Why this story matters
(commentary on Genesis 27-31)
(Page 4 of 4)
Rachel and the household “gods”
There is one final little mystery in this story, and it concerns Rachel’s perplexing theft of her uncle’s “gods.” This is the wife of the future father of Israel and yet she steals and keeps gods without any apparent recrimination anywhere in the Bible. The narrator barely thinks its worth mentioning and simply states, “When Laban had gone to shear his sheep, Rachel stole her father's household gods" (Gen. 31: 19). We actually don’t know why Rachel took the gods, so predictably there are differing solutions offered by apologists.
One idea is that Rachel took them in order to stop her father’s idol worship. But then, if this were true, she should have destroyed them. Another possible solution is that, since these gods were used for divination, she took them so that her father wouldn’t be able to know where she'd gone and wouldn’t be able to follow her. But surely Yahweh would be able to prevent Laban from using divination to find them. And, again, once they'd gotten away, Rachel would have destroyed them. She didn't. She kept them. Another idea is that Rachel was following the custom of tribes of the region who would bequeath household gods to the heir. She tried to steal the birthright from her brothers just as Jacob had done with his brother. Rachel, as the idea goes, believed Jacob to now be part of the family and qualified as the eldest son of Laban. This sounds more plausible, but it doesn't solve the problem of the wife of Yahweh's favorite, Jacob, keeping "gods" without recrimination anywhere in the Bible.
Because of this, some Bible teachers have asserted that, when Rachel died some time later while giving birth to her second son, this was her punishment. But this has to be creatively inferred since the text doesn't say anything of the kind. What's more, it's inconsistent with other parts of Genesis.
Much later, in the 35th chapter of Genesis, Jacob's daughter is raped by a Hivite man. Jacob's sons take revenge by killing all the Hivite men. When Jacob finds out, he fears reprisals from the Canaanites and Perizzites and decides to flee. He tells his people to get rid of their gods: “So Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, “Get rid of the foreign gods you have with you, and purify yourselves and change your clothes (Gen. 35: 2).” Apparently, then, Yahweh's favorite was well aware that his family kept gods, other than Yahweh, and did nothing about it. Since he allowed his people to keep foreign gods unless they were under attack, he would have had no difficulty with Rachel stealing her father's gods and keeping them.
We also know that another one of Yahweh's favorites, King David, kept such idols in the family too. When one of his wives, Michal, found out that men were coming to kill David in the morning, she put one of her idols in his bed to fool them while he fled:
“Saul sent men to David's house to watch it and to kill him in the morning. But Michal, David's wife, warned him, “If you don't run for your life tonight, tomorrow you'll be killed.” So Michal let David down through a window, and he fled and escaped. Then Michal took an idol and laid it on the bed, covering it with a garment and putting some goats' hair at the head” (1 Samuel 19:11-16)
And in another story, this time from the book of Judges, a man named Micah hired a Levite to be his “priest”. Micah kept a host of idols or gods and yet the Levite priest never told him that he had to get rid of them. And a little later, scouts from the Israelite tribe of Dan came by Micah’s house and asked the priest to inquire of Yahweh if their impending attack on the town of Laish would be successful. The priest prays and tells them it has Yahweh’s approval: "The priest answered them, "Go in peace. Your journey has the Lord's approval" (Judges 18:6). With Yahweh's approval, then, the scouting party summons the soldiers to come and attack Laish. On the way, the soldiers stop at Micah's house. They take the idols and gods and ask the Levite to leave Micah and be their priest instead. The priest is very pleased with this and goes with the soldiers. So with Yahweh's approval, the soldiers from Dan, armed with all these gods, attack the defenseless people of Laish and kill them all in order to take their land which is rich in resources. The story finishes off with the statement: “They continued to use the idols Micah had made, all the time the house of God was in Shiloh" (Judges 18:31). There are a couple of things to note, then. First, the soldiers are in possession of these gods when they carry out their successful mission sanctioned by Yahweh. And second, there is no explicit condemnation of the possession of these idols anywhere.
Conclusion
There's no doubt this is a great biblical story, but for those who say everything in the Bible happened just as written, it raises many difficult questions. Apologists have a lot of work to do to make sense of this story from a literal perspective. However, for now they can take comfort in the fact that these problems are largely unknown by the faithful. That's too bad.
END OF COMMENTARY
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