like did she—here’s what I want to know that the Text doesn’t tell us. Like did she—did Rivka share the things? Like Brent, you read that passage earlier about God telling her, “You have these two boys in your womb, the one will—” she has this prophecy. Did she share that prophecy with Isaac or not? Like did she keep that to herself? We weren’t told either way.

Did Isaac, did she share it and Isaac ignored her? Like, “Ah, stupid women. What do they know? God doesn’t talk to them.” Did he just disregard it? Did he not believe her? Like I would love to know the relational dynamics there. We just weren’t told.

But now she’s trying to, and this is the part we’ll dive into in Session 6 through Fohrman’s material, and I encourage you to look at it before then as well. But the plot essentially backfires. The plan that she has, the plan that they have together, and what she envisions, it doesn’t work. And yet it does work on the material side. Jacob gets the blessing that was intended for Isaac.

And at the end of this, you’re just like, “Why doesn’t Isaac just take it back? Like why does Isaac, he gives the wrong blessing. Why doesn’t he just say, ‘Okay, listen, guys, that wasn’t how it worked.’” And this goes to your question a moment ago, Brent, where it’s like, is this that easy to just get rid of your birthright and like, and Isaac even give it away?

Like, they see a power in words. Like we’re used to this idea of “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” which is totally ridiculous and a stupid saying, because we all know how powerful words can be. But in their world, they even saw not just like an interrelational destructive power to words, but a really efficacious, like, there’s a covenantal, we would say contractual reality.

There’s a binding reality when these words went out. Isaac had spent all of this time. I would imagine, I don’t think he spent hours. I don’t even think he spent days. He probably spent months or years thinking about the blessings that he was going to give. He prayed over this. He prepared this. This was heavy and weighty. And then He sends it out into the cosmos. And once they’re gone, in their world, these words go to work.

And so He can’t just like do, you know, flipsies. He can’t be like, “Oh, I gave it to the wrong people. Sorry. You know, don’t trick me like that. Swap those blessings.” It doesn’t work like that for them. But I don’t know. Reed, what do you see in that section?

Reed: I think we do kind of know this. I think what feels strange about this is that it’s kind of feels like an incantation almost. You know and we’re like, oh, is it just like—is he like casting a spell, and why can’t he just undo that or something.

But I think if you think about it in terms of like promises and vows we know like if you have children and you’ve made a real promise to your kid. You know that you can’t just go back on that or just think about marriage like marriage is created with what? With words. And that actually creates a whole new reality now that’s really going to affect everything about the future.

And that kind of language is—that kind of speech is really different from like, oh, what time is it? It’s 3-15. Or, oh, I heard there’s going to be a thunderstorm tomorrow. That kind of speech is powerless compared to this kind of speech. So I think we know it.

I also think that the question you bring up is a really important one when you say—when it comes to Rebecca—she knows—like that’s, that’s really important background information. She has received a word about the kind of destiny or the fate of these two children.

And it’s important to remember that I don’t know whether Isaac knows or not. I suspect maybe he actually does. Cause I think he’s not fully deceived when Jacob is coming to him. I think he’s kind of going along, but I think it brings up the question of, “Well, if this is what I know that God wants to have happen in the world, then does it justify me doing underhanded things in order to make that happen?”

And that’s a question I think all of us can kind of grapple with. And this is why I like that this story ends up being kind of a tragedy, because maybe it is well-intentioned. Maybe they just wanted what God wanted, but they went about it maybe in the wrong ways. And then the destruction kind of gets out of control by the time we get to the end of the story.

Marty: Yeah, yeah, I really love all those points. It’s the complexity and the messiness, like you said, in the tragedy that makes it real and relatable because it’s like, we would love it if everything in life and in our own stories and experiences fit so cleanly in a good box and a bad box.

And yet they’re kind of this weird mixture of the two. It’s very true to our experience. And so this story doesn’t, you know, doesn’t go real well. Esau wants to kill his brother, you know, like you do. And he’s forced—he’s forced to go.

He has to leave his family, and he has to go to the only other family available to him. And we’ve heard of them before. That’s the family of Nahor. So give me Genesis 28, 11. Brent, let’s jump ahead to that next chapter.

Brent: When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep.

Marty: Right, so he’s on his way to this family we just talked about, and he ends up having this dream. One of my favorite teachings that was pointed out to me is that he is the Hebrew here insinuates the middle of nowhere’s nowhere.

Like he’s on his way to Nahor’s house where he’s going to end up meeting Laban and that whole part of the story, which we’ll deal with here in a moment, but he’s in the middle of nowhere’s nowhere. Like this, there is nothing, it’s the Hebrew’s way of saying there is nothing significant, there is nothing holy about the place, like the geographical location, the stones that he’s on, the stone he’s sleeping on.

And yet in these very mundane, very normal, very in-between, very unholy places, we can have these quite holy experiences. It’s going to be a place that he calls and returns to—Bethel, house of God. He meets God. God was in this place the whole time and I wasn’t even aware of it.

Brent: You’ve taken me some places like that in Israel, Marty.

Marty: Yes, I very much like that. Absolutely. Reed, what are you thinking?

Reed: I love this part of the story because I think this is a stupidly gracious response on God’s part. Jacob has just done like a pretty underhanded, like if the first time with the birthright was just sort of opportunist, this thing with, you know, stealing the blessing is like, that’s just way active trickery, you know, that’s, that’s outright deception, that leaves kind is he lays down to sleep and like God comes to him with this dream and also this promise of I’m gonna be with you wherever you go. And so I just—I think it is a ridiculously beautiful gracious response on God’s part.

And then to that point about—I just—I can really relate to the sentiment it’s Jacob was shaken you know when he woke up and he was like oh my gosh God was in this place and I I didn’t know it, it reminds me of, in some like orthodox Christian iconography, there is, you’ll see the Christ figure and behind him is this dark shaped, it’s like an almond shaped, and it’s got these layers and it actually gets darker as you go towards the center.

And what that means is like, the more you experience God, the less you understand God. And I saw, when I was reading for this chapter, It was somebody who said, “Only once you admit that you don’t know, when you don’t have it all together, mentally, cognitively, only then do you actually experience the mystery of God.” And I think that this dream sequence just kind of speaks to that.

Marty: Well, I love how you frame that, because that’s exactly how I feel, especially at this point in Jacob’s story, is that God—and I do, I appreciate the beauty that Reed is speaking to—logically, my brain keeps kicking back, going, “Why? Why would God show grace here?

Why would God be stupidly gracious in His response? Why the abundance of—because He certainly doesn’t deserve it, and He’s certainly not Abraham, and He’s certainly not Isaac. And why—like, that’s what keeps bothering me about this story is why would God show up? You have a note in here as well, Reed. I love this. You say, “He’s not ready for wrestling yet.”

Reed: Oh yeah.

Marty: I love that. Gosh, that’s great. I love that.

Reed: When he wakes up and he is asking, let’s see here, it’s in verse. Oh yeah. So after that, he makes a vow and he says basically like, “God, if you will protect me because my brother wants to kill me, then I’ll serve you forever,” you know? And it’s this kind of wheeling and dealing, like trying to bargain with God. And I just see that that is not the same kind of thing that he ends up doing when he wrestles later.

Marty: Yep.

Reed: And just that he’s still not at a point yet where he is ready for that kind of wrestling. His thinking about God is, I don’t know what the, maybe just small. Like, “You do something for me and then I’ll do something for you,” as if God is really going to care about that.

Marty: Absolutely.

Reed: And it also doesn’t have anything to do with Jacob being transformed. He has no concern for that. All he wants is just to be like, “I don’t want to die.”

Marty: Yes, right, absolutely. Yeah he’s still a hot mess and he’s a hot mess as he keeps going into Genesis 29 and God’s still meeting him there. God’s still working with him. God’s still traveling with him. Is this just because God knows who he’s going to be and what he, I don’t know, but He’s still…

He shows up at Laban’s house. There’s these two daughters, Leah and Rachel, falls immediately in love with Rachel and Laban ends up deceiving him like poetic justice, right? Jacob is finally deceived by somebody else and he’s tricked into marrying Leah, the daughter he didn’t want.

And then he’s so in love with Rachel, he agrees to, that’s after working for seven years. And then he agrees to work for another seven years and then Laban will give him Rachel. We’re told that for an additional seven years he ends up working after that. He was so in love with Rachel, it was like a blink of an eye, we’re told in the Text.

Just this really over the top. But this deception, it’s going to just continue. Jacob living in Laban’s, around Laban’s household, is just full of poetic justice. They have like this deceive off in Genesis 30. It’s like a game show, deception competition.

Brent: [laughs]

Reed: That’s a good way of saying it.

Marty: And they have these flocks and it’s, I want, you know, whatever flocks like increase the most and we’re not even sure. And again, it feels kind of like, I don’t know how you guys read it. It feels kind of like God’s behind it still.

Like why would God be like, is he condoning this? Like Jacob says, we’re not told that God came to him in a dream, but he says that God told him in a dream how to do this. He puts striped sticks next to and then speckled and he controls—like through this, like it feels like voodoo magic ends up controlling the flocks increase. Is God like in that? Like what do we even do?

Again, it’s kind of unresolved, super messy, fits everything else that I’ve been wrestling with up to this point. And so he has to go, you know, this is going to be unsustainable, a theme in Jacob’s life up to this point, whatever relational situation he has put himself in is completely unsustainable.

Reed: Great word.

Brent: Hmm.

Marty: And yeah.

Brent: That feels a little too close to home, Marty. I don’t know if I’m comfortable with that.

Marty: Yeah.

Reed: Called out.

Marty: And he now has to flee yet again. And Rachel is going to steal her dad’s idols on the way out. I wonder if this is a great example, by the way, it made me think of Abraham when Eliezer said, “Should I just take Isaac to Nahor’s house if she doesn’t want to come back?” And Abraham says, “Absolutely not.”

I wonder if Abraham had this awareness or had this foresight that if you live in Laban’s house, like his gods go with you, like that kind of a thing, because Rachel ends up stealing Laban’s idols. Jacob doesn’t know anything about this, which is going to be relevant here in a moment in the story, but she takes that with, but okay, Reed, what do you see in this part of the story?

Reed: I don’t see a lot here other than what you’ve already said, which is it’s unsustainable and it just becomes this like one thing leads to another. And Jacob seems like this character to me who’s kind of always doing whatever he has to do in the moment, not thinking about what that’s going to lead to, how that’s going to spiral out or what the consequences are going to be.

And then he just deals with the next thing however he has to in that moment, and it’s like this chaotic sort of life and it’s kind of comically compounded here with the whole Laban situation and like you said, they’re trying to have it deceive-off. That’s what I see, is this sort of chaotic nature of these lives.

Marty: Yeah, so then he has to take off and flee yet again, and Laban’s going to follow. So let’s pick up here in Genesis 31. Let’s not read the whole thing. Let’s go to 43.

Brent: Laban answered Jacob, “The women are my daughters, the children are my children, and the flocks are my flocks. All you see is mine. Yet what can I do today about these daughters of mine, or about the children they have born? Come now, let’s make a covenant, you and I, and let it serve as a witness between us.” So Jacob took a stone and set it up as a pillar. He said to his relatives, “Gather some stones.” So they took stones and piled them in a heap, and they ate there by the heap.

Marty: So they eat there by the heap. And this is so these two guys, they have like legitimate, they have legitimate beef. Like they, they, from their perspectives, this is not like where one side is obviously right and the other side like that. From their two perspectives, they have this irreconcilable situation, but they need to find a way to come to some kind of peace so that the relationship can be somehow put together.

And so they go to eat together. Eating together in the ancient world is a way of showing, we’re going to see this throughout the biblical story. If you’re eating—we think about Jesus eating with sinners and tax collectors—you eat with someone, what it tells you, what it tells the world that would be watching is that you and this person are in fellowship. That you are in right relationship, legally right relationship, that things are right.

So they sit down to have this meal and they’ve set up a couple different markers. There’s one stone that’s stood up, then there’s a heap of stones that are put up. And this is, like Reed said, this is the mess, the chaotic mess that comes out of this. It’s the circumstances that they’re in. And now they’ve got to try to put this thing back together. And this isn’t going to go as smooth as we may want it to. So give us the next couple verses here, Brent.

Brent: Laban called it “Jagar-sa-hadutha” and Jacob called it “Galid.” Laban said, “This heap is a witness between you and me today.” That is why it was called “Galid.” It was also called mitzvah because he said, “May the Lord keep watch between you and me when we are away from each other.”

Marty: They don’t even, they can’t even agree on what to call the thing. They’ve got two different piles. They’re having a meal. They can’t figure out like which God they’re going to call on and what they’re going to call the place, like Laban calls it one thing, Jacob calls it another.

They like are both trying to like set there, they’re trying to like figure out like who’s, it’s not really a suzerain vassal situation, but who’s the one that gets to like write the terms and they’re trying to figure out how to come to terms they can both agree on. Kind of a hot mess, but keep going.

Brent: Okay, so this is still Laban talking. If you mistreat my daughters or if you take any wives besides my daughters, even though no one is with us, remember that God is a witness between you and me. Laban also said to Jacob, here is...

Marty: Alright. So that is, that’s one of those broken conversations there that we have, right?

Brent: Mmm, yes.

Marty: It feels like Laban’s trying to set out these terms and Jacob’s like, “Nyeh, nyeh.” So now, but Laban keeps, and you could even look over the past paragraph. Like, you can see, like, this is a—this is, like Reed pointed out, a chaotic, hot mess. The circumstances of their relationship—this is not the kind of world that I want to be. It’s not what Isaac was building with the quarreling herdsmen of “whose wells are these?” and “Isaac’s bringing shalom to chaos.” This is just pure chaos that Jacob has in his wake.

Brent: Jacob’s not talking much at all. The last thing he said was in verse 46, and all he said was, “Gather some stones.”

Marty: Sure.

Brent: And then Laban’s just been running his mouth since then.

Reed: At this point, I mean, each one knows that they’re dealing with a con man.

Marty: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Great point. Absolutely.

Reed: And so there, he’s trying to be as like shrewd as possible here. Like, “Eh, what are you saying? You’re trying to take me for a ride here? Like what’s going on?”

Marty: Yeah, absolutely. Alright, Brent, give us the last little bit here. Let’s close this thing out.

Brent: And also said to Jacob, “Here is this heap and here is this pillar I have set up between you and me. This heap is a witness and this pillar is a witness that I will not go past this heap to your side to harm you and that you will not go past this heap and pillar to my side to harm me. May the God of Abraham and the God of Nahor, the God of their father, judge between us.”

So Jacob took an oath in the name of the fear of his father Isaac. He offered a sacrifice there in the hill country and invited his relatives to a meal. After they had eaten, they spent the night there. Early the next morning, Laban kissed his grandchildren and his daughters and blessed them. Then he left and returned home.

Marty: So they finally get it straightened out. And I don’t know if you noticed, but they end up having a second meal again, because this whole thing is so chaotic. As I read it, it’s like, wait, are we good? Are we good? Like, did we finally figure out what to call this?

Brent: Hmm. Yeah.

Marty: Did we finally figure out in our terms?

Reed: Mm-hmm.

Marty: They finally got a stone. Each one of them needs their own stone because they have to have the stone that they agree on. They’ve got to have their own terms, they’ve got to have their own arrangement. They finally, they’re marking a spot, they’re marking a moment that they can call.

It’s kind of like showing the receipts, like they can walk back to this and say, “No, we settled this. We said we were good. Here’s your stone by your name. Here’s my stones by my name. Here’s where we had our meal, not just one but two.” Like they finally kind of get it ironed out.

Brent: Is there one last element of trickery though when Laban’s talking? This heap is a witness and this pillar is a witness that you—or sorry—that I will not go past this heap to your side and that you will not go past this heap and pillar to my side.

Marty: Yes, I can remember memorizing this section not too long ago, Brent, and that’s what I heard as I memorized this. Like, I kept hearing them both. I hear them both. Like you said, Jacob doesn’t say a whole lot of things, but their actions, too.

Like, they’re both like, okay, but my pillar, like, like they won’t even acknowledge the other person’s name, the other person’s pillar, the other person’s side of it. It is this, and I hear that in his language, like, here’s the thing that’s set up. That’s the thing that I’m concerned about.

I’m really not concerned about yours, but I won’t go over there, but you don’t come past this and my thing to my stuff. That language seems to be far more weighted to his side.

Brent: Yeah.

Marty: And the thing that I see here is this is just definitely not, I mean, the last episode we talked about the mission realized. We talked about Isaac blessing all nations, even through like pretty stiff pushback and opposition. Isaac realized the promise that God was trying to accomplish through his father.

Boy, the Jacob story is in a different place at this point. it. We can’t even bless, like Isaac was blessing the Canaanites and the people living in the land, the people of Abimelech. Like Jacob can’t even get along with his cousins. Like this is kind of the mess that we have here.

But kind of my final observations, and we’ll see if Reed has any closing thoughts as we get out of here. You know, why does God, again, part one, part two, we’re sitting at kind of like the cliffhanger in between. We’re right in the middle of Jacob’s story, “Why does God keep wanting to work through this guy? Why does he keep showing up?”

And I think part of what I have taken away throughout the years is if God has to choose between a guy that doesn’t have it all together, but he wants it, versus the guy who has it alright, but just doesn’t care. Like the guy who’s the rule follower, but just has no fire. Or the guy that kind of breaks the rules, kind of has a hope, but he has fire. Like he really wants to be in the middle of what God’s doing.

I think God chooses the Jacob. And I don’t want that to be like some dooming condemnation for all of us Esau’s out there. But if you’re a Jacob, I think oftentimes you’ve been told there’s really not a place for you. You kind of color outside the lines. I love this story because it reminds me God loves to work with Jacob’s.

I don’t think that means that God doesn’t work with Esau’s who are willing. I’m more of an Esau character, I think. I typically follow the rules. I typically want everything to work the way it’s supposed to, and God will still use me if I show up. But it’s easier to steer and direct a moving target. It’s easier to steer the momentum of Jacob than it is to light a fire under an Esau.

Doesn’t mean that God won’t. It just means it’s easier for God to muse that chutzpah fire laden Jacob. rather use a Jacob than convince an Esau, if that’s another way to phrase it. So Reed, I don’t know if you have any closing thoughts you’d add to that before we get out of here, but lay it on me.

Reed: That’s, well, that’s really well said. This reminds me of a short parable that Jesus tells in Matthew, where he talks about these two sons and the father is trying to get them to go out and work. And the one says, “I’m on it,” and then he doesn’t go and do anything. And the other one is like, “Nah, I’m not going to do any of that.” But then he ends up going anyway.

And he tells this parable to the Pharisees and he says, “The tax collectors and the sinners are entering the kingdom ahead of you.” Which I think it’s a similar kind of point that is, there’s no just resting on your laurels here. Like, just because you happen to be born first, or just because you’re of this particular—that’s not what actually God is most interested in.

What God is looking for is who are the people that are going to, even if they’re reluctant at first, even if they are strong-headed, right, and thick-skulled like a bull or whatever, God would rather find those people who are gonna go along, even if it’s difficult, than the people who are like, “Yeah, no, we’re like, we got it made in the shade.”

Marty: Yep, I love that. I love that connection, that parable. I think it perfectly gives us a Jesus teaching behind what we’re looking at here.

Reed: It’s what I’m here for.

Brent: And Marty, I think you had a book that you would recommend to go along with this material?

Marty: Let’s see here. Did we have Fohrman stuff in our notes, Brent? Is that what we had?

Brent: Yes, but also Kushner.

Marty: Oh, yes. I love that. I appreciate you bringing that up. When it comes to that moment where Jacob is dreaming in the middle of nowhere’s nowhere, when he says, “God was in this place and I”—that’s actually the title of Kushner’s book. Kushner wrote a book, God Was in This Place & I, I Did Not Know. And it goes through some of the teachings here and expands on some more Jewish wisdom that you might find there. But you could have that book.

And then obviously we’ve got the Fohrman material that I believe we’ve linked already before last in some other episodes, Brent? For convenience, there you go.

Brent: Yeah, but we’ll do it again, just for convenience. And not anything specific, just Aleph Beta. There’s plenty of stuff on Jacob there.

Marty: Absolutely, we could do that. There’s a Parsha Companion that Fohrman wrote that really got into this story deeper. If people wanted to get ahead of the ballgame and beat us to Session 6, they could dive into that there.

Brent: Alright, well you can find those show notes and all the details about the show at bemadiscipleship.com. If you want to get in a group, if you want to get a hold of us, you can use the contact page. Everything’s going to be there on the website.

And everything we do is made possible by listeners like you. So if you are interested in supporting us, you can find the donate page there or use the support link in your podcast app. Everything is available—we try to make those resources convenient and easy for you. If you have any questions, definitely get in touch. But thanks for joining us on the BEMA Podcast this week. We’ll talk to you again soon.

Mollie: Hi, I’m Molly, a BEMA listener in Idaho Falls, and here’s the prayer from episode 13’s Companion.

God, we bless you for your grace, your radical grace, when we misjudge your promises with our own plans and misguided words. In the middle of, or rock bottom of, nowhere's nowhere, you remind us that you are here and you have been here all along.

Thank you for still pursuing and partnering with us to carry out your promise and bless the world. With your grace and love, may we never stop. Amen.