![]() ![]() The only narrative in which he is more active and says a few things is in Genesis 26 where he participates in a parallel story to what happened to also his father when once in Egypt he lied about Sarah being his wife. Indeed, Isaac is just generally a fairly passive figure in Genesis. Isaac is quite passive in the whole story, never speaking a word even at the end when he meets Rebekah and promptly “marries” her (which seems to mean he made love to her on their first date and that was that in terms of de facto marrying her). In any event, Abraham for sure sees everything as riding on the success of this wife-finding mission, and the narrative itself thus lingers on every little detail to show exactly how it all panned out that Rebekah was found. Abraham predicts earlier in the chapter that God would send an angel ahead of the servant to help ensure his success in finding the right woman for Isaac to marry but it’s not clear God had revealed that to Abraham or if Abraham assumed this (and maybe after that bad business God had put Abraham through on Mount Moriah back in Genesis 22, Abraham figured God owed him one!). There is not a lot of indication God had commanded this per se. ![]() And although in the future there will be plenty of foreign influence on and even participation in the covenant people of Abraham and Isaac’s descendants-including Canaanites who will even later get listed in the family tree of Jesus in Matthew 1-for now it appears to be important that this remain a kind of “all in the family” affair such that Isaac’s wife had to come from back home and not from the land to which God had directed Abraham. It is key that Isaac is going to carry forward the covenant God established with his father Abraham. Theologically, though, it is difficult to see this. Still, for some reason the author and redactor(s) of Genesis clearly believed that this story was important. Not only is the story told twice in this chapter-once in the narration of the actual encounter at the well and then a second time as the servant re-tells that whole story in the second half of the chapter-we also linger on all kinds of details until mercifully the whole thing ends after a whopping 67 verses, making this the longest chapter in Genesis, the second longest chapter (by just 2 verses) in the whole Pentateuch and one of the longest in the whole Bible, eclipsed only by chapters like Luke 1 and 2.ĭevoting that much narrative real estate to this story may or may not signal anything of significance. Even the Lectionary skips the entire first half of the chapter and once it picks things up in verse 34, the RCL shows a bit of its own narrative impatience by chopping up the remaining 33 verses into three chunks so as to delete at least a dozen or so verses to speed things along. This week we get a vastly more straightforward story, and yet the author of Genesis 24 takes forever and a day to spit it out already. Instead we get a crisp, bare-bones narrative that dispatches with the whole terrible story in a short 15 verses. The story cries out-nearly screams out-for more details. We noted how maddeningly spare that narrative is. Last week we looked at the exceedingly fraught and difficult story of the binding (and near sacrifice) of Isaac in Genesis 22. ![]()
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