Laban's Face Turned Against Jacob in the Field

Jacob sent word out to the pasture for Rachel and Leah to come to him in the field. Not to the tent. The field, where wind takes a sentence away instead of carrying it back to the house.

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He did not soften it.

"I consider the looks of your father, and behold, they are not peaceful with me as yesterday and as before it."

He had been reading that face for twenty years. He knew what it did at a wedding and what it did over a wage dispute. Lately the greeting had gone short and the eyes had gone flat, and the flat look arrived whenever the flocks came into the conversation.

Then, in the same breath, the rest of it. "But the God of my father has been to my aid."

The Flocks Were Already Thin When He Got There

Long before any of this, before Jacob ever came over the ridge into Haran with a staff and a brother behind him who wanted him dead, the Holy One had sent a plague through Laban's flocks. It went through the pens and left a remnant. The animals Jacob was handed to tend were the ones that were left, the survivors of that killing.

The pastures had been emptied on purpose. Whatever grew back would grow back under one man's hands, and nobody would be able to file the increase under good rain or clever management.

It worked. The flocks came back fat, and Laban said so out loud, that the Lord had blessed him on account of Jacob's foot.

There is a foot that lays a house waste and a foot that carries blessing across a threshold. Laban had the second kind come through his gate. He named it. Then he changed the wages ten times.

Why He Called Them Out of the Tents

Nothing stays private inside a camp. Cousins in the next tent, hired men at the pens, a servant carrying water past a doorway with nothing better to do than listen. Jacob wanted his wives standing in open ground for a conversation that was going to split their family down the middle.

They came out to him with the smell of sheep on them and stood in the grass while he talked.

He gave them the danger and the protection together, in that order, and then he stopped and let them weigh it. Their father against their husband. The pens they had grown up beside against a road to a country neither of them had seen.

What Leaving Would Cost

Rachel and Leah knew the face he was describing. It had smiled at their weddings. It had also sold them, one after the other, for seven years apiece of another man's labor.

Staying meant raising children under a gaze that had already turned. Leaving meant sisters they would not see again, a grave they would not visit, and a household god or two that one of them would decide to take along.

Neither of them argued with him about whether the face had changed. They had seen it too.

The Foot About to Walk Out

Jacob had arrived in Haran as a fugitive with nothing to his name and had become the reason his father-in-law counted a full pen every evening. Now the arithmetic was turning against him. A man whose presence makes another man rich is safe only as long as the rich man remembers why.

Behind them, over the ridge, Laban's animals went on grazing. Every one of them descended from a remnant that had survived a plague nobody in that house remembered any more.

The house had thrived because a certain foot crossed its threshold. It was about to find out what happens when the foot walks back out.