Scripture Daily

Context No. 302 of 4322 · Genesis

Context · Reflection

Genesis 25:19-23: in context

19This is the history of the generations of Isaac, Abraham’s son. Abraham became the father of Isaac. 20Isaac was forty years old when he took Rebekah, the daughter of Bethuel the Syrian of Paddan Aram, the sister of Laban the Syrian, to be his wife. 21Isaac entreated the LORD for his wife, because she was barren. The LORD was entreated by him, and Rebekah his wife conceived. 22The children struggled together within her. She said, “If it is like this, why do I live?” She went to inquire of the LORD. 23The LORD said to her, “Two nations are in your womb. Two peoples will be separated from your body. The one people will be stronger than the other people. The elder will serve the younger.”

This is the beginning of Isaac's family, and it opens with a long wait. Isaac marries Rebekah, and she is unable to have children, so he prays for her, and the text notes almost in passing that twenty years go by before the prayer is answered. When the answer finally comes, it does not come as simple relief. Rebekah conceives, and the pregnancy is agony. The children, the text says, struggled together within her, so violently that she cries out, if it is going to be like this, why am I even alive?

What she does next is the quiet center of the passage. She does not simply endure the confusion and the pain in silence. She went to inquire of the LORD. She takes her bewilderment straight to God and asks what is happening to her. And God answers, not by easing the discomfort, but by telling her that her private struggle is far larger than she knows. Two nations are in your womb, he says, two peoples who will be divided, one stronger than the other, and the elder will serve the younger. The fight she can feel inside her own body is the beginning of whole nations, and it carries God's habit of overturning the expected order, the younger set above the older.

The turn worth keeping is that she asked. She had a struggle she could not understand, and rather than grind through it alone, she brought it to God and requested its meaning. What inner struggle have I simply been enduring in silence, gritting my way through it, without once going to inquire of the LORD what it might actually mean?

Sources