From *The Skeptical Review* 1996 / November-December:
by Farrell Till
There is no scarcity of fanciful tales in the Bible. An especially quaint one tells about the duel of the handmaids when Jacob, the grand patriarch of Israel, was siring his sons who subsequently became heads of the twelve Israelite tribes. It is a story that simply cannot pass the how-likely-is-it? test that was discussed in the Autumn 1993 issue and applied to the Israelite Exodus.
The story began in Genesis 28 when Jacob left Canaan and journeyed to Paddanaram to look for a wife. Before his departure, Jacob had forced his twin brother Esau, in a moment of hunger, to sell his birthright for a mere mess of pottage and then had tricked his father Isaac into pronouncing a primogenitive blessing on him rather than Esau, the firstborn of the twins. Fearful of what Esau might do to avenge Jacob's deception, their mother Rebekah convinced Isaac to send Jacob to Paddanaram to seek a wife among the daughters of her brother Laban rather than the women of Canaan. Esau had already married two Hittite women who were "a grief of mind to Isaac and to Rebekah" (Gen. 26:34-35), so this gave Rebekah an excuse to feign concern for whom Jacob might marry. "I am weary of my life because of the Hittite women," she said to Isaac. "If Jacob marries one of the Hittite women such as these, one of the women of the land, what good will my life be to me?" (Gen. 27:46).
So Isaac sent Jacob to Paddanaram with instructions to select a wife from among his mother's people. On his arrival, Jacob saw his uncle Laban's daughter Rachel keeping her father's sheep and instantly fell in love with her. For the right to marry Rachel, he struck a deal with Laban to work for him seven years. At the end of Jacob's seven years of service, however, Laban tricked Jacob and gave him his elder daughter Leah instead. Jacob spent his wedding night with his bride, and "it came to pass in the morning that, behold, it was Leah" (Gen. 29:25) rather than Rachel.
If ever there was an absurdity in the Bible, this part of the story certainly qualifies. Are we to believe that Jacob spent seven years working for Laban and living in his house (Gen. 31:41), a period in which he must have had many personal contacts with Rachel, the woman he loved enough to offer himself as a servant in order to obtain permission to marry her, and yet he spent his entire wedding night doing what men do on their wedding nights and didn't even know until the light of day that the woman he was with was not the woman he thought he was marrying! It is an insult to human intelligence to expect anyone to believe that.
Anyway, as the story goes, Laban explained to Jacob that "(i)t is not so done in our place, to give the younger before the firstborn" (Gen. 29:26). Laban then offered to give Jacob Rachel in exchange for seven more years of service. Jacob accepted the terms, and Laban gave him Rachel (vv:27-29). Leah began to bear children, and after she had given birth to four sons, Rachel, who had not yet conceived, gave Jacob her handmaid Bilhah and asked him to sire children for her on Bilhah. Apparently no arm-twisting was necessary to get Jacob's cooperation in going along with Rachel's plan, for Bilhah promptly bore Jacob two more sons (Gen. 30:1-8).
Meanwhile, Leah, who had temporarily stopped bearing children, gave Jacob her handmaid Zilpah, who in the duel of the handmaids, also bore Jacob two sons (Gen. 30:9-13). Eventually, "God hearkened unto Leah" (Gen. 30:17), and she bore two more sons and Dinah, the only daughter ever born to Jacob during all of this sexual rampage (vv:17-21). "God remembered Rachel" too and "opened her womb" (v:22), and she bore Joseph. So when all of the passions had cooled in Paddanaram, Jacob had had eleven sons and one daughter. Later, on Jacob's journey back to Canaan, Rachel gave birth to Benjamin at the cost of her life. In all, according to the story, twelve sons and one daughter were born to Jacob.
All of this had happened over a period of 20 years, because "it came to pass when Rachel had borne Joseph" that Jacob, having finished his 14 years of service to Laban, asked permission to take his wives and children and return to his country (Gen. 30:25-26). Laban, however, persuaded Jacob to stay and work six more years in exchange for all the spotted and speckled lambs and kids born in his flocks (Gen. 30:27-43), so altogether Jacob spent 20 years in Paddanaram (Gen. 31:41).
This story has been read countless times by the millions of people who have professed Christianity, but, unfortunately, not very many of them have critically examined it. If they had, they would have recognized it for what it is -- just a fanciful Hebrew folk tale.
I know that such a statement is blasphemy to those who have been reared to respect the Bible as the verbally inspired, inerrant word of God, but inconsistencies existing between this story and other incidents related in the Bible about Jacob necessitate this conclusion. For one thing, if the Bible is inerrant in all details, as fundamentalists adamantly insist that it is, then we have to believe that Jacob was 83 years old when his sexual adventures in Paddanaram began. Such nonsense might make good reading material for The National Enquirer and other sensationalistic tabloids, but it is asking just a little too much to expect critical readers to believe that an 83-year-old man could have been capable of such sexual vigor while working long hours in the day tending to large flocks of sheep and goats. When Yahweh appeared to Abraham to tell him that his wife Sarah would bear him a son, Abraham was 99 at the time, and his reaction was to laugh: "Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, `Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old?'" (Gen. 17:17). Of course, after Sarah died, when Abraham was 137, he married another woman (Keturah) and apparently with no difficulty sired six other children (Gen. 25:1-2), but that is just another example of nonsensical inconsistency in the biblical text. The point is that rational people will realize that the sexual escapades attributed to Jacob while he was in Paddanaram far exceed the capabilities of a man who was 83 to 96 years old, and even the Bible in at least one place recognizes the unlikeliness of it.
How can we know that Jacob was 83-96 years old when all this was happening? It is a matter of simple arithmetic. When Joseph presented his father to Pharaoh after the arrival of Jacob's family in Egypt, Jacob was 130: "Pharaoh said to Jacob, `How many are the years of your life?' Jacob said to Pharaoh, `The years of my earthly sojourn are one hundred thirty; few and hard have been the years of my life'" (Gen. 47:8-9). This age was confirmed later in the chapter, at the time of Jacob's death, when it was claimed that "Jacob lived in the land of Egypt seventeen years; so the days of Jacob, the years of his life, were one hundred forty-seven years" (v:28). So if we can determine the age of any of his sons at the time when Jacob was presented to Pharaoh, it would be possible to know how old he was when his sons were being born to him in Paddanaram.
In the case of Joseph, we can make that determination. After his brothers sold him into Egypt, Joseph rose to prominence through his dream-interpretation skills. Having interpreted with accuracy the dreams of Pharaoh's butler and baker while they were in ward with him, Joseph was called out of prison to interpret two disturbing dreams that Pharaoh had had. In his interpretation, Joseph predicted seven years of plenty to be followed by seven years of famine. So pleased was Pharaoh with Joseph's performance, that he elevated Joseph to the second highest political position in Egypt to supervise the storage of food during the seven years of plenty so that the country would have food supplies during the famine. At the time of his promotion, Joseph was thirty: "Joseph was thirty years old when he entered the service of Pharaoh king of Egypt" (Gen. 41:46).
Joseph's task was to gather excess food during the seven years of plenty and store it for use during the seven years of famine (Gen.41:34-43). The Bible implies that the 14-year period foreseen in Pharaoh's dreams (seven of plenty and seven of famine) began immediately after Joseph was made food administrator, because Joseph had said when interpreting Pharaoh's dreams, "God will shortly bring it to pass" (Gen. 41:32). Also, the verses following the passage quoted above to establish his age when Joseph "entered the service of Pharaoh king of Egypt" said that "Joseph went out from the presence of Pharaoh, and went through all the land of Egypt" to gather up "all the food of the seven years when there was plenty in the land of Egypt" (41:46-48). Obviously, then, the Bible teaches that Joseph was thirty years old when the seven years of plenty began.
This would mean that Joseph was 39 when he identified himself to his brothers who had come into Egypt to buy grain. They came after the seven years of plenty had passed and "the famine was sore in all the earth" (41:57; 42:1-3, ASV). Although he had immediately recognized his brothers, Joseph did not reveal his identity to them. They bought grain and returned home, and when the grain was consumed, Jacob ordered them to return to Egypt to buy more (Gen. 43:1-2). On this second trip, Joseph made himself known to his brothers, and by then, the famine was in its second year (45:6,11). So at this point, Joseph had to be nine years older than when he had first entered into the service of Pharaoh at age 30.
Joseph sent his brothers back into Canaan to bring their father and relatives into Egypt where they would have food to sustain them during the five remaining years of famine (45:11). If it had taken no more than a year for the brothers to return home and bring Jacob and their families to Egypt, Joseph would have been about 40 years old, according to the biblical narrative. So if Jacob was 130 at this time, as the Bible claims, that would mean that he was 90 years old when Joseph was born.
Inerrantists will insist that men lived longer in those days and were therefore more vigorous in their eighties than men of today, but that is an assumption that they have no proof for but what the Bible says. To make such a defense as this, then, would be a resort to the familiar tactic of circular reasoning or trying to prove inerrancy by assuming inerrancy. Besides, they would still have the problem of explaining Abraham's statement quoted earlier, which plainly indicated that even in biblical times it was considered unlikely that a man in his nineties could sire children. If Jacob was 90 when Joseph was born, as the chronology cited in support of this conclusion certainly showed, then he was at least 96 when Benjamin was born. When he learned that Laban had given him Leah instead of Rachel, Jacob agreed to work seven more years if Laban would give him Rachel too. Then "it came to pass when Rachel had borne Joseph" that Jacob asked Laban for permission to take his wives and children and return to his country... "for thou [Laban] knowest my service wherewith I have served thee" (Gen. 30:25-26). As previously noted, however, Laban persuaded Jacob to stay and continue working in exchange for all the spotted and speckled lambs and kids that would be born in the flocks. When Jacob finally left Paddanaram, he said to Laban, "These twenty years have I been in your house; I served you fourteen years for your two daughters, and six years for your flock" (Gen. 31:41, NRSV). So if Jacob had felt free to go after Joseph's birth because he had served Laban well, this must mean that Joseph was born at the end of Jacob's second seven-year term of servitude or, in other words, 14 years after Jacob arrived in Paddanaram. Rachel died giving birth to Benjamin en route to Canaan after Jacob had spent 20 years in Paddanaram, so if Jacob was 90 when Joseph was born (as already shown), then he would have been at least 96 when Benjamin was born. At age 99, Abraham laughed when told that he would father a son within a year, so the claim that Abraham's grandson Jacob sired a son when he was 96 should warrant at least a chuckle.
There is also one direct textual statement in the Bible that is inconsistent with the chronology that fixes Jacob's age at 76-96 when he was in Paddanaram. As previously noted, Rachel's concern for what Esau might do to Jacob for having deceived their father Isaac into pronouncing a primogenitive blessing on him instead of the firstborn Esau was why she urged Isaac to send him to Paddanaram to find a wife. However, just before the story of Jacob's deception of Isaac was told in Genesis 27, the 26th chapter ended by saying that "when Esau was forty years old," he married two Hittite women. If Esau was 40 at this time, then Jacob was the same age, because they were twin brothers. After saying this about Esau, the very next verse in the Genesis narrative begins to tell the story of Jacob's trickery in getting Isaac to bless him. That story runs throughout the 27th chapter and ends by telling of Rebekah's fear that Esau might kill Jacob for his duplicity. Pretending then to Isaac that she was afraid Jacob might do as his brother Esau had done and marry a Hittite woman, Rebekah used this as an excuse to urge Isaac to send Jacob to Paddanaram. Surely, then, thirty-six years had not passed since Esau had married his Hittite wives. How convincing would her fear have been to Isaac if Rebekah had reached back thirty-six years for something to express concern about? The fact that she used this as an excuse to get Jacob out of the country clearly implies that the Genesis writer thought that Esau's marriages to the Hittite women and Jacob's deception of Isaac were sequentially close events. Further indication that the two events were sequentially close is evident in Esau's reaction to Jacob's flight:
- Now Esau saw that Isaac had blessed Jacob and sent him away to Paddan-aram to take a wife from there, and that as he blessed him he charged him, "You shall not marry one of the Canaanite women," and that Jacob had obeyed his father and his mother and gone to Paddan-aram. So when Esau saw that the Canaanite women did not please his father Isaac, Esau went to Ishmael and took Mahalath daughter of Abraham's son Ishmael, and sister of Nebaloth, to be his wife in addition to the wives he had (Gen. 28:6-9, NRSV).
To believe that Jacob was 76 when he went to Paddanaram, as chronological information cited earlier indicates, requires us to believe that Esau was married to his Hittite wives for thirty-six years before he realized that "the Canaanite women did not please his father Isaac." That, of course, is ridiculous, because recognizing that one's parents are dissatisfied with his choice of a wife would typically occur much sooner than that. So this spiteful marriage that Esau entered into can only be seen as another indication that his marriage to the Hittite women when he was 40 and Jacob's flight to Paddanaram both happened within a relatively short period of time.
Furthermore, to say that Jacob was 76 when he left for Paddanaram requires one to believe that 36 years in his life were skipped in the Genesis narrative. The writer detailed Jacob's life more specifically than any other Genesis character, including even Abraham, yet he passed over entirely 36 years of this central character's life, from age 40 to 76, if Jacob was indeed 76 when he went to Paddanaram. That seems very unlikely.
Obviously, then, whoever wrote this part of the story of his life thought that Jacob was much closer to 40 than 76 when he went to Paddanaram. Certainly, the sexual escapades attributed to him while he was there would be far more believable in a man in his forties than one in his eighties.
Once again, we must conclude that the Bible narrative cannot sustain critical analysis. To argue that the Bible is historically and chronologically accurate in every detail, as bibliolaters claim, one must believe that Jacob, the grand patriarch of Israel, was an old geezer, who spent the better part of his twenty years in Paddanaram engaging in sexual escapades with younger women.
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