How Jacob Cursed Rachel Without Meaning To

Jacob had served Laban for twenty years. He had arrived with nothing and built a household of thousands of animals, wives, children, and servants. He had been deceived at his wedding, his wages changed ten times, his flocks manipulated. When he finally left, he left without telling Laban, departing while the sheep were being sheared, taking his wives and children across the Euphrates toward Gilead. He knew the holy spirit had revealed to him that God would bring help to his children in that place in the days of Jephthah, generations hence. He was not running blindly. He was following a thread.

Rachel had taken her father's household idols before they left. She wanted to prevent Laban from continuing his idolatrous practices. She hid them. Jacob did not know.

The account in the Legends of the Jews traces what happened next through several levels of cause and effect. Laban discovered the well of Haran had run dry as soon as Jacob departed, and he understood immediately that the blessing on the city had been given for Jacob's sake and had left with him. He assembled the people of the city, pursued Jacob, and caught up with him in the mountains of Gilead. He would have killed him. The archangel Michael appeared to Laban in a dream and told him: take care that you do not harm Jacob even slightly, or you will die yourself. Laban arrived to find Jacob praying and praising God. He opened the confrontation by boasting of his power to harm: it is in my hand to do you hurt, but God warned me. That, the tradition notes, is characteristic of the wicked: they boast of the evil they could have done.

Laban searched all the tents for his idols. He went to Jacob's tent, to Leah's tent, to the tents of the two handmaids. Then he noticed Rachel moving things around, and his suspicion sharpened, and he went back to her tent a second time. He would have found what he was looking for, but a miracle intervened: the teraphim were transformed into drinking vessels, and Laban, searching through cups, found nothing. He gave up.

Jacob, who did not know about Rachel and the idols, was incensed. He turned on Laban with the full force of twenty years of grievance. He said: I dealt wrongfully with the lion, because God had assigned some of your sheep to the lion's daily portion and I replaced them from my own pocket, and people called me a thief for it. He said: is there another son-in-law who has lived in his father-in-law's house and not taken so much as a needle or a nail? In his anger he swore: with whomsoever you find your gods, he shall not live.

He did not know he had cursed his own wife.

The fuller tradition says this curse would have taken effect at once, except that God wanted Rachel to bear Jacob one more son before she died. The curse waited. It waited until Benjamin was born, and Rachel died in childbirth on the road between Bethel and Bethlehem, and Jacob buried her there, not in the Cave of Machpelah with the other patriarchs and matriarchs. The rabbis noted the location was not an accident: Rachel was buried on the road so that when her descendants passed that way as exiles, they would pass her tomb, and she would pray for them. Her burial at the roadside was not a deprivation but a station.

After the confrontation with Laban, the two men made peace. Jacob set up a great stone as a memorial and his sons cast up heaps of stones as a sign of their covenant. Jacob summoned his sons and called them brothers, for they were his peers in piety and strength. He swore to take no other wives beside his four daughters. Laban swore not to cross the heap with hostile intent. They called the place Mahanaim, Double Host, because at this spot on the road Jacob was met by the second army of angels, the ones who accompanied him from the border of the Holy Land onward, relieving the first army of six hundred thousand that had escorted him out of Haran.

Jacob noticed them and said: you belong neither to the host of Esau who is preparing for war against me, nor to the host of Laban who is about to pursue me again. You are the holy angels sent by God. Six hundred thousand angels in each host. He had been guarded on a scale he could not have imagined, through twenty years of labor and deception and loss, arriving at the border of his homeland accompanied by more than he had left with, in ways he could barely count.

The tradition preserved in the Legends of the Jews notes that in his anger over the idols, in the moment he swore the curse, Jacob also said something that revealed his character: he reminded Laban that he had dealt honestly in a world that expected him not to. He said that other people called him a thief and a sneak because he replaced, from his own pocket, the sheep that lions or wild beasts had taken from Laban's flocks, when no honest shepherd would have done that. He had protected Laban at personal cost for twenty years, and not once had he taken so much as a needle or a nail from the household. He said this in the middle of an accusation, still not knowing that his own wife was the one who had stolen. His righteousness and his curse arrived in the same breath, and Rachel's death, when it came, would carry both of them inside it.