From the Torah you would also think that Esau and Jacob were never close, but that wasn’t the case. Although they were very different temperamentally, they were like many sets of twins I’ve known down through the ages. My father told me that even when they were very old they would finish each other’s sentences. They got sick at the same time, and laughed at the same dumb jokes. And they were both pranksters. Here’s one that the family talked about for years. As young boys the two of them dyed a newborn lamb a deep blue and brought it back to Isaac’s tent, pretending that it was an omen, a magical lamb that had been born that way. Isaac, a joker himself, pretended to believe them, and told them he was going to make a special offering of it, and invite the entire family, even their cousins from Haran. Embarrassed, and in love with that little lamb, the two confessed, to the laughter of the whole clan.
Perhaps you have something like this in your family, a phrase or a slogan that means nothing to anyone else but a great deal to all of you. In my family, even when we were down in Egypt, if you wanted to tell someone how absurd something was you would say, “Look at that blue lamb,” and for centuries afterwards blue dye and blue threads held a special place among our people; think of the blue fringes on our garments. There’s another story like that in our family. It’s not a funny one, but in a funny way it led to a dietary tradition among our people, one that I’ll talk about a little later on.
According to the story in the Torah, Jacob, under his mother’s direction, swindled his older brother out of his birthright. The good news here, as it will so often be the case, is that however lovely a story it is, it isn’t a true one. But truth be told, Esau was happy to tend our family’s flocks and leave the trading arm of the business to his brother and the camels to his mother. The story, however, is a marvelous one, don’t you think? But the trickery and the discomfort weren’t Isaac and Rebecca’s, nor Esau and Jacob’s. The real discomfort belonged to the later writer of that tale, who didn’t know what to do with Isaac and wanted to both distance his listeners from him and yet somehow redeem him. And Jacob didn’t go north because he was fleeing from his brother’s wrath; he went north because of work. Over several generations the center of the family business had remained in Haran, run by Abraham’s brothers and their sons, so contact needed to be kept up with them. That’s why Jacob traveled north, and he ended up spending a little more than a decade in Haran, learning more about the family business from its heads, and getting richer himself. It was there that he met and married Rachel and Leah.
The story you know about Jacob working for seven years for Rachel and then being tricked on his wedding night when Leah ended up in his bed is another one of those stories that aren’t true. A later redactor of the Torah was very uncomfortable with the notion that his ancestor had married two sisters, which was forbidden in his own day, although not in Jacob’s. How to explain it? By inventing a trick, which was one of his favorite plot devices. But there was no trick. Jacob my grandfather was in love with Rachel but they were never able to talk well. However he and Leah had a great relationship. Those two could sit up all night talking, whereas with Rachel, there were always long stretches of silence, and not always the restful comfortable kind.
The two sisters were very close, and being the kind of man that he was, marrying two sisters who suggested the union to him themselves seemed perfect to Jacob, as several of the Elohim had married siblings, sometimes even their own. “My brother Esau is a real man out in the world, but I am a real man in bed,” is the kind of thing my grandfather Jacob might have said to himself. And each of them, Leah and Rachel, were given a servant as a wedding gift by their father, something horrendous that fortunately doesn’t happen anymore in most parts of the world. (I say this in case you think I miss the past and find it preferable to the present.) The servants, Bilhah and Zilpah, were also sisters, and both of them had children with my grandfather. Liberal Jewish congregations now add to their prayers the names of “the four mothers,” Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel, but they usually leave out my own grandmother Zilpah and her sister. Fortunately for us, Grandpa Jacob saw us all of his wives and concubines and their children as equals. He was a wonderful father and grandfather. My father Asher adored him, and I did too.
My grandfather’s life was shaped by four defining events. You know them from the Torah in a garbled fashion. One was his encounter with an angel, the second was the death of his beloved wife Rachel, the third was the rape of his daughter Dinah, and the forth was the tragedy of being told that his favorite child, Joseph, was dead. The first event elevated him and the second three events nearly destroyed him. Fortunately the fourth event had a happy ending and I am grateful to this day that I had a part in it.
Grandpa Jacob was a shrewd businessman, a wise investor, and during the years that he and his wives lived in Haran he became even richer than he was when he arrived, which was how he was able to support all of us. But after eleven years in Haran he decided that he wanted to return to Canaan, to be with his own clan and to get out of the shadow of his father-in-law, Laban, who ran the family concern up north. Laban wasn’t too happy about them going; in fact, he had a huge fight with Jacob and refused to let them leave. That strange story about Rachel stealing Laban’s teraphim is grounded in something that really happened.
Contemporary scholars don’t know what teraphim were. But I do. Scholars speculate that the teraphim were household gods. Not quite. They were winged creatures who represented the goddesses and gods we called the Elohim. They were the power animals of those divine beings, in a way, their living thrones. But to understand what they represented back then I want you to think about the framed certificates you see in restaurants that tell you that they’re legally entitled to serve food and alcohol, and in doctors and dentists offices that tell you that they’re licensed practitioners. The teraphim, usually made of wood or clay or bronze, but sometimes carved from stone, were issued by various temples and let customers know that they were dealing with a legitimate business which was registered with the local authorities, to whom they paid taxes, and whose scales were regularly inspected by them.
Now Rachel didn’t steal the teraphim, and she didn’t take all of them. She and Leah and Jacob had a meeting with Laban to tell him they were leaving. He refused to let them go at first but Rachel negotiated with him, reminding him that the family business had prospered because of her and Jacob’s work. He eventually agreed to let her take two of the family’s seven teraphim out of the wooden chest where they were stored and leave with them. Those two small wooden teraphim were enough to set up the family business officially in Canaan, independent from the ties that had bound them to Haran since the time of Abraham’s great grandfather Serug, the first merchant in the family and the one who set up the family business. So it was Rachel who actually legitimized the family’s concerns in Canaan, and you ought to know that. But the redactors of your Torah were uncomfortable with the story of a woman of power, so they turned her into a tricky thief.
I remember the teraphim from when I was a little girl. They were kept in a wooden chest in Rachel’s tent. There were similar but not identical, one a bit larger than the other. Both of them had wings that spread out to their sides, and both of them had cuneiform writing on them, which let you know they came from two different temples and licensed their owners to operate two different businesses, one directed toward material trade and the other toward livestock. You’ll hear more about those figures and this chest so don’t forget about them. We took them down to Egypt with us, and they came out with us all those years later. But I’ll tell you about that when I come to it.
Now is the right time to tell you about the first critical event in my grandfather’s