The Vagina Monologue
The Maddening Mystery of The Gender Barrier
Unveiled
I seriously doubt Jacob was in love with his cousin Rachel. Like
most men, Jacob was being superficial—I want this daughter, not
that one. Like most men, Jacob was obsessed with youth. It is
likely that Leah was, perhaps, in her early-twenties—practically
a spinster by biblical standards. Rachel was most certainly a
teenager. I’ve been chastised and rebuked for saying teenage
girls are sexy. Which is stupid. Teenage girls *are* sexy.
That’s what the word “jailbait” means. Little girls are flowers
that bloom throughout puberty and grow into beauty and grace.
Teens are a legally-enforceable look-but-don’t-touch situation
because society has rightly presumed that, though in many ways
she appears to be an adult, a teenager is still emotionally and
psychologically a child. Children lack the experience and
maturity to make important decisions for themselves. They certainly
lack the maturity and reason to
grant sexual consent to anyone. Teen sex is, by definition,
reckless; children--whether they think they are or not--playing
with fire. The fact she grants access to some boy--no job,
living with his mom, and clearly unconcerned with the risk his
bareback adventure subjects her to--marks her as a child.
In biblical days,
however, this wasn’t a problem. Dad was firmly in charge of the
daughter, or more specifically, the daughter’s vagina. Verse 19:
“It is better that I give her to you than that I should give her
to another man.” Sexual purity was of paramount importance
because both the honor and the financial security of the family
often rested on the intact hymen of their teen girls, whose
vagina would be inspected on their wedding day to confirm they
were, in fact, virgins. A father was paid a dowry—the “marriage
price”—at the time of the girl’s wedding, which was the only
good thing about having daughters in the first place. Never mind
that hymen can be broken climbing a tree or chasing a goat, a
father of a girl whose hymen was not intact had a loathsome
burden on his hands, a child who would fail to launch—to leave
the home. He would have to house and clothe and feed her
indefinitely unless someone took her on as a servant or
concubine.
Presuming Leah to be into her twenties, my guess was Laban was
anxious to be rid of her. The bible makes it seem that Leah was
ugly, which is a sexist conclusion.
The Bible says that Leah had weak eyes, but the adjective rak is
translated weak in only a few places (Genesis 33:12; Deuteronomy
20:8). More often it describes something that is tender (flocks,
Genesis 18:7), gentle (a king’s reign, II Samuel 3:39), soft
(speech, Proverbs 15:1; Job 41:3), delicate (a woman,
Deuteronomy 28:56; Isaiah 47:1), and young (an experienced young
man, I Chronicles 22:5 and 29:1; Second Chronicles 13:7).
That is, she had eyes that according to the Oriental standard of
beauty, were a great blemish. Bright eyes, full of fire, are
considered the height of beauty.
I am persuaded Leah’s looks had less to do with anything than
the fact Rachel was, likely, a teenage hottie. In biblical
times, if you had enough money and the right family connections,
you could buy yourself a hot teenager to have sex with.
Marriage, for men, was more about the future potential of the
girl—she was usually a girl and not quite a woman. I doubt Jacob
loved Rachel. I’m sure he believed he loved her, but he’d
never have been allowed to spend time alone with her. He
encounters her briefly in verse 9 and is “in love” with her by
verse 18, willing to commit seven years of hard work in exchange
for her. Thus, he could not have actually known her. He observed
her from afar. To burn with passion over some teenager you catch
occasional glimpses of across a meadow suggests Jacob’s interest
with Rachel had nothing to do with her SAT scores. We learn
absolutely nothing about her, abut who she is, about her
personality, her hopes for her own life. Like most women in the
bible, she is a name on a sheet of paper and likely only has a
name so as to properly reference the men the narrative is more
concerned with. Rachel was likely a teenage hottie, young enough
to likely have been untouched. Moses, the presumed writer,
romanticizes what amounts to a 30 year-old cruising a high
school and picking out a cheerleader to have sex with. He
arranges everything through the dad, the girl has no say, but
knows she must submit herself sexually to this stranger on their
wedding night.
This is what we do: glimpse some woman across a grassy meadow
and convince ourselves we’re in love. And the self-hypnosis
becomes increasingly more potent as we turn our lives inside-out
in hot pursuit of the object of our desire—just as we’ve done
over and over since adolescence. We sing songs and we write
poems and we fight wars and we plan and scheme and enlist the
help of friends and family. And, for many of us, rather than
wait for the vow, we convince her, manipulate her, into granting
us access to the vagina. Because, no matter what we’ve said, her
heart is not the object of our desire. If we were truly
interested in *her,* if we had a mature outlook on human
sexuality, we’d realize jumping the gun on sexual intimacy
almost always dooms the relationship. We’re men. The vagina is
the ultimate mystery if not the ultimate goal. It never occurs
to us, dolts that we are, that if she’s lifting the veil for us,
it’s highly likely she’s done this before. Oh, we pushed and
cajoled and twisted her arm—but if she lets us in before the
vow, chances are all that cajoling was just her protecting her
pride. She’s done this before. This ain’t her first unveiling.
Not Her First Rodeo: They're smarter than us.
God's Way
As much as we’d like to believe otherwise, Rachel was not
“saved,” by which I mean Rachel was not a servant of the God of
Jacob. Jacob refers to God as “…the God of Abraham and the Fear
of Isaac” [30:42]. Rachel’s investment were in the Teraphim, her
family’s household “gods” intended to protect the dwelling, she
hid from Jacob by, ahem, sitting on them and then claiming she
could not raise up from her saddle because she was menstruating.
Laban would have defiled himself had he touched her or the
saddle she sat upon. The record never suggests Rachel had much
interest or love for Jacob, nor was she apparently jealous of
Jacob’s sham marriage to her older sister Leah—a woman Jacob
likely neglected because he never wanted her in the first place.
Such neglect was to be expected if not wholly anticipated, and
Laban could likely care less.
Laban and Jacob ultimately make a pact. The place where a
monument is built is given three names: Laban calls it Jegar
Sahadutha meaning “the heap or round heap of witness” in Chaldee,
and Jacob named it Galeed, meaning the same in Hebrew, and
Mizpah, meaning “watchtower.” The interesting feature of this
verse is that it brings out the difference in languages used
between Jacob and Laban. [1] There may have been an initial
language barrier between the two, which may buy Laban a bit of
slack in terms of how he swindled Jacob.
[2] Through this ordeal, the Lord would teach Jacob three
lessons. The first lesson was to learn humble submission.
Because he had refused to submit to God, he must submit to serve
a human master. The second lesson was to respect the rights of
the firstborn. What Jacob had disregarded in connection with
Esau, he must now concede concerning his wife Leah. The third
lesson was to learn patience. Because he had refused to wait for
God’s timing for the fulfillment of His promise (25:23), he had
to wait seven days before he could marry Rachel, and that he
would have to serve another seven years after that.
Jacob lay with Rachel also and he loved Rachel more than Leah.
And he worked for Laban another seven years as the bride price
for Rachel (29:30). Jacob was becoming like his mother and
father, each of whom loved one son more than the other. Parental
favoritism was replaced by marital favoritism.470 The former led
to friction in Isaac’s family, and Jacob’s favoritism for Rachel
will lead to family discord that will plague him for the rest of
his life. In his old age, he favored Rachel’s son, Joseph, so
much that Leah’s sons wanted to kill him, as we shall see
(37:3-4, 18).
Verses 20 to 30 follow an antithetical structure. There is a
parallelism, where the first letter is antithetical to the
second letter, and so on.
A Jacob’s payment for a wife (29:20)
B Jacob’s marriage to Leah through deception
(29:21-24)
C Jacob’s accusation against Laban (29:25)
C Laban’s defense (29:26)
B Jacob’s marriage to Rachel by negotiation
(29:27-30a)
A Jacob’s payment for a wife (29:30b)
Not Her Heart We're After: Jacob’s interest in Rachel had nothing to do with her SAT scores.
Love, Actually
Did Jacob and Leah live happily ever after? I’ve been warning
sisters for years that, once your husband has, ahem, hit it 80
times, it’s over. I’m being wildly facetious, but what I mean is
our fascination with the vagina extends only so far. The novelty
of new sex will eventually wane, for both the man and woman.
Sooner or later, you’ve seen all she’s got. The mystery is gone.
And our behavior changes. Where we once pursued her
relentlessly, called her many times per day, now we’re out in
the street, working late, full of excuses. Your marriage, your
relationship, cannot, must not, be based upon sex. People who
save it for marriage can often be so riled up, stalked by The
Need, dizzy with sexual longing, that the longing becomes
confused with love. A man’s interest in scoring the goal, in the
unveiling, can and often is confused with love. Waiting is no
guarantee. Not waiting almost certainly endangers the
relationship, even while exposing how superficial the
relationship was in the first place. He’s not in love with you.
He’s in love with it. “Then Jacob said to Laban, ‘Give me my
wife, for my days are fulfilled, that I may go in to her,”
Jacob’s arrogant demand, not for love but for sex. The bible
further mentions these women mainly in the context of sex, whom
Jacob lay with and so forth.
The major component of real love is patience. Fourteen years is
a lot of patience. If Rachel was fourteen years old when Jacob
first met her, he didn’t marry her until she was nearly 30—an
old hag by biblical standards. And why, if she was such a hottie,
was she still available? I suppose Laban had control over her,
but, presumably, she could have run away, married someone else
while still in her prime. Are we to believe Rachel was a virgin
until nearly 30 years old? Or that she was happy about waiting
while Jacob had nightly sex with her sister? These are the kinds
of questions that pop up when you look too hard at bible
stories. The point of the bible is not to provide encyclopedic
details of every character, but to teach us something about God.
The fact that Jacob waited, finally marrying not a hair-twirling
teen hottie but a fully-grown and developed mature woman,
suggests that maybe this was love after all.
Christopher J. Priest
5 December 2012
editor@praisenet.org
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