I say to her, give me, I pray thee, a little water of thy pitcher to drink; and she say to me, both 44th verse. 45th verse. 46th verse. 47th verse. drink thou, and I will also draw for thy camels: let the same be the woman whom the Lord hath appointed out for my master's son. And before I had done speaking in mine heart, behold, Rebekah came forth with her pitcher on her shoulder; and she went down unto the well, and drew water and I said unto her, Let me drink, I pray thee. And she made haste, and let down her pitcher from her shoulder, and said, Drink, and I will give thy camels drink also: so I drank, and she made the camels drink also. And I asked her, and said, Whose daughter art thou? And she said, the daughter of Bethuel, Nahor's son, whom Milcah bare unto him: and I put the ear-ring upon her face, and the bracelets upon her hands. And I bowed down my head, and worshipped the Lord, and blessed the Lord God of my master Abraham, which had led me in the right way to my master's brother's daughter unto his son. And now, if ye will deal kindly and truly with my master, tell me; and if not, tell me; that I may turn to the right hand or to the left. Then Laban and Bethuel answered, and said, The thing proceedeth from the Lord: we cannot speak unto thee, bad or good. Behold, Rebekah is before thee, take her and go, and let her be thy master's son's wife, as the Lord hath spoken. And it came to pass, that when Abraham's servant heard their words, he worshipped the Lord, bowing himself to the earth. And the servant brought forth 48th verse. 49th verse. 50th verse. 51st verse. 52nd verse. 53rd verse. jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment, and gave them to Rebekah: he gave also to her brother, and to her mother precious things. And they did eat and drink, he 55th verse. 56th verse. 57th verse. 54th verse. and the men that were with him, and tarried all night and they rose up in the morning, and he said, Send me away unto my master. And her brother and her mother said, Let the damsel abide with us a few days, at the least ten; after that she shall go. And he said unto them, Hinder me not, seeing the Lord hath prospered my way; send me away, that I may go to my master. And they said, we will call the damsel, and inquire at her mouth. And they called Rebekah, and said unto her, Wilt thou go with this man? And she said, I will go. And they sent away Rebekah their sister, and her nurse, and Abraham's servant, and his men. And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, Thou art our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them. And Rebekah arose, and 58th verse. 59th verse. 60th verse. 61st verse. her damsels, and they rode upon the camels, 62nd verse. 63rd verse. and followed the man: and the servant took Rebekah, and went his way. And Isaac came from the way of the well Lahai-roi; for he dwelt in the south country. And Isaac went out to meditate in the field at the eventide and he lifted up his eyes and saw, and behold the camels were coming. And Rebekah lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac she lighted off the camel. For she said unto 64th verse. 65th verse. 66th verse. the servant, What man is this that walketh in the field to meet us? And the servant had said it is my master: therefore she took a veil and covered herself. And the servant told Isaac all things that he had done. And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah's tent, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her: and Isaac was comforted after his mother's death. 67th verse. Abraham's second marriage; his death; and the birth of The scriptural history of Abraham now draws to a termination, not, however, without revealing an important incident in his domestic life. We think the story highly improbable, and are inclined to consider it a spurious interpolation into the text. Nevertheless, it appears there, as a part of the patriarchal history, and as such, it is our duty to consider it authentic. Esau and After the death of Sarah, and notwithstanding his advanced age, Abraham took to wife a Canaanitish woman, whose name was Keturah, and who bore him no fewer than six sons. The great scrupulosity with which he had rejected the women of the land of Canaan as unfitted for a matrimonial connection with his son was lost sight of on the occasion of his own second marriage, for all his sons became Canaanites, and settled in Canaan, where they gave their respective names to the cities of their foundation. Keturah being a Canaanite, again furnishes us with proof of the latitudinarianism of 3rd & 4th verses. 5th & 6th verses. Abraham's religious principles. Abraham gave these sons gifts, "and sent them away from Isaac his son, while he yet. lived, eastward, into the east country," which was the neighbourhood of the Moabites and the Ammonites, who were the children of Lot, by his two daughters. One of Abraham's sons, named Midian, was the founder of the sect of the Midianites. These people, five hundred years afterwards, hospitably gave shelter to Moses, when he fled from Egypt, on the occasion of the act of homicide committed by him on the person of an Egyptian. Moses married their high priest's daughter, and dwelt in their land for forty years. It was there he meditated and perfected his plans for the extradition of the Hebrew people from Egypt. In Numbers xxv. we read of them as a pagan people, the illicit intercourse of whose women with some of the Hebrew grandees incensed Moses, and notwithstanding his obligations to them, and his personal connection with them by blood, he invaded the land of Midian by surprise, and mercilessly put these friendly people to the sword, without regard to age or sex. This transaction will be fully detailed in the progress of our history. 7th & 8th verses. 9th verse. Abraham having completed the age of an hundred and seventy-five years, died, and his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the land of the Hittite, in the cemetery which Abraham had bought, situated before Mamre, the land of honourable mention for Abraham, being that from whence he had set out on the celebrated military foray, when he recaptured Lot and his family. 10th verse. 12th to 18th verses. The genealogies of Ishmael, Abraham's spurious son, are here particularized by the text, who are described as having settled on the frontiers of Egypt. 19th to 21st verse. 22nd to 26th verse. 27th verse. The preceding chapter has shown the manner of Isaac's marriage with his cousin Rebekah, but Rebekah was not fertile during the lifetime of her husband's father. She remained sterile for twenty years, for Isaac was forty years old when his marriage was celebrated, and he was sixty when Rebekah bare her first children, who were twins. The manner of their birth, as related in the words of the text, renders fruitless any attempt of ours to modify its extreme indelicacy. The first-born, whose name was Esau, was the favourite of his father, for he was a sportsman, or, as he is termed in the text, "he was a cunning hunter, a man of the field," and he supplied his father with the spoils of the chase, or in biblical words, "Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison." Rebekah, on the other hand, loved Jacob, and "Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents." We do not precisely understand what is meant by a plain man; his history shows him to have been a cunning and artful, and a timid man, much too overreaching for his bold, frank, uncalculating brother the hunter, who at the very outset of their history, and at the point of death from hunger, sells him his birthright, and confirms the sale to him by a solemn oath, to induce Jacob to supply him with a mess of pottage. This unbrotherly conduct, combined with the favouritism displayed by the paternal parent 28th verse. 29th to 32nd verses. |