1. It is not given to many women to know beforehand what their children will be or do, and although we may think it would be an immense advantage if they did know, and a help in training the children, we must admit that the use Rebekah made of her knowledge does not favour such a theory.
Rebekah was assured that she would have two sons, and that each of them would be the progenitor of a nation; but there was to be a reversal of the natural order: the nation sprung from the younger son would have the lordship over the nation sprung from the elder. This oracle of Jehovah, the mother, as we shall see, treasured in her heart. And when the two boys were born, she, not without thought of the Divine election, centred her hopes and her affections, not on Esau, the firstborn, the strong man of his hands, but on Jacob his brother, a gentler, and, to other eyes, far less attractive type of man. And when they were grown she had so indoctrinated the younger with the idea that he would take precedence of the elder brother, that Jacob took the first opportunity to purchase from Esau that birthright which he believed by Divine foreknowledge was assigned to him.
Mother and son were drawn to each other by strong affinities. She saw in his patience, his self-control, his spiritual leanings, the promise of great and good things. She hoped much from his mother-wit-the cleverness he inherited from herself. In many ways he was happy, in some not so happy, in having such a mother, who fostered in his mind the love of high things, and stirred him to act a great, if not always a noble, part. Her influence over her son in the formative years of his life was incalculable.1 [Note: J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, ii. 18.]
2. Rebekah has all a mother's love for Jacob, but seems a little hard and cold to Esau. She reverences her husband as the mouthpiece of the Almighty, and yet studies how to deceive him when He who knows all things is most obviously with him. She believes in God's word, or at least in that one of His words which flatters her inclination; but she cannot trust Him to fulfil it without her help, and so commits a gross and terrible sin in order to secure its fulfilment. Rebekah's love ought to have made Jacob honourable and true, but she forgot the high commission which mothers have, and became the temptress of her boy. It was an awful thing for even love to say, “Upon me be thy curse.” Together they deceived Isaac in his old age, and the lad who had stolen his brother's birthright, now by fraud to which he was instigated by his mother, stole from his father the elder son's blessing. That bold stroke teaches us, among other suggestive lessons, that it was not to Isaac, the slave of the sworn faith, or to Abraham that Jacob owed his natural deceitfulness, but that in this he was truly his mother's son. When he had fled from Beersheba and sought refuge in Haran, he found in his maternal uncle Laban a man able to understand him and to deal with him as he himself so well knew how to deal with others. Rebekah and Laban explain, and to a certain extent are an excuse for, the character of Jacob.
Rebekah is a fascinating woman, with a clever, eager, inventive mind; with a genius for laying plans and overcoming difficulties; accustomed to give orders and to be obeyed; ready to make any sacrifices for those whom she loves; but impatient of opposition, and vexed beyond measure and weary of life itself when she has to deal with things beyond her comprehension, or simply to submit to the inevitable. It is impossible to question the strength of her mother-love. We tremble at the audacity of her wild words: “Upon me be thy curse, my son.” She is reckless of personal consequences if so be she can secure a coveted distinction for her son. He is dearer to her than her own soul. It is no mean advantage that she desires for him; it is a covenant blessing, a heritage of spiritual promises; and she believes it is God's will that he should obtain this privilege. But neither a high purpose nor a great love ever consecrates the use of dishonourable means; and Rebekah, with all her charm, must be numbered among those mothers who love not wisely but too well.1 [Note: J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, ii. 30.]
Oh dangerous wiles of cunning! at what cost
Ye gain faith's prize! Too eager to procure,
Ye try by human artifice to ensure
What, if God-promised, never can be lost.
Faith's frail-barked freight must needs be tempest-tossed.
Trust, loving confidence, patience to endure
Pain, peril, toil, and charms of lust's allure,
Untwine life's tangled thread when tangled most.
Birthright and blessing subtly gained involve
Postponement of the promise, hindrance, snares,
Hard service, disappointment, fraud, deceit.
Shifts implicate with evil, do not solve.
Subtlety for subtleties faith's way prepares.
Ourselves are treated as we others treat2 [Note: T. A. Walker, Meditations in Sonnet Verse.]
3. Nothing that can be said can clear Rebekah from blame, and she had to reckon with the consequences of her sin; for Esau resolved to have revenge upon Jacob, and so the mother had to devise another plan to save his life. The only wise course was that of sending him away from home altogether. Thus she suggested to her husband the desirability of making sure that Jacob should not “take a wife of the daughters of Heth”! Rebekah said to Isaac, “lam weary of my life because of the daughters of Heth: if Jacob take a wife of the daughters of Heth, such as these, of the daughters of the land, what good shall my life do me?”
There is traceable here one of the defects of Rebekah's character-a tendency to exaggeration in expression, to say things somewhat in advance of her real feelings; yet do not let us forget that the last glimpse we get of her reveals the anxiety of the mother for the well-being of both her children. She thought and believed the separation was to be but for a short time. “Tarry with Laban a few days,” she said to her son privately, “until thy brother's fury turn away; … then I will send, and fetch thee from thence”; but the days lengthened into years, and long before the return of her favourite son, Rebekah was laid to rest in the grave at Machpelah.
My grandmother's son, Walter, had gone forth from her, in prosecution of his calling, had corresponded with her from various counties in England, and then had suddenly disappeared; and no sign came to her, whether he was dead or alive. The mother-heart in her clung to the hope of his return; every night she prayed for that happy event, and before closing the door, threw it wide open, and peered into the darkness with a cry, “Come hame, my boy Walter, your mither wearies sair”; and every morning, at early break of day, for a period of more than twenty years, she toddled up from her cottage door, at Johnsfield, Lockerbie, to a little round hill, called the “Corbie Dykes,” and, gazing with tear-filled eyes towards the south for the form of her returning boy, prayed the Lord God to keep him safe and restore him to her yet again. Always, as I think upon that scene, my heart finds consolation in reflecting that, if not here, then for certain there, such deathless longing love will be rewarded, and, rushing into long-delayed embrace will exclaim, “Was lost and is found.”1 [Note: John G. Paton: An Autobiography, i. 15.]
The sunset falls on Isaac's tent-
And all the glowing Syrian sky
Is flooded with a mingled dye
Of gold, and faintest crimson blent.
But never more at evening's close
Her loved son's voice Rebekah hears;
That was a true chord to her ears
More sweet than any music knows.
And he that shared her fond deceit
That could not wait the appointed time,
He feels, by night, the frosty rime,
By day, the summer's noon-tide heat.
An exile in another land;
And never more his head to rest
Upon a mother's patient breast,
And never feel her soothing hand.1 [Note: C. F. Alexander, Poems on Subjects in the Old Testament.]
4. Thus severely was the sin of Rebekah and Jacob punished. It coloured their whole after-life with a dark, sombre hue. It was marked thus, because it was a sin by all means to be avoided. It was virtually the sin of blaming God for forgetting His promise, or of accusing Him of being unable to perform it. Yet this woman's sin was not, as most sins are, the fall from an habitual path of righteousness; it was a fall in her habitual path of righteousness. David fell by revolt from God; Solomon fell by forgetting God; but Rebekah fell by fanaticism for God. Sinners are usually conscious rebels against the Divine will; but Rebekah's darkest deed came from the sense that she was obeying the Divine will. She never dreamed that she was working for any end but the cause of Providence. She was wrong, as Saul of Tarsus was wrong, as hundreds of persecutors have been wrong; but the light which blinded was a supposed light from heaven. All through her life this woman never wavered in her purpose. It was her refusal to waver that made her stumble. She wanted to present to God a soul of her own house who would keep unblemished the priesthood of her race. She fell by the weight of the very burden which she believed she was carrying for Him.
As might be expected from his general speculative views Browning regards the effect which our volitions produce upon our environment as of no importance whatever. It is for the volition itself that he cares, and not for the results that follow from it. The Utilitarian passes judgment upon a man's action according to the amount of pleasurable or painful feeling which it causes; but Browning, whose attention is concentrated throughout upon the eternal soul, ignores the physical act altogether, and declares, with Kant, that from the point of view of ethics, “the good-will is the only unconditioned good.”2 [Note: A. C. Pigou, Browning as a Religious Teacher, 110.]
Often it is the safest way to shut the eyes and be half-blind to many things in a friend's character, which must be taken as it is, for better for worse; but in --'s character I am grateful to find that his perfect transparency reveals only the more delicately the moss-fibres, which are not blemishes but beauties in the rock-crystal. I was prepared to discover many faults, but I was not prepared to find that the very faults and the things which disappoint will bear the magnifying-glass and only give fresh insight into a character which perfectly astonishes me by its exquisite delicacy. I do verily believe that his imperfections are like pearls in the sea-shell-aberrations from healthful nature, if you will, but more tender and tinted with heavenlier iridescence than even the natural shell itself.1 [Note: Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson, 182.]
