Goodbye

Now that all the holidays are over, it’s time to go back to what we were doing before, and in the case of my blog, that was Jacob. Surely we should be winding the story of Jacob down, since he was an old man when he married, and in the last story we looked at, some of his kids were getting to be grown up. I feel like I’ve been blogging about Jacob forever. I still have a ways to go, but I think after this story, Jacob will become a supporting character, rather than the protagonist.

In looking at the story, actually three stories, that I want to put in this blog entry, I see a tie-in to my last story, the New Testament story of Simeon and Anna. Simeon and Anna experienced the birth of Jesus as very old people who had lived a long time and had seen a great deal. Simeon had just one more thing he wanted to see, and he saw Him. Anna had seen premature loss, and lived on to see the One Who could comfort her. Jacob, in this story, as an old man, experienced a similar loss to Anna’s.

By the way, something I was listening to online just before writing this reminded me to make a clarification: when I use the word story, I do not mean in any way that I think the stories in the Bible are fictitious. They are not “just stories.” They are stories only in that they are narratives. But every story, unless it is prefaced in the Scripture as being fiction is actual history. There are plenty of people who would deny that, but I am not one of them. We’ll one day get to some of these stories that the Bible tells us are fiction, such as the story of trees so desperate for a king that they crowned the bramble, the only thing they could find willing to reign over them. Of course that story is not true, but the Bible doesn’t say that it is. It says that a man told it to illustrate a certain point. And that is enough to convince me that the man, and the circumstances he was in that made him think that story would be a good idea to prove his point, were historical, just as Charles Dickens is a historical person, and it is a matter of history that he wrote A Christmas Carol.

Jacob began to experience what all people experience as they grow older, if they are blessed enough to live out their full life spans. People in his world began to die, and he began to enter a time of mourning. Two of these people were old and had reached the natural end of their lives, but one of these was not, and was probably the last person on earth Jacob would have wanted to outlive.

The first to die was a person who was not mentioned in Scripture until it was told that she died. It happened about the time that Jacob and his family had gone to worship God at Bethel after the fiasco at Shechem. Her name was Deborah, and apparently she had come from Paddan-Aram with Rebecca to be her nurse. Abraham had married his wife’s servant to give children to his wife. Jacob had done the same with a servant of each of his wives. But for the generation in between, Isaac, though he had to wait twenty years and pray hard over it to have children by Rebekah, nothing like this is said. There was no dalliance of Isaac with Deborah. I think this speaks powerfully of the faithfulness of Isaac, not only to his beloved Rebekah, but also to the God Who had promised him descendants. He had the story of his own birth to instruct him, and he waited on God to keep His promise.

Deborah was buried under an oak tree and mourned so heartily that the oak tree itself got a new name: “The Oak of Weeping.” Even though Scripture doesn’t tell us much about her, she was very much loved even two generations after the one she served. She must have been a faithful and good servant. I like to think she heard the “well done” that I myself long to hear one day, because I like to think that her service to the family God chose as His own was service to Him.

The commentators I read speculated a little on what Deborah was doing with Jacob’s family when she was his mother’s servant, but nothing was conclusive. Somehow or other she’d come to live with Jacob and his family, and spent the rest of her days there, appropriately mourned when she was gone.

The second death was the one that was hardest to take, one of the saddest in Scripture, in my opinion. And it isn’t an obscure story. I mention it here because it falls in with the others.

Jacob left Bethel and went to Bethlehem, which wasn’t called Bethlehem then, but Eprath. Before they arrived, the unthinkable happened.

It started out as a joyful thing. The second son that Rachel had prophesied when she’d had her first was at last being born! But Rachel’s labor was long and hard, and even though the midwife tried to encourage her, it did little good. When her son was finally born, she named him for her horrendous labor, or perhaps for how she felt about the fact that it had taken such a toll on her that she knew she would be unable to raise him. She named him “Ben-oni,” which meant “Son of My Sorrow.” And that name was to be her last word.

But Jacob, as devastated as he must have been, and as much as the name would have been fitting to the circumstances, overruled it. He had allowed his wives to choose the names of his other children. In a time and culture when a woman’s word meant nothing, he had allowed every name chosen by either Rachel or Leah to stand—for all eleven of his sons and for his one daughter. But this time, he overruled his favorite wife’s last word, and changed the name to a similar one, at least in that it began with “Ben.” But the new name was more positive, more comforting. Jacob, in all his grief, was strong enough to love his son enough to lift the name of sorrow off him and replace it with a better name. The new name was Benjamin, meaning “Son of My Right Hand.”

The next death was probably the closest thing to a positive death that can happen in this world, because the man who died had far outlived what even he had expected. He was a man of God and surely was comforted in heaven after he died, and one thing happened after his death that spoke of reconciliation. The man who died was none other than Isaac himself.

If you remember, when Jacob stole Esau’s blessing, (which was Jacob’s anyway by God’s design, but Isaac had wanted to give it to Esau), Isaac was thinking he was about to die. But at least thirty years had passed since then, and Isaac was now an incredible 180 years old! He had lived to see Jacob return from Paddan-Aram, where he had fled after Isaac had blessed him, and had lived to see many of the children Jacob brought back with him grow up.

When Isaac died, Jacob and Esau came together one last time to bury him. The twins are not mentioned as ever being together as brothers again. Many years later, when the nation of Israel, Jacob’s descendants, were coming to Canaan from Egypt, God reminded them that the people of Edom, who were Esau’s descendants, were their brothers, but the fact remained that the two countries were seldom allies, and were often at war.

But for that day, all bygones were bygones, and the two brothers came together to bury their father, one of the most venerable men who ever lived, just as Isaac had done with Ishmael a generation before when Abraham had died.