Lecture III : Jacob (part 1)
by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D.D.
"ABRAHAM was a hero, Jacob was 'a plain man,
dwelling in tents.' Abraham we feel to be
above ourselves, Jacob to be like ourselves.
So the distinction between the two great Patriarchs
has been drawn out by a celebrated theologian.
"Few and evil have the days of the years of my life been,
and have not attained unto the days of the years of the
life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage." So
the experience of Israel himself is summed up in the
close of his life. Human cares, jealousies, sorrows, cast
their shade over the scene — the golden dawn of the
Patriarchal age is overcast: there is no longer the
same unwavering faith; we are no longer in com-
munion with the "High Father," the "Friend of God;"
we at times almost doubt whether we are not with His
enemy. But for this very reason the interest attach-
ing to Jacob, though of a less lofty and universal
kind, is more touching, more penetrating, more at-
tractive. Nothing but the perverse attempt to demand
perfection of what is held before us as imperfect could
blind us to the exquisite truthfulness which marks the
delineation of the Patriarch's character.
I. Look at him, as his course is unrolled through
the long vicissitudes which make his life a faithful
mirror of human existence in its most varied aspects.
Look at him, as compared with his brother
Esau. Unlike the sharp contrast of the earlier
pairs of Sacred history, in these two the good and
evil are so mingled, that at first we might be at a
loss which to follow, which to condemn. The distinct-
ness with which they seem to stand and move before
us against the horizon of the clear distance is a new
phase in the history. Esau, the shaggy red-haired
huntsman, the man of the field, with his arrows, his
quiver, and his bow, coming in weary from the chase,
caught, as with the levity and eagerness of a child,
by the sight of the lentil soup, — "Feed me, I pray
thee, with the 'red, red; pottage," — yet so full of
generous impulse, so affectionate towards his aged fa-
ther, so forgiving towards his brother, so open-handed,
so chivalrous: who has not at times felt his heart
warm toward poor rejected Esau; and been tempt-
ed to join with him as he cries with "a great and ex-
ceeding bitter cry," "Hast thou but one blessing, my
father? bless me, even me also, O my father!"
And who does not in like manner feel at times his
indignation swell against the younger brother? "Is
he not rightly named Jacob, for he hath supplanted
me these two times?" He entraps his brother, he
deceives his father, he makes a bargain even in his
prayer; in his dealings with Laban, in his meeting
with Esau, he still calculates and contrives; he dis-
trusts his neighbors, he regards with prudential in-
difference the insult to his daughter, and the cruelty
of his sons; he hesitates to receive the assurance of
Joseph's good will; he repels, even in his lesser traits,
the free confidence that we cannot withhold from the
Patriarchs of the elder generation.
But yet, taking the two from first to last, how
entirely is the judgment of Scripture and the judg-
ment of posterity confirmed by the result of the
whole. The mere impulsive hunter vanishes away,
light as air: "he did eat and drink, and rose up,
and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birth-
right." The substance, the strength of the Chosen
family, the true inheritance of the promise of Abra-
ham, was interwoven with the very essence of the
character of "the plain man, dwelling in tents,"
steady, persevering, moving onward with deliberate
settled purpose, through years of suffering and of
prosperity, of exile and return, of bereavement and
recovery. The birthright is always before him. Ra-
chael is won from Laban by hard service, "and the
seven years seemed unto him but a few days for
the love he had to her." Isaac, Rebekah, and
Rebekah's nurse, are remembered with a faithful, filial
remembrance; Joseph and Benjamin are long and
passionately loved with a more than parental affec-
tion, — bringing down his gray hairs for their sakes
"in sorrow to the grave." This is no character to
be contemned or scoffed at; if it was encompassed
with much infirmity, yet its very complexity demands
our reverent attention; in it are bound up, as his
double name expresses, not one man, but two; by
toil and struggle, Jacob, the Supplanter, is gradually
transformed into Israel, the Prince of God, the harsher
and baser features are softened and purified away: he
looks back over his long career with the fulness of
experience and humility. "I am not worthy of the
least of all the mercies and of all the truth which
Thou hast shown unto Thy servant." Alone of the
Patriarchal family, his end is recorded as invested with
the solemnity of warning and of prophetic song.
"Gather yourselves together, ye sons of Jacob; and
hearken unto Israel your father." We need not fear
to acknowledge that the God of Abraham and the
God of Isaac was also the God of Jacob.
Most unworthy indeed we should be if the gift of
the Sacred narrative, if we failed to appre-
ciate it in this, its full, its many-sided aspect.
In the Jewish history, what a foreshadowing
of the future! We may even venture to trace in the
wayward chieftain of Edom the likeness of the fickle,
uncertain Edomite, now allied, now hostile to the seed
of promise; the wavering, unstable dynasty which came
forth from Idumæa, Herod the magnificent and the
cruel; Herod Agrippa, "almost a Christian" — half
Jew and half heathen. "A turbulent and unruly race,"
so Joseph describes the Idumæans of his day: "al-
ways hovering on the verge of revolution, always
rejoicing in changes, roused to arms by the slightest
motion of flattery, rushing to battle as if they were
going to a feast." But we cannot mistake the type of
the Israelites in him whom, beyond even Abraham and
Isaac, they recognized as their father Israel. His doubt-
ful qualities exactly recall to us the meanness of
character, which even to a proverb, we call in
Scorn, "Jewish." By his peculiar discipline of exile and
suffering, a true counterpart is produced of the special
faults and special gifts, known to us chiefly through his
persecuted descendants in the Middle Ages. Professor
Blunt has with much ingenuity pointed out how Jacob
seems to have "learned like maltreated animals to have
the fear of man habitually before his eyes." In
Jacob we see the same timid, cautious watchfulness that
we know so well, though under darker colors, through
our great masters of fiction, in Shylock of Venice and
Isaac of York. But no less, in the nobler side of his
career, do we trace the germs of the unbroken endur-
ance, the undying resolution, which keeps the nation
alive still even in its present outcast condition, and
which was the basis, in its brighter days, of the heroic
zeal, long-suffering, and hope, of Moses, of David, of
Jeremiah, of the Maccabees, of the twelve Jewish
Apostles, and the first martyr, Stephen.
We cannot, however, narrow the lessons of Jacob's
history to the limits of the Israelite Church. All
Ecclesiastical History is the gainer by the sight of
such a character so delineated. It is a character not
all black nor all white, but checkered with the mixed
colors which make up so vast a proportion of the
double phases of the leaders of the Church and world
in every age. The force of the Scripture
narrative may be seen by its contrast with the
dark hues in which Esau is painted by the Rabbinical
authors. He is hindered in his chase by Satan; Hell
opens as he goes in to his father; he gives his father
dog's flesh instead of venison; he tries to bite Jacob
on his return; he commits five sins in one day. This
is the difference between mere national animosity and
the high impartial judgment of the Sacred story, evenly
balanced and steadily held, yet not regardless of the
complicated and necessary variations of human thought
and action. For students of theology, for future pas-
tors, for young men in the opening of life, what a series
of lessons, were this the place to enlarge upon it, is
opened in the history of these two youths, issuing from
their father's tent in Beersheba! The free, easy, frank
good-nature of the profane Esau is not overlooked; the
craft, duplicity, timidity, of the religious Jacob is duly
recorded. Yet, on the one hand, fickleness, unsteadi-
ness, weakness, want of faith and want of principle, ruin
and render useless the noble qualities of the first; and
on the other hand, steadfast purpose, resolute sacrifice
of present to future, fixed principle, purify, elevate, turn
to lasting good even the baser qualities of the second.
And, yet again, whether in the two brothers or their
descendants, we see how in each the good or evil strove
together and worked their results almost to the end.
Esau and his race cling still to the outskirts of the
Chosen People. "Meddle not," it was said in after-
times, "with your brethren the children of Esau, for I
will not give you of their land, because I have given
Mount Seir to Esau for a possession." Israel, on the
other hand, is outcast, thwarted, deceived, disappointed,
bereaved, — "all these things are against me;" in him,
and in his progeny also, the curse of Ebal is always
blended with the blessings of Gerizim. Remember
these mingled warnings as we become entangled in the
web of the history of the whole Church. How hardly
Esau was condemned, how hardly Jacob was saved.
We are kept in long and just suspense; the prodigal
may, as far as human eye can see, be on his way
home; the blameless son, who "has been in his father's
house always," may be shutting himself out. Yet the
final issue, to which on the whole this primitive history
calls our attention, is the same which is borne out by
the history of the Church even in these later days of
complex civilization. There is, after all, a weakness in
selfish worldliness, for which no occasional impulse can
furnish any adequate compensation, even though it be
the generosity of an Arabian chief, or the inimitable
good-nature of an English king. There is nobleness
in principle and in faith which cannot be wholly de-
stroyed, even though it be marred by the hardness or
the duplicity of the Jew, or the Jesuit, or the Puritan.
II. Let us now follow the Patriarch through the suc-
cessive scenes of his life; again, as in the case of Abra-
ham, dwelling upon those special points which admit
of geographical or historical elucidation, or general
application of ecclesiastical and spiritual truth.
1. "And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went
toward Haran." It is, if one may so say, the
first retrograde movement in the history of
the Church. Was the migration of Abraham to be
reversed? Was the westward tide of events to roll
back upon itself? Was the Chosen Race to sink back
into the life of the Mesopotamian deserts? The first
halt of the Wanderer revealed his future destinies.
"The sun went down," the night gathered round;
he was on the central thoroughfare, on the hard
backbone of the mountains of Palestine; the ground
was strewn with wide sheets of bare rock; here and
there stood up isolated fragments, like ancient Druidical
monuments. On the hard ground he lay down for
rest, and in the visions of the night the rough stones
formed themselves into a vast staircase, reaching into
the depth of the wide and open sky, which, without
any interruption of tent or tree, was stretched over the
sleeper's head. On that staircase were seen ascending
and descending the messengers of God; and from above
there came the Divine Voice which told the houseless
wanderer that, little as he thought it, he had a Pro-
tector there and everywhere; that even in this bare
and open thoroughfare, in no consecrated grove or cave,
"the LORD was in this place, though he knew it not."
"This was BETHEL, the House of God; and this was the
gate of Heaven."
The monument, whatever it was, that was still in
after-ages ascribed to the erection of Jacob, must have
been, like so many described or seen in other times
and countries, a rude copy of the natural features of
the place, as at Carnac in Brittany, the cromlechs of
Wales or Cornwall, or the walls of Tiryns, where
the play of nature and the simplicity of art are
almost indistinguishable. In all ages of primitive his-
tory such monuments are, if we may so call them, the
earliest ecclesiastical edifices. In Greece there were
rude stones at Delphi, still visible in the second cen-
tury, anterior to any temple, and, like the rock of
Bethel, anointed with oil by the pilgrims who came
thither. In Northern Africa, Arnobius, after his con-
version, describes the kind of fascination which had
drawn him towards one of those aged stones
streaming and shining with the sacred oil which
had been poured upon it. The black stone of the
Arabian Caaba reaches back to the remotest antiquity
of which history or tradition can speak.
In all these rough anticipations of a fixed structure
or building, we trace the beginnings of what in the
case of Jacob is first distinctly called "Beth-el," the
house of God, "the place of worship" — the "Beit-
allah" of Mecca, the "Bætulia" of the early Phœni-
cian worship. When we see the rude remains of
Abury in our own country, there is a strange interest
in the thought that they were the first architectural
witness of English religion. Even so, the pillar or
cairn or cromlech of Belthel must have been looked
upon by the Israelites, and may still be looked upon
in thought by us, as the precursor of every "House
of God," that has since arisen in the Jewish and
Christian world — the temple, the cathedral, the
church, the chapel; nay more, of those secret places
of worship that are marked by no natural beauty and
seen by no human eye — the closet, the catacomb,
the throughfare, of the true worshipper. There was
neither in the aspect nor in the ground of Bethel
any '"Religio loci," but the place was no less "dreadful,"
"full of awe." The stone of Bethel remained as the
memorial that an all-encompassing Providence watches
over its chosen instruments, however unconscious at
the time of what and where they are. "The Shep-
herd of the stone of Israel" was one of the earliest
names by which "the God of Jacob" was known.
The vision of the ascending and descending messen-
gers received its highest application in a Divine mani-
festation, yet more universal and unexpected.
2. The chief interest of the story of Jacob's twenty
years service with Laban lies in its reopening
of the relations between the settlers in Pales-
tine and the original tribe of Mesopotamia, which
appeared on Abraham's migration to have been closed.
These chapters are an instance of the compensation
which is constantly going on in the losses and gains
of theological study. If a shade of uncertainty is
thrown here and there over the meaning and nature
of the narrative, which a hundred or a thousand years
ago would not have occurred; yet, on the other hand,
with how far deeper a pleasure than in any preceding
age do we enter into the beauty of those primitive
scenes. We are more than interested; we are re-
freshed; we are edified; we become again like little
children, as that pastoral life rises before our own
worn out time. Like the aged patriarch, "whose eyes
were dim that he could not see," and who "longed
for the savoury meat that he loved, that he might
eat it before he died," we too in the haze of many
centuries which surround our vision, "smell the smell
of the raiment" of those ancient chiefs, and we bless
them, and we feel that it is "as the smell of a field
which the LORD hath blessed," full of the dew of
heaven and of the fatness of the virgin earth.
"Then Jacob 'lifted up his feet' and came into the
land of 'the children' of the East. And he looked,
and behold a well in the field; and lo! three flocks
of sheep lying by it, and a great stone was on the
well's mouth." The shepherds were there; they had
advanced far away from "the city of Nahor." It was
not the well outside the walls, with the hewn stair-
case, down which Rebekah descended with the pitcher
on her head. Rachel comes, guiding her father's
flocks, like the daughter of Laban, his mother's brother,
and the sheep of Laban, his mother's brother (ob-
serve the simplicity of the juxtaposition], that Jacob
went near and rolled the stone from the well's mouth,
and watered the flock of Laban his mother's brother;
and Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted up his voice and
wept." Everything which follows is of the same
color. Bethuel, the aged head of the family in Re-
bekah's time, is dead; and Laban has succeeded, the
true type of the hard-hearted, grasping Sheik of an
Arabian tribe; Laban, the ordinary likeness of one
side of the Arabian character, as Esau is of the other.
Then begins the long contest of cunning and perse-
verance, in which true love wins the game at last
against selfish gain. Seven years, the service of a
slave, thrice over, did Jacob pay. He is the faithful
Eastern "good shepherd;" "that which was torn of
beasts he brought not unto his master; he bare the
loss of it; of his hand" did his hard taskmaster
require it, whether stolen by day or stolen by night;
in the day the drought" of the desert "consumed
him, and the frost" in the cold Eastern nights; "and
his sleep departed from him." In Edessa, as we have
seen, was laid up for many centuries what professed
to be the tent in which he had guarded his master's
flocks. And at last his fortunes were built up; the
slave became a prince; and the second mi-
gration took place from Mesopotamia into
Palestine, "with much cattle, 'with male and female
slaves,' with camels and with asses." The hour
was come. As in the earlier flight of Abraham from
the same region, the double motive is put before us:
"And Jacob beheld the countenance of Laban, and
behold it was not towards him as before." "And the
Lord said unto Jacob, Return unto the land of thy
fathers and thy kindred, and I will be with thee."
"He rose up," and once again high upon the backs
of camels he set his sons and his wives, and he fled
with all that he had; and Rachel stole the teraphim,
the household gods of her family; and he rose up
and passed over the" great "river, and set his face"
— not, as Abraham, towards Damascus, — but right
away to the south-west, to the long range of Gilead,
the line ogf heights on the east of the Jordan which
stand as outposts between Palestine and the Assyrian
desert. On the seventh day the pursuers overtook
the fugitives. On the undulating downs of Gilead the
two lines of tents were pitched; and in the midst of
the encampment of Jacob rose the five tents of him-
self and of his wives, the camels and the cattle moored
around, the seats and furniture of the camels stowed
within the covering of the tents. As in later times,
the fortress on these heights of Gilead became the
frontier post of Israel against the Aramaic tribe that
occupied Damascus, so now the same line of heights
became the frontier between the nation in its youth
and the older Aramaic family of Mesopotamia. As
now the confines of two Arab tribes are marked by the
rude cairn or pile of stones erected at the boundary
of their respective territories, so the pile of stones
and the tower or pillar erected by the two tribes of
Jacob and Laban, marked that the natural limit of
the range of Gilead should be their actual limit also.
"The God of Abraham and the God of Nahor" —
here for the first and last time mentioned together —
"was to judge betwixt them." The variation of the
dialects of the two tribes appears also for the first
and last time in the two names of the memorial. The
sacrificial feast of the covenant was made on the
mountain-top; "And early in the morning Laban rose
up and kissed his sons and his daughters, and blessed
them; and Laban departed, and returned to his
place;" and in him and his tribe, as they sweep
out of sight into the eastern Desert, we lose the last
trace of the connection of Israel with the Chaldæan
Ur or the Mesopotamian Haran.
from The History of the Jewish Church, Vol. I : Abraham to Samuel,
Lecture III: Jacob
by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D.D., Dean of Westminster
Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1879, pp. 57-69
Posted Jul 23, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC
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