Jacob awoke in high spirits. He turned to give his bride a kiss and is horrified by what he sees. “Dear God, what have I done?”
Grappling with his thoughts he tried to remember everything about last night. It was dark when he came to Rachel to consummate their marriage; his mind fogged from partying and drinking wine. How did this happen?
Esau, his twin brother, comes to mind and there is shame. “God I know my scheming was wrong, and I deserve to be punished, but don’t punish Rachel for my sins.”
When he first met Rachel it was love at first sight. Jacob was tired and weary after a long journey from Canaan to Paddam-Aram, home to his mother’s people, but he was not immune to her wiles. As he watched her walking to the well, others told him
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Treachery is their father’s middle name, but ignoring the ketubbah (marriage contract), and giving Leah to Jacob on her wedding night was the most horrible thing he ever did. Worse, how could faint-hearted Leah take part in this clandestine scheme? How will she get through the celebrating?
Finally, the long week of feasts is over. Tonight is Rachel’s night. Her father agreed to allow Rachel and Jacob to consummate their marriage as long as Jacob committed to another seven years of work to pay a second dowry. Rachel spots Leah across the room, “You may be the first wife big sister; but you’ll see, I am the favored one.”
Rachel snaps back from daydreaming when she senses an increased excitement in the room. Jacob must be coming. Why the butterflies? Jacob is her beloved. Everyone prepares to leave the couple to their privacy. Locking eyes Rachel notes, with much satisfaction, Leah’s distressed look. As Jacob walks by Leah, he doesn’t even nod. He loves Rachel, not Leah (Gen. 29:30). Everyone knows it, especially Leah. Four sons later Leah still longs for Jacob’s love, and Rachel is barren and
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How to give Jacob children? She wants children so badly she is willing to bring yet another woman into Jacob’s bed; her maidservant Bilah. Like his grandfather (Abraham) before him, Jacob accepts the gift (Gen. 16: 1-4). It works, Bilhah has a son. Not to be outdone, Leah offers her maidservant Zilpah. The race is on, but for the first time in their lives Leah is winning.
Finally, Rachel conceives and gives birth to a son. Unfortunately, Rachel suffers from the never satisfied syndrome. No time to praise God or find joy in the moment. She name’s him Joseph, which means may he add. “May the Lord add to me another son (Gen 30:24b NIV).” In the meantime, Jacob has other problems. His relationship with Laban is deteriorating. Constantly changing the rules, Laban constantly tries to trick Jacob out of wealth he rightly earned. Indifferent to leaving their childhood home, Rachel and Leah plan an escape when Laban’s gone. but not before Rachel steals her father’s idols.
Although Rachel prays to Jacob’s God, she still honors the gods of
When thrown into a foreign country where everything new is particularly strange and revolting, the Price family would be expected to become closer; however, the exile from their homeland only serves to drive the family farther apart. In Leah’s case, as a impressionable child in need of guidance in a dramatically foreign country, she remains loyal to her father, idolizing his close-minded ways. This blind devotion unknowingly
Orleanna, struggles with the hardships of daily life; toting and disinfecting the family's water, scrambling to make ends meet and trying to protect her family from the myriad terrors of the bush. Orleanna uses irony to describe the early days of her marriage. As she describes them, the days when there was still room for laughter in her husband's evangelical calling, before her pregnancies embarrassed him, before he returned from World War II a different man, a man who planned ''to save more souls than had perished on the road from Bataan.'' Her husband, Nathan Price, had escaped those miseries simply by luck, and knowing it curled his heart ''like a piece of hard shoe leather.'' As her husband continually preaches the good Lord’s word, she is faced with what seems to her to be the more important burdens of life, survival and keeping her family safe and sane. She doesn’t appear to have nearly so strong of a religious background as her husband would have hoped for her, however, throughout the novel it is made quite clear that she is in fact a better person than her husband could have ever hoped to be. Her daughter, Leah, captures her mothers religion very well when she says, “my father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's foot soldiers, while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.'' This quote is very true, as her father is the evangelical missionary leader who parades his religion around, as he craves for the reputation of being a ...
Now that she has spilt blood during the High Holy Days she is sacrificing for God and her religion. She has an epiphany that she must be “a Chosen One” (54) and a “child to lead your tribe” (55) meaning that it is up to her to bring light upon the injustices of Jews. Here the speaker has her awakening, which results in both happiness and pain. She is proud of her religion and culture but at the same time she understands the harsh reality of the outside, Non-Jewish world filled with hate. The attitude of the speaker goes from one of observation and childish thoughts (such as her preoccupation with her wool winter suit that "scratched" and was "a size to large") to realization and overall growth.
“The First Seven Years” begins with Feld and Sobel working in the shoe repair store. Max enters to get his shoes fixed, and Feld convinces him to call his daughter Miriam. Sobel is angered by this and leaves his job. Feld does not understand why. Miriam goes on a couple dates with Max, but is dissatisfied. Feld is disappointed, and searches for Sobel. Sobel confesses his feelings for Miriam, and claims he continued to work for five years in hopes of receiving Miriam for his work ethic. Feld decides he would approve if Sobel would work two more years. Genesis 29 begins with Jacob traveling to Laban. Jacob falls in love with Laban’s daughter, Rachel. Laban and Jacob compile a deal. If Jacob works for him for seven years, Jacob may marry Rachel. However, Laban deceives Jacob and gives him Leah instead. Laban tells Jacob to work for him for another seven years in order to marry Rachel. Jacob did
Through the horrific circumstances they experienced, Jules and Genevieve showed some of the best traits in human nature. The shock of finding two sick, dirty girls in their backyard could put off anyone but the Dufaures express utter kindness towards Rachel and Sarah. They show their selflessness when Genevieve says to her husband that “they must come in; they must be hidden at once” (De Rosnay 110). This woman knew the risk of taking in Jewish girls but she saw them as human beings, not as criminals or a contagious disease. She saw them as sick little girls who needed to be taken care of. Jules and Genevieve knew about the dangers of letting t...
“Araby” is a bildungsroman story, about coming of age, the passing through innocence to experience. This story takes place in Ireland, but in the boys dreams he visualizes Araby, a very exotic or “sexy” setting, in the east, similar setting to Aladin. It is a place of high wealth and romance, the perfect setting for a young boy to come about his sexuality. He visualizes a woman in Araby, and wants to give her all the gifts he can, including a chalice from the church. The problem with this twelve year old boy giving this woman a chalice is that the chalice is used to carry Jesus’s blood, and in a very religious place of Dublin, Ireland, this would be a horrible sin to use a chalice as a form of sexuality. The young boy in this story wants to confess his love for Meghan’s sister but does not understand how or why he wants to do this. His mind is trying to pass over from innocence to experience, prelapsarianism to postlapsarianism, but the people surrounding him do not give him the information to complete this change. As a result of this, the young boy becomes frustrated and angry, but he does not exactly know why. Dublin in this time is not the place for having sexual thoughts before marriage, and that is all this young boy will
With the amount of anti-Semitic activity in Germany, no Jew was safe and Helen realized this quickly. In order to protect her child he had to give her to family to keep her safe. “There we said goodbye as casually as possible and gave these strangers our child.” After this moment, Helen’s fight for survival to see her child once again. Finding a place to hide became very difficult as no one wanted to host a Jewish family due to the fear of the Nazis finding out. “People were understandably nervous and frightened, so the only solution was to find another hiding place.”
“Where is the rest of your family,” asked Masoud. Her father came back to bring her after a long time he left her. As a girl, she wanted to be with her family, but she thought about all the things, about her father, then she determined who knows if her father again abandons her. That was the reason she let her father go, and Jameela let all the pain go from her heart.
The incident in Genesis in which a woman interferes with this momentum involves Rebekah, who intervenes on behalf of her second born son, Jacob. As a result of Rebekah’s manipulative orders, Jacob, the younger son, inherits the divine blessing from Isaac, though it is clear from the text that Jacob’s brother, Esau, had been Isaac’s favored child. Rebekah’s actions are rebellious because they result in the violation of the law of primogeniture that seems to have been the standard practice of inheritance in the book of Genesis. And by reassigning the inheritance, Rebekah threatens to destroy the course of events god has anticipated en route to the creation of his select nation. While the text shows that Rebekah had received a prophecy that “the older would serve the younger” (25:23), whenever women in Genesis take assertive actions that ramifications, conflict always ensues. Just because Rebekah received a prophecy, there is no indication that she was in any position to actively seek its fulfillment. Jacob, as a result of his mother’s initiative, is forced to flee his home for fear that Esau will kill him. The hate between the brothers endures, and just as Sara’s infertility caused family conflict, Rebekah’s actions likewise cause disruption in the house of Isaac and its descendents. Unlike the instances where the men in genesis take the fate of their family’s lives into their own hands under open direction from god, the rare occasions when women, such as Rebekah, take aggressive action, the result is battles and feuds. As in the case of infertility, a women’s inheritance with the divine scheme can be seen as a multiple threat to the thematic framework of Genesis. Rebekah takes assertive, independent action with regard to her family’s development, and this action clearly crosses over the rigid boundaries of the prescribed female role.
With the exception of some small problems with Sarah’s strong will, MacLachlan makes the relationship between Sarah and Jacob seem easy. However in the movie, Jacob also has a hard time letting Sarah get close to him because of his love for his dead wife, Katherine. For example, in the movie when they fight about putting Katherine’s possessions in the house and going to visit the grave Sarah says “I cannot make a difference until you make peace with Katherine’s death”. Jacob does not make that peace until Sarah goes to help Maggie deliver her baby. The delivery brings back memories of Katherine’s death since she died giving birth to Caleb. It is here that Jacob realizes “I never stopped long enough to tell her that I missed her”. Once Jacob realizes this he has room to love Sarah.
Unfortunately, Sarah was unable to bare children for many years. She even assigned blame, asserting, “The Lord has kept me from having children (Genesis 16:1).” God had promised Sarah she would bear children but Sarah grew impatient, as she often did. Now, Sarah turned to her Egyptian servant, Hagar. Sarah rendered Hagar to Abraham so that she could bear his child. Abraham consented to his wife’s wishes and later Ishmael was born. [The Book does not mention whether Hagar consented to this arrangement or not.] Now, both Sarah and Hagar were connected to Abraham. After Hagar conceives a child with Abraham, Sarah holds a certain level of antipathy towards her servant. Sarah feels that her servant holds her to a lower esteem because she cannot conceive, and Sarah starts to feels insignificant. In return, Sarah treats her servant harshly until finally Hagar flees from her. While in exile, an angel proposed that Hagar return to Sarah and Abraham and be subservient; in return, blessings would be bestowed upon
She informs the readers that Sethe wishes she could have died with her other siblings because the current life she is living is only filled with anguish and agony. Sethe remembers the story of Nan and her mother during the Middle Passage. According to Nan, Sethe’s mother “threw them all away but you,” (74). Sethe’s siblings are all thrown overboard, murdered. All except Sethe. Nan assures Sethe that she is special to her mother because “[she] put her arms around him. The others she did not,” (74). Her mother loves her father and because of that, Sethe is the only child her mother truly loves. Although this story is to make Sethe grateful for life, she only feels “unimpressed” and “angry,” (74). Sethe is the unlucky child from her mother. All her life, she has been enslaved and nothing good has come out from living. She has only experienced traumatic events, mainly from her time as a slave in Sweet Homes. One of the most disturbing memories Sethe has is when Schoolteacher categorizes the slaves’ characteristics. She happens to be passing by the building and hears that the men are putting “her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right,” (228). Sethe is perturbed as to how her animalistic features are sorted out from her human characteristics. She is not seen to be a human being, but an animal. With her life as a slave, Sethe sees that there is not positive outcome from living. She only experiences pain for Halle goes insane, Sixo is burned alive, Paul A is hanged, Paul D is forced to wear a bit in his mouth, and Sethe is almost whipped to death. Her only wishes are that all these events had never happened and blames her mother for not having thrown her into the sea and causing all these memories. According to Freud, everybody has a death drive within themselves. Currently, Sethe’s death drive is causing her to have this desire of death.
... were African. Although the Husband loves his wife, he realizes that he does not "know" his wife as," the sound of someone moving through the house, a stranger." Wolff creates a situation between the two where the husband is looking to settle the argument, whereas the wife just wants to hear yes to the proposal. Ann doesn't think that her husband will say yes and when he does she realized that they still don't know each other. It takes the Husband until the end of the story to figure this out, when his wife, the stranger, now comes to bed. . The story does end with him going to bed with this new strange wife, but also leads to a conclusion of rediscovery and renewal for the marriage.
Jacob first appears in the Bible in the book of Genesis. The Bible says that Esau was the firstborn of the twins. “Afterward his brother came out, with his hand gripping Esau’s heel; so he was named Jacob.” (Genesis 25:26). The boys grew up, and Esau was described as a skillful hunter, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents. Once when Jacob was cooking a stew in his tent, Esau came in from the from hunting in the fields and was famished. Jacob told Esau he would share with him his stew on the condition that Esau renounce his birthright to him. Esau accepted. Later, as their father, Isaac sat on his deathbed, he blessed Jacob, who was dressed in fur clothing to imitate Esau who had more body hair than Jacob. Isaac thought it was Esau he was blessing (Meeks 41). After this, Jacob’s mother advised him to go live with his Uncle Labon in Padan-Aram – afraid that Esau would become vengeful and kill Jacob after he tricked their father into giving him his blessing of the first born.
Mrs. Linde shows her loyalty to her family when she did not think that she “had the right” to refuse her husband’s marriage proposal. After taking into consideration her sick mother, her brothers, and Krogstad having money. She married for the welfare of her family.