A Bride Worth Waiting For

January 3, 2016 Background Scripture: Genesis 28 – 30 Lesson Passage: Genesis 29:15 – 30 The Eastern culture’s norms concerning betrothal, engagement, and marriage can seem quite strange when viewed in the light of the Western culture’s romanticized view of love, engagement, and marriage. One can argue that the various types of pre-arranged marriages used in the East really can serve to bring stability to families which will in turn translate into stability in the community. From a Western perspective, a number of those Eastern marriage arrangements look more like business deals or contracts than love and happiness. This is not to say that romance cannot blossom from an arranged pairing. On the other hand, I believe that today’s Western society is proof that it takes more than feelings and positive emotions to hold a marriage together for decades. Likewise, we can also witness that marriages arranged in the East don’t necessarily survive if true love does not develop between husband and wife. Our lesson today presents one of the arranged—or perhaps better defined as negotiated marriage arrangements of the East. When Jacob met the woman that he believed to be his dream wife, Rachel, he arranged to hire himself out for seven years as a servant to her father as a form of dowry in exchange for his approval to marry his daughter. As can be seen, the arrangement in our lesson was somewhat of a composite between the West’s romanticized view of “boy meets girl and falls in love” and the East’s respect for the “quasi-business arrangement involving a dowry”. The dowry represented some form of wealth that a man must bring in exchange for the privilege of marrying his bride. In other words, Rachel was Jacob’s choice but there remained the business to be taken care of with her father to gain his approval of the marriage. The dowry was the business side of this arrangement. Based on the scriptures, it appears that Jacob might well have been more of a romantic than he was a shrewd businessman. After Jacob labored for seven years, Rachel’s father pulled a fast one and swapped her sister, Leah, in her stead on the night the marriage was to be consummated. Of course this “swap out” was not discovered until the next morning after Jacob apparently consummated his marriage to the wrong girl! How disappointing this must have been to Jacob after seven years of labor invested. This brings me to the topic of this lesson: “A Bride Worth Waiting For”. Because Rachel was Jacob’s choice and not merely the product of an arranged marriage, Jacob had a serious decision to make. Jacob agreed to serve Rachel’s father an additional seven years in exchange for Rachel—the woman he wanted from the start. In total, that’s over fourteen years of labor in exchange for the approval of the bride’s father. That is a very high price to pay no matter how it is viewed. In today’s terms, that’s almost half of a career in many areas of work. To Jacob, she was worth it. After fourteen years of labor, Jacob finally had the bride of his choice and he knew she was “A Bride Worth Waiting For”. Robert C. Hudson December 5, 2015