030. Jacob--Protector of Benjamin
Jacob--Protector of Benjamin
Gen 42:36-38. And Jacob their father said unto them, Me have ye bereaved of my children; Joseph is not, and Simeon is not, and ye will take Benjamin away: all these things are against me. And Reuben spake unto his father, saying, Slay my two sons, if I bring him not to thee: deliver him into my hand, and I will bring him to thee again. And he said, My son shall not go down with you; for his brother is dead, and he is left alone: if mischief befall him by the way in the which ye go, then shall ye bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave.
It is a pleasing and an useful employment to trace important events up to their sources; to mark the gradual progress of human affairs; to observe the same persons at different periods of their existence, and in different situations; to discover on what delicate hinges their fortunes have turned; and to contemplate the wisdom, power, and goodness of Divine Providence, in producing the greatest effects from the slightest and most unlikely causes. There is no greater error in conduct than to reckon certain actions relating to morals, trifling and insignificant. When revolutions in private families, and in empires, are pursued up to the springs from whence they flow, they are often found to commence in some little error, inadvertency, or folly, which, at the time, might have been despised or neglected. Just as mighty rivers begin their course in some paltry, obscure stream, which the peasant could dry up with the sole of his foot. The past is infinitely less perspicuous to the eye of human understanding, than the future is to divine intelligence. God “seeth the end from the beginning, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will fulfill all my pleasure.” The periods which make the most brilliant figure in the page of history, were periods of anxiety and trouble to the men and the nations who then figured on the scene. A life of many incidents is a life of much distress. When the writer has got a great deal to relate, the person whose life is recorded has had a great deal to suffer.
Much more is written of Jacob than of any other of the patriarchs. Alas! it is only saying that his miseries were much more numerous and severe. In a life shorter than his father’s by thirty-three years, calamity so crowded upon calamity, that it seems extended to the utmost stretch of even antediluvian longevity. What hour of his mature age is free from pain and sorrow? Not one! In what region does he find repose? No where. Canaan, Haran, Egypt, are to him almost equally inclement. As a son, a servant, an husband, a father; in youth, in manhood, in old age; he is unremittingly afflicted. And no sooner is one difficulty surmounted, one woe past, than another and a greater overtakes him. Formerly he had youthful blood and spirits to encounter and to endure the ills of life. Hope still cheered the heart, and scattered the cloud. But now, behold the hoary head sinking with sorrow to the grave; the spirit oppressed, overwhelmed, with a sea of trouble. Keen recollection summons up the ghosts of former afflictions, and past joys recur only to remind him that they are gone forever; and black despair obscures, excludes the prospect of good to come. What heart is not wrung, at hearing a poor old man closing the bitter recapitulation of his misfortunes, in the words I have read, “All, all these things are against me?”
Perhaps the life of no other man affords a like instance of accumulated distress. The mournful detail of this evening will present, collected within the compass of not many months, a series of the heaviest afflictions that ever man endured; and all springing up out of objects, in which the heart naturally seeks and expects to find delight. An only daughter dishonored--his eldest hope stained with incest--Simeon and Levi polluted with innocent blood--Judah joined in marriage to a woman of Canaan, and a father by his own daughter-in-law--Joseph torn in pieces by wild beasts--his beloved Rachel lost in childbirth--his venerable father removed from him in the course of nature--the miserable wreck and remains of his family ready perish with famine--Simeon a prisoner in Egypt,--and Benjamin, the only remaining pledge of his Rachel’s love, demanded and forced to be given up. What sorrow was ever like this sorrow? “This is the man who hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath.” And does all a partial mother’s fondness; do all a father’s blessings, wishes, and prayers; do all the promises and predictions of Heaven issue in this? “If in this life only there were hope,” who so miserable as God’s dearest children? Whose lot is so much to be deplored as that of the son of Isaac?
Jacob, after an absence of more than twenty years, has returned to the land of his nativity. A guardian Providence has protected and delivered him from his avowed enemies, from Laban, and from Esau: but the most dangerous enemies of his repose are still nearer to him, they “are those of his own house.” He has purchased an estate, he has spread his tent, he has erected his altar; “his mountain stands strong,” what can move him! From what slight beginnings, do great events arise! Dinah the daughter of Jacob, prompted by female vanity, curiosity, or some other motive equally deserving blame, ventures, unattended, beyond the verge of the paternal superintendence and protection, and falls into danger and shame. She went out, says the Scripture, “to see the daughters of the land.” Josephus affirms, that she was attracted by the celebration of a great public festival, according to the manners of the country. Her youth, innocence, and inexperience inspire confidence; novelty awakens curiosity; beauty tempts, opportunity favors, and virtue is lost. From the first transgression, down to this day, female disgrace and ruin have begun in the gratification of an immoderate desire to see, and to know, some new thing; from an inclination to exhibit themselves, and to observe others. One daughter of Israel is much more likely to be corrupted by communication with many daughters of Canaan than they are to be improved by the conversation of that one. There is much wisdom, my fair friends, in keeping far, very far within your bounds. There is danger, great danger, in advancing to the utmost limit of liberty and virtue. For, the extreme boundary of virtue is also the extreme boundary of vice; and she who goes every length she lawfully may, is but half a step from going farther than she ought, or perhaps than she intended.
Desire is commonly extinguished by gratification; but it is also sometimes inflamed by it. And so it was with Shechem. The first disorder of his passion and its effects, are not more to his shame, than the reparation which he intended and attempted, is to his honor. Indeed, if we except the leading step in this transaction, the whole proceeding on the part of the young prince is noble and generous to a high degree; and loudly reproves and strikingly exposes the cool, the cruel, remorseless seducers of a Christian age, and of a civilized country. The unhappy father receives the news of his daughter’s dishonor with silent sorrow. And how often does he wish in the sequel, that he had forever buried his grief in his own heart! Hamor readily adopts the views of his son, disdains not the alliance of a shepherd, courts Dinah, though humbled, with all the respect due to a princess, and all the munificence becoming one who was himself a sovereign. Those who are fathers, who have daughters for whom they feel, or for whom they fear, will judge of Jacob’s satisfaction at this proposal. To have the wound which had been made in the fond paternal heart, instantly closed up; the stain cast upon his name, wiped clean away; his darling child’s peace and reputation restored; an honorable alliance formed with a wealthy, virtuous, and generous prince; a whole people proselyted from idols to the God of Israel. How many sources of exquisite satisfaction! Is the black cloud over Jacob’s head going for once to descend in refreshing drops, is it going for once to burst, and disperse itself into calmness and serenity? Alas, alas! the tempest is only gathering thicker around him; and dreadful must the discharge of it be. I shudder as I proceed.
Simeon and Levi, two brothers having the same parents of Dinah, and who, on that account, think themselves peculiarly concerned in the vindication of their sister’s honor, affect to receive Shechem’s overtures with complacency.--They have no scruples but what arise from religion. Let these be removed, and the way is cleared at once. Deep, designing, dissembling villains! The ordinance of God is in their mouths, the malice of the devil lies brooding in their hearts. They recommend a sacrament, and they are preparing a sacrifice, a horrid human sacrifice, of many victims.
There is not a more singular fact in all history, than the ready compliance of the whole inhabitants of Shechem with the proposal of changing their religion, and of receiving, at so late a period in life, the painful sign of circumcision. Great must have been the authority which Hamer had over them, or great the affection which they bore him. Unhappy man! and he practiced a little deceit in stating the case to his people, but was himself much more grossly deceived. And I greatly question whether he had prevailed, had not the temptation of Jacob’s cattle and other substance, been held out as a motive to obtain their consent. Comply however they did--and it proved fatal to them. For on the third day, the two sons of Jacob already mentioned attended probably by a band of their friends and servants, rushed upon them and put them all to the sword. “Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce; and their wrath, for it was cruel; I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel.”[*]Gen 44:7 We no where meet with an instance of more savage, indiscriminating barbarity. For the offence of one, a whole nation is mercilessly cut off; and rapine closes the scene of blood. For they plundered the city, and carried off the wretched women captive whose husbands they had murdered. Horrid, infernal passion! And how was Dinah’s honor repaired by this! And these simple, easy, believing men, these harmless, unoffending women, what had they done? Daughters of Canaan, dearly have ye bought the favor of a visit from Jacob’s daughter. Idle and unhallowed was the opening of the scene, and dreadful has the conclusion been. I should not have been surprised to hear of a confederacy among all the neighboring states, to exterminate such a band of robbers and murderers from the face of the earth. Jacob is justly alarmed with the apprehension of this, and, warned of God, removes from the neighborhood of Shechem to Bethel; a spot that brought to his recollection, calmer, happier days--when he was flying indeed from his country, without wealth, without a friend; but free also from the anxiety, vexation, and care, which an increased family and abounding wealth have brought upon him. How much better is it to go childless, than have children to be the grief and plague of a man’s heart? Being arrived at Bethel, where he had been blessed with the visions of the Almighty on his way to Padan-Aram, he deems it a proper time and place to purge his family of every vestige of idolatry. It is no easy matter to live in an idolatrous, or irreligious country, without losing a sense of religion, or acquiring a wrong one. This is one of the great evils which attend traveling into distant lands. Our young men who reside long abroad, whatever else they bring back to their native country, generally drop by the way the pious principles which were in stilled into them in their youth. Some very nearly related to Jacob, I am afraid, had a violent hankering after the gods beyond the flood. Why else did Rachel steal away the images which were her father’s? However that may be, Jacob now disposes of them in a proper manner, and buries every shred that could minister to idolatry, under the oak that was by Shechem. The conduct of Jacob’s sons had, of necessity, awakened a hostile spirit in the country against him, which, had it not been providentially restrained, must have proved fatal to him. But “the terror of God was upon the cities that were round about them, and they did not pursue after the sons of Jacob.”[*]Gen 35:5
About this time, a breach was made in the family by the death of Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse; the threatening and fore-runner of a much heavier stroke. For, just after they had left Bethel, as he was on his way finally to join his father with all his family, with a heart exulting, no doubt, in the prospect of presenting to his venerable parents the wives and children which God had given him; Rachel, his much-loved Rachel, is suddenly taken in labor by the way side, and dies, after bearing another son. Unhappy woman! She falls a victim to what she had coveted so earnestly. “Give me children else I die,” in her haste, in the bitterness of her heart, she exclaimed. She obtains her wish, and it proves fatal to her. God, a righteous God, gives her children, and she dies. Resentment at her vehemence and impatience is lost in sorrow for her loss. The history does not expand itself here, but simply relates the fact. Some causes are injured, not assisted, by a multiplicity of words. The feelings of the patriarch on this occasion are rather to be conceived than described. Rachel early, constantly, tenderly loved; earned with long and severe servitude; endeared by knowledge and habit, and rendered more important and valuable by fruitfulness, could not be lost without pain. It was natural for the dying mother to think of perpetuating the memory of her mortal anguish, by giving the son whom she brought into life at the expense of her own, the name of Ben-oni, “the son of my sorrow.” It was wise and pious in the surviving father, to preserve rather the memory of the benefit received, than of the loss sustained; and by the name of Benjamin, “the son of my right hand,” to mark and record submission to, and trust in Providence, rather than seek to perpetuate his grief, by retaining the maternal appellation, which seemed to murmur at and to reflect upon the dispensations of the Almighty. Dying in childbirth, it was found necessary to bury her with greater expedition than the removal of the corpse to the cave of Machpelah permitted; though there the precious dust of Sarah and of Abraham reposed. And, as it is happily ordered by nature, Jacob amuses, soothes, and spends his grief, which might otherwise have oppressed and spent him, in erecting a monument to Rachel’s memory. Thus, what the heart in the first paroxysms of its anguish intends as the means of rendering grief lasting or continual, gradually, imperceptibly, and most graciously extinguishes it altogether.
While this wound was still bleeding, the patriarch’s heart is pierced through with another stroke, if not so acute, perhaps more overwhelming. Reuben, his eldest hope, raised and distinguished by Providence, placed in the foremost rank among many brethren, degrades and dishonors himself by the commission of a crime which modesty blushes to think of, and “such as is not so much as named among the Gentiles;” a crime which blended the guilt and shame of another with his own; which could not make the usual apologies of surprise, temptation, or passion for itself: But let us hasten from it. We can sit and weep awhile upon the grave of Rachel; but from the incestuous couch of Reuben, imagination flies away with horror and disgust. What a dreadfully licentious, irregular, and disorderly family, is the family of pious Jacob! Each of his sons is worse and more wicked than another. Accursed Laban, I see thy infernal avarice at the bottom of all this disorder and wickedness! It was ‘that which first introduced a multiplicity of wives into Jacob’s bosom. It was that which created and kept up jarring interests in his family; and gave birth to those unhallowed, disgraceful, head-strong passions, which disturbed his peace, pierced his heart, and dishonored his name. An affliction more in the order of nature, and whose certain and gradual approach must have prepared the heart to meet it, at length overtakes him. After an absence of more than twenty years, he rejoins his aged father, now in his one hundred and sixty-third year, at Arbah, afterwards called Hebron, “the city where Abraham and Isaac sojourned.” It does not appear whether Rebekah yet lived, or not. If she did, what must have been her feelings at embracing her long-lost, darling son; and at finding him so abundantly increased in children and in wealth? Pure and perfect is the delight of a grandmother, as she caresses the young ones of a beloved child, the heirs and representatives of the husband of her youth, the supporters of his name, prospects, and dignity. In presenting his family to his father, Jacob must have been agitated by various and mixed emotions. It was natural for the old man to inquire minutely into the events of his son’s life, during the tedious years of their separation; into the character and qualities of his grandchildren; into the state of Jacob’s worldly circumstances; much more, into the state of his mind as a believer, and the heir of the promise. The answer to these parental inquires must of necessity have awaked in the bosom of the wretched sufferer ten thousand melancholy and painful sensations; and torn open afresh those wounds which the lenient hand of time had begun to close up. The hardships endured in Padan-Aram; the severity, churlishness, and deceit of Laban, would rise again to view. And almost every child, as he presented them one by one to his sire, must have suggested some mortifying and distressful circumstance to wring his heart. Dinah, not in the bloom and dignity of virgin innocence, but humbled and dishonored, robbed of that which makes youth lovely, and age respected--Simeon and Levi, her brothers, polluted with innocent blood, and Reuben, his “first-born, his might, and the beginning of his strength, the excellency of dignity, and the excellency of power,” stained with incest--Judah, his fourth son, who had begun to build up a family of his own, but it was by a Canaanitish woman,[*]Gen 38:2;Gen 38:18;Gen 38:24-26 whose progeny involved him in complicated guilt, and covered him with shame--Joseph and Benjamin, fair as the opening blossoms of the vernal rose, and precious as the purple fluid which visited his sad heart--But alas! the highly valued stock which had shot forth these two lovely branches, is prematurely cut down and withered. His beloved Rachel is no more; and he is deprived of even the poor consolation of reflecting, that her sacred dust slept in the same tomb with that of his venerable ancestors. But to have the privilege of pouring his sorrows into the bosom of a father, was the alleviation if not the cure of them. And he, who by meditation, and faith, and prayer, had overcome the world, and lived so long in heaven, was well qualified for administering the vivifying cordial to the fainting soul, to apply the sovereign balm to the aching heart of a son, who had been a still greater sufferer than himself. But the calamities of neither the father nor the son are as yet come to a period; and they have still to interchange sorrows for a loss more bitter and oppressive than any which they have yet endured. For, in little more than six years from their re-union; while Isaac, now one hundred and seventy years old, was patiently looking for his dismission from this scene of trouble, and preparing to enter the harbor of eternal rest he is driven back upon the tempestuous ocean, and doomed to toil and grieve ten years more of a weary life, deploring an affliction which admitted of no consolation, and which at length brought his white head with sorrow to the grave. At this period it was, that Joseph, beautiful and young, Joseph, the delight of God and man, Joseph, the memorial of Rachel, the pride of Jacob, the prop of Isaac’s old age, disappeared, and was heard of no more, till many years after his venerable grandsire slept in the dust.
Jacob, sinking himself into the dust, under the pressure of a burthen which nature was unable to sustain, is at length called to perform the last sad office of filial affection, and to lay his hand upon the already extinguished orbs of his honored father; willing, and longing, I am persuaded, to have descended with him into the grave. But not the least eventful part of his history is yet to come. It will henceforward be blended with that of Joseph, which now solicits our attention. O could we but bring to the study and display of it, a small portion of that native simplicity, that divine eloquence, that celestial energy, which glow and shine upon the page of inspiration! with what delight and success should we then speak, and with what pleasure and profit should ye then lend a listening ear! The story of Jacob, as it proceeds, teaches many useful lessons for the conduct of life; and opens many sources of religious instruction. Who would not rather be honest, unsuspecting, believing Jacob, than dark, designing, selfish Laban? And yet, who does not see the necessity of blending the wisdom of the serpent, with the harmlessness of the dove? We mourn to think on the prevalence of those fiery and ungovernable passions which separate, and scatter, and alienate those whom God and nature designed to live together, and to love one another; and which robs human life of many instances of felicity which might have been in it. Why should Isaac and Jacob have lived twenty years asunder, to their mutual discomfort and distress? The vile spirit of this evil world arose; the spirit of pride, emulation, ambition, avarice, fear, revenge, drove Jacob into a miserable exile; and left his father a forlorn, forsaken, anxious blind old man. Happy that poverty, which permits the parent and his child to cherish each other, till the cold hand of death chill the heart. Happy the obscurity which excludes envy; and forces not a man to be an enemy to his own brother!
We have seen in the patriarch, a man like ourselves, “bruised and put to grief;” the image of “one greater man,” “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,” whose woes commenced in the manger, and ceased not till they were lulled to rest in the tomb. “The Son of Man” who “came not to be ministered unto, but to minister.” “The heir of all things” who emptied himself, and voluntarily assumed “the form of a servant.” “And they gave unto Jacob all the strange gods which were in their hand, and all their ear-rings which were in their ears; and Jacob hid them under the oak which was by Shechem.”[*]Gen 35:4 “And Jesus went up to Jerusalem, and found in the temple those that sold oxen, and sheep, and doves, and the changers of money, sitting. And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen, and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables: and said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence, make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise.”[*]John 2:13-16 Jacob presented to his father a numerous and thriving offspring; but many of them children perverse and corrupted, their father’s shame and sorrow. But when our spiritual Head shall present his redeemed to “his Father and our Father, to his God and our God,” saying, “Here am I, and the children thou hast given me,” the parental eye shall discern in them “neither spot, nor wrinkle, nor any such thing.” Our Father in Heaven ever lives, “exalted that he may show mercy;” our “Redeemer liveth,” “he is risen again, he is even at the right hand of God, he also maketh intercession for us.”