The Deceiver Deceived

The Deceiver Deceived
Genesis 29:14b-31

The chapters in Genesis for Everyone regularly begin with a story making a link with our own world, but who needs a story to introduce the account of Jacob’s wedding? If I made a list of the moments in the Bible that I would most like to have witnessed (at least, a slightly frivolous list), then at the top would be seeing the look on Jacob’s face the morning after. The way Genesis tells the story invites you to imagine the scene: in the dark of evening Jacob could not see who was coming to him, but when morning dawns, “There, it was Leah!” The person he has married is not the person he thought it was (of course, all married couples have that experience one way or another). The great deceiver has become the one deceived. The younger cannot have priority over the elder: that was just the principle Jacob had defied, in his deceit of Isaac. Poor Jacob has lived by the principle that “true love waits,” and he wants to be able to give expression to all the libido he has been storing up for seven years. But in Laban, Jacob has met his match. He expresses his libido all right, but not in the direction he had in mind. So he completes the honeymoon week with Leah and then starts again with Rachel and knuckles down for another seven years of work for Laban...