Rebecca Ran Down From Her Tower the Day Jacob Came Home

The Torah is strangely quiet about the reunion. When Jacob finally comes back to Canaan after twenty years in the house of Laban, the biblical text says almost nothing about his mother. Rebecca does not appear at the reunion with Isaac. She is not named at her own son's return. She is not even explicitly given a death scene. The Torah buries her in a footnote. (Genesis 35:8) mentions the death of Deborah, her nurse, and that is the closest thing to a goodbye Rebecca gets.

The rabbinic and Second Temple tradition refused to accept this. It insisted that Rebecca saw her son again, that she ran from a tower to meet him, and that the reunion was the last great act of a woman who had already risked everything to get him home in the first place.

Start with the Book of Jubilees, a second-century BCE Jewish work preserved in full in Ethiopic manuscripts and studied today from the copies found at Qumran. Jubilees rewrites the Jacob cycle with a level of detail the Torah does not bother with. When Jacob returns from Haran, Jubilees places Rebecca in a high tower of the household, the kind of structure an elder matriarch would occupy in a wealthy nomadic family. Word reaches her that her son is approaching. The text says her spirit revived. The phrase is almost identical to the Hebrew verb used later in the Torah when the old Jacob is told that his own son Joseph is still alive. Vatchi ruach. The spirit came back to life.

Rebecca runs down the tower stairs. She does not wait. She does not stand at the door. She rushes out to meet him in the open ground in front of the house and kisses him on the face, just as she had kissed him twenty years earlier the night she disguised him in his brother's clothes and sent him into Isaac's tent. Jubilees then does something the Torah does not. It places Ephraim and Manasseh into the scene, clearly anachronistic, and has Rebecca meet her grandsons and bless them. "In you shall the seed of Abraham become illustrious." The text gives her the final word.

The Book of Jubilees also preserves a version of the earlier scene in which Rebecca sent Jacob away. The Torah tells us Esau was planning to kill his brother after the stolen blessing. Rebecca knew. She always knew. She tells Jacob to run to her brother Laban in Haran and stay there "a few days" until Esau's anger cools. It is one of the great ironies of the Jacob story. Those "few days" became twenty years. Rebecca never saw him again in the Torah's timeline.

Jubilees preserves something the Torah almost leaves out. Jacob actually argues with his mother. "I am not afraid," he tells her. "If he wishes to kill me, I will kill him." Rebecca's answer is unforgettable. "Let me not be bereft of both my sons on one day." She had carried twins. She had watched them wrestle in the womb. She had heard the oracle about two nations at war with each other, and she knew that if the brothers met in arms, she would bury both of them. Her whole adult life had been spent trying to keep one alive without losing the other, and the tower she would eventually run out of was the tower she retreated to the day she finally sent him off.

Bereshit Rabbah, redacted in fifth-century Palestine, fills in the original scheme. The rabbis wanted to know how Rebecca could have deceived her own husband. Their answer is that she was acting on prophecy. Louis Ginzberg's compilation in Legends of the Jews (1909) preserves the tradition: Rebecca, through the Holy Spirit, knew that the blessing meant for Esau would destroy the family if it fell on the wrong son. She had known it from the moment of the oracle in (Genesis 25:23), the line that told her the older would serve the younger. The deception in the tent was not manipulation. It was prophecy implementation.

The rabbinic tradition records her giving Jacob the exact instructions. Go to the flock and bring me two young goats. I will prepare the food Isaac loves. Put the skins on your hands and neck. The rabbis note that Isaac's eyes were dim, but his other senses were not. He smelled the field of his son. He felt the rough skin of his son. He heard the voice of his son that did not match his son. "The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau." (Genesis 27:22). Rebecca had planned for everything except the voice.

Isaac blessed him anyway.

The rabbis then put Rebecca back in her tower, alone, for twenty years. Her husband will not speak to her about what happened. Her favored son is in exile in Haran, working for a man she knows is dangerous because he is her own brother. Her other son is in the camp below the tower, nursing a grudge so deep he has already vowed to kill his twin the moment their father dies.

When Rebecca runs down the tower stairs in the Jubilees scene, she is running out of twenty years of silence.

The Jubilees tradition gives her three blessings to offer. One for Jacob. One for Ephraim. One for Manasseh. Then she walks him to Isaac's chamber and stands while her husband, still dim-eyed, greets the son who tricked him. The Second Temple apocrypha refused to let the matriarch die anonymous in a verse about her nurse's grave. It gave her a last scene. It gave her a tower to run out of. It gave her the one thing the Torah had taken away: the son, walking back up the road, alive.