Laban Chased Jacob to Gilead and God Got There First

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The Well Went Dry

The shepherds of Haran came down to the well in the morning and there was nothing in it.

For twenty years that well had run over. They waited three days to see whether it would come back, and it did not come back, and on the third day they went and told Laban, who did not need to hear the rest. The water had never belonged to him or to Haran. It had been standing on his son-in-law's account, and his son-in-law was gone.

Jacob was already across the Euphrates with four wives, eleven sons, a daughter, and the flocks, aiming himself at the mountain of Gilead.

The Head in the Wall

What Rachel took out of her father's house was not a little figurine.

They had killed a man, a firstborn, and cut off his head. They salted it and packed it with spices, wrote words on a plate of gold and laid the plate under the tongue, and set the head into the wall of the room. At certain hours it talked to them. Laban bowed down in front of it.

Rachel put the thing in the basket of a camel and sat down on top of it, and rode out of Haran with her father's oracle underneath her.

An Angel With a Drawn Sword

Laban went after them with every man of his household. Seven days of road went under him in one, and he made up all the distance Jacob had put between them, and he had decided what he would do when he arrived.

Then he slept.

The angel came into the dark with a sword already out of its sheath and stood over him. Take care what you say to Jacob. Not one word from good to bad. Not a blessing, not a curse, nothing.

He woke up with his men still around him, his horses still fresh, and his mouth fenced.

When he came up the mountain Jacob was standing in the open with his hands raised, praising God, unarmed, unaware.

My Gods

Laban started in on him at once. Stealing away in secret. Carrying off my daughters like prisoners of war. If you had told me I would have sent you off with singing and drums.

Then he told on himself. "It is in my hand to do you harm," he said. "But the God of your father spoke to me last night."

That is how a certain kind of man boasts. He wanted Jacob to know exactly how much violence had been sitting in his hands the night before, and exactly who had taken it out of them.

He kept going until he got to the part that mattered to him. "Why did you steal my gods?"

His grandchildren were standing right there listening to him.

"We are ashamed of you, grandfather," they said. "An old man, and this is how you talk. My gods."

He went through the tents. Jacob's first, which was Rachel's, because Jacob always slept in the tent of the wife he loved. Then Leah's. Then the tents of the two handmaids. Nothing. Coming back out he noticed Rachel's hands moving over the bedding as though she were looking for something, and he turned around and went into her tent a second time.

She stayed on the camel basket and did not stand up for him. "Let it not offend my lord that I cannot rise. The way of women is on me."

He searched around her and under her, and the thing he was looking for had become a set of drinking cups, and he handled them and put them down.

Not a Needle, Not a Nail

Jacob had been silent through the whole search. When it turned up nothing he came apart.

Twenty years, he said. Fourteen for your daughters and six for your sheep, and you changed my wages ten times. Frost at night and heat in the day and no sleep in either. Whatever a beast tore I made good out of my own flock, and whatever was stolen I made good, and I even robbed the lion. God had assigned that lion its daily portion out of your sheep, and I took the portion out of its mouth and paid you for it, and the men of the town called me a thief to my face because they could not work out any other way a shepherd replaces what the wild takes.

Then the last of it. Every son-in-law who has ever lived under another man's roof has walked off with a knife or some small thing. You have had your hands through everything I own. Show me a needle. Show me a nail.

And in the middle of that, sure of himself, Jacob said the sentence that mattered.

"Whoever you find your gods with will not live."

He did not know. Rachel was twenty steps away sitting on them.

The Heap Was Listening

They built the boundary that afternoon. Jacob set up a standing stone by himself, a rock no crew of men could have lifted, and called his sons his brothers and had them pile a heap of stones beside it, and they all ate a meal on top of the pile.

Laban swore by the God of Abraham and the God of Nahor. Jacob would not put God's name next to a living man's, so he swore by the Fear of his father Isaac. Neither of them was to cross that heap toward the other with harm in mind.

In the morning Laban kissed his daughters and his grandchildren and blessed them, and none of it went any deeper than his mouth. He rode home, and as soon as he was home he sent his son Beor and ten men on a fast road to Esau with a story about a nephew who had come to him naked and left him rich, and an invitation to go and do whatever his heart wanted.

Jacob went on with six hundred thousand angels walking him to the border and six hundred thousand more waiting on the other side to take him the rest of the way, and he named that place Two Camps.

Laban lived a long time after Gilead, and turned up again on a ridge above Israel, hired by a Moabite king to curse them for money. On the road there his own donkey crushed his foot against a wall. It was that wall. The witness he had sworn on put its hand on him first.

And the curse Jacob spoke came out of Gilead in a camel basket. Rachel paid it on the road to Bethlehem, with Benjamin in her arms and her husband standing over her, and Jacob went to his own grave not knowing what he had said.