Notes 47: Good news and bad news (35:16-20)

SYNOPSIS: Then on the road from Bet-El to Efrat, Rachel goes into labour and it doesn't go well. Her second son and Jacob's youngest, Benyamin, is born and Rachel names him 'son of my affliction', and then she dies. Jacob buried her there and erected a monument to her.

• Text of the passage in Nawat

According to some, Jacob unwittingly predicted Rachel's death in Gilead when Laban accused him of stealing his idols, to which Jacob retorted, since he was unaware that his wife Rachel had taken them (31:32): ‛im asher timtza et elohékha lo yixye 'Anyone with whom you find your gods shall not remain alive!' I think there are abundant reasons for scepticism about this theory. For one thing, while Jacob's heated challenge adds palpably to the dramatic tension of the search scene, in the event Laban did not find his gods with anyone, even though the audience knew who had them; if it were really to be believed that such a serious event as Rachel's death had been provoked by the literal interpretation of Jacob's highly rhetorical utterance, surely by the same token the interpretation should stick to its own priniciple of literalness and thereby result in Rachel's being saved, since literally the premise did not come about? My objection concerning this is that if it had been the intention of the narrative to imply such a connection, I think the authors would have been rather more meticulous about the details. Secondly, everybody has to die some time, and for women in the past death in childbirth was common enough, but if we follow the chronology of Genesis (the end-product at least), Rachel doesn't die until years after the scene with Laban when, now living in Canaan, Jacob's other children had grown into adult men and women in Shechem before their removal to Bethel and on towards the south. Again, I would object here that if the narrative was trying to establish a cause-effect relationship, it could have tried to do so somewhat more effectively.

Furthermore, there is considerable reason for doubt about exactly what it was that Jacob said to Laban, because in the absence of punctuation the verse is really ambiguous. Jacob's words in full were: ‛im asher timtza et elohékha lo yixye néged axénu hakker l'kha ma ‛immadi w'qax lakh which, in an unpunctuated English rendering, read something like: 'anyone with whom you find your gods shall not live in the presence of our kinsmen go and discover what I am holding and take it'; the question is whether néged axénu 'in the presence of our kinsmen' is to be parsed with what precedes ("shall not live in the presence of our kinsmen") or with what follows ("go and discover in the presence of our kinsmen"). If the former, then Jacob was possibly not suggesting the death penalty for the person with whom the idols were found (even if they had been found)! The translators of the Septuagint read the verse in a way which implies they parsed néged axénu as the complement of lo yixye: Παρ᾿ ᾧ ἐὰν εὕρῃς τοὺς θεούς σου, οὐ ζήσεται ἐναντίον τῶν ἀδελφῶν ἡμῶν.

Moreover, independently of that syntactic uncertainty, it is a known fact that many of the characters of Genesis are given to outbursts of fiery rhetoric and hyperbole at times, and this does seem to be one such time; Genesis is the more precious as literature for having preserved some specimens of this kind of talk in its dialogues, and it is not as if every time somebody produces such emotional verbal manifestations their words are automatically translated into real events. People say things like What am I living for?! without dropping dead; although of course all such people do die, some day, but surely nobody thinks that if they hadn't spoken in such terms they would still be alive today? A comment in Etz Hayim asks, specifically, about the intention of Laban's words in the scene under consideration (EH p. 183-4):

It is uncertain whether the phrase here has judicial or merely rhetorical force. Sacrilege was severely dealt with in the ancient Near East, but it did not always incur the death penalty.

Just as some scholars interpret the Dinah story as tribal history, so also the present notice about the birth of Benjamin and the death of Rachel have been so explained (CB p. 324):

The story is generally regarded as a piece of tribal history. The birth of Benjamin takes pace in what was later on the territory of the tribe of Benjamin, and this 'birth' is really the formation of the tribe. The meaning of the statement tht Rachel died when Benjamin was born is that the formation of the new tribe Benjamin broke up the old tribe Rachel.

Whatever the real story is about that, Genesis reads as a saga concerned about people, and it is perfectly legitimate for us to treat it on that level. And as a personal history, the news of Rachel's passing comes as a bit of a shock, both because it is unexpected and because the narration of the circumstances probably seems too austere in proportion to Rachel's emotional significance, though the latter impression perhaps should be qualified. First of all, if we think about it, all the allusions to Rachel in the foregoing story have tended to be on the short side: she is painted with quick, fleeting strokes, a little like the sprightly ewe that she is. And for another thing, the death scenes of Genesis are few and those found are rarely drawn out. Indeed, all we know about the way the lives of most of the characters ended, including some of its central personalities, is that wayyámot 'he died' or wattámot 'she died.' The amount of information surrounding Rachel's decease compares favourably with what we are told about that of other members of the family such as, for example, Abraham, Sarah or Isaac (see the next passage). Jacob's own obituary, when we come to it, will be the only main exception to this pattern. Seen in that light, Rachel cannot really complain; at least we know how she died.

Jacob created a memorial at Rachel's grave, which is described as surviving "until today" (v. 20); it would of course be very interesting to know when today is. In a note, EH adds:

"The tomb of Rachel" was a famous landmark from the time of Samuel, ca. 1020 B.C.E. (1 Sam. 10:2). The traditional site lies about 4 miles (6.5 km) south of Jerusalem and 1 mile (1.6 km) north of Bethlehem.