Water - Genesis 24:7-21

24:7-21 - I don’t know what kind of tasks Eliezer had done for Abraham in the past, but being his chief servant guy, I’m sure that they were extensive and he had to fly by the seat of his pants and hope that Abraham would approve after the fact. But surely these matters were about animals and stuff like that, so of course in Abraham’s mind there’s no one better to go find a wife for his son than Eliezer, but man that was probably the most pressure he’d ever felt in his life. It’s interesting that Abraham is content that the task will be satisfied because he believes that God “shall send his angel before thee, and thou shalt take a wife unto my son from thence.” Eliezer is less confident in his abilities and asks basically “well what if she won’t come with me?” The answer is simple “then thou shalt be clear from this my oath.” The lecture on this chapter from the Torah Class website notes the difference, “Abraham was not worried, for he knew God was preparing the way for this. The worried party was the servant, not Abraham.” I can’t find it right now, but somewhere else in the lecture, the speaker notes that this confidence in a seemingly farfetched plan goes back to spiritual maturity. Abraham is much older now and has spent decades of his life devoted to God and developing a personal relationship with him and that investment now bears the fruit of assurance. Looking at it from Eliezer’s perspective, he is supposed to travel all the way to Mesopotamia and back without getting robbed and/or murdered in the desert, he’s supposed to find Abraham’s family in the general vicinity of where he left them decades ago, they didn’t have phones to call and find out where they were or keep up on the birth, marriage, death cycle so who knows how big the family is and turns out that it’s not large at all. In this small and probably scattered family, he’s supposed to find a single, faithful, young enough to bear children, woman and convince her to go back with him, a complete stranger, to the middle of the desert and probably never see her family again. That’s a pretty tall order and at any one of those points, the whole mission could just end. Nevertheless, Eliezer “took ten camels of the camels of his master, and departed.” This is very much a Nephi situation here, where it looks impossible but he goes anyway trusting that God will prepare a way for him to keep Hid commands. And let’s just note here that Eliezer is from Damascus, so probably raised in idolatry, so it goes to show that upbringing or even commitment to the gospel is required for divine intervention in one’s life. I always thought that it was just one guy and I assumed a camel who went off, but apparently it was a much bigger party and that makes sense especially considering that this land was full of robbers when Lehi left Jerusalem a millennia later so there’s no reason to think that it would be safe at this time. He’d need a big party to protect each other, just one guy walking alone in the desert would probably meet some unfortunate circumstances. Another point that I was unaware of was with the word “camels.” It seems that there is a little upset within the scriptural world because the animal that looks like a camel but only has one hump is called a dromedary and is native to the northern middle east, but it is not a camel, where as a two humped animal is classified as a camel but only native to the southern middle east such as Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Yemen. This point was made on the Torah Class podcast lecture and was interesting enough to bring up. But Eliezer brought ten animals that the writer called camels, even though by classification they might not Eliezer took all the men and camels and stuff “and went to Mesopotamia, which the footnotes mention means “Aram of the two rivers,” and presumably the two rivers are the Tigris and the Euphrates. Now having personally been in the land between these two specific rivers, I will note that this is not a small area, it is quite large and hot and dusty, this was no easy undertaking just to get to the approximate area. He shows up to an area that *might* be close to where he thinks he should be going and “he made his camels to kneel down without the city by a well of water at the time of the evening, even the time that women go out to draw water.” The lecturer notes that Eliezer’s timing isn’t an accident, he knew that in the evening women come out to get water from the well, so he was looking for a target rich environment. The text makes it seem like this is the first place that Eliezer shows up to start looking for a wife, but its possible that he had tried many different cities without any luck. He's sitting there with his camels, and asks the “Lord God of my master Abraham, I pray thee, send me good speed this day, and shew kindness unto my master Abraham.” He tells God that he’s going to ask a woman to give him some water to drink, and then asks God to have the woman that He wants to have marry Isaac, respond “Drink, and I will give thy camels drink also.” The IM notes the importance of Eliezer telling God his plan saying, “when faced with a tremendously challenging task, the servant turned to the Lord for help. Instead of just asking the Lord to solve his problem, he presented a plan for the Lord to confirm.” This is very much like a brother of Jared type of situation. The significance of Eliezer’s proposition is that with the hospitality rules at the time, it probably would have been expected for any woman to give a traveler water who had asked her, but the difference here is that for most this is probably where the generosity ends. Traveling all this way was a tough job for men and camels, they would need some water too, but it was probably too much to ask for a solitary woman to spend so much time giving water to the whole company. Significantly, as Eliezer was putting this proposition out before the Lord, “before he had done speaking, that, behold, Rebekah came out, who was born to Bethuel, son of Milcah, the wife of Nahor, Abraham’s brother, with her putcher upon her shoulder.” I don’t think that Eliezer knew this genealogy for this girl when he spoke to her, and this was all discovered after the fact. This girl “was very fair to look upon, a virgin, neither had any man known here.” It really bothers me that so much of a woman’s worth is based on her sexual history, and that it’s spoken about so freely, because honestly I can’t think of a single time that a man’s proclaimed a virgin in scriptural account. Anyway, the IM notes “the King James Version suggests that Rebekah was very beautiful, but the Joseph Smith Translation says that she was the most beautiful woman the servant had ever seen.” Again, I don’t know why this matters, the way that she looked was dictated by God and had nothing to do with her character as a righteous woman that was foreordained to be a mother of billions. It’s almost mentioned like she’s a prize that Isaac won for being will to be sacrificed by his father. Maybe I’m just reading too much into it, but it bothers me that her beauty and virginity are her most important aspects at this point. Interestingly, with all the other women there, presumably, Eliezer saw this beautiful, young woman and he “ran to meet her.” No sitting and waiting for her to get closer, and it could be that he’s going to ask her to do him a big favor so he wants to show that he’s not lazy in the endeavor, but he runs to her, which might have been a little bit unnerving for her. He asks her to “drink a little water of thy pitcher.” This begs the questions, did he not bring his own pitcher in all that stuff that the camels were carrying? Did he genuinely not have the equipment to get himself a drink or would it have been weird to just come up and take water out of a well that belonged to a community that he wasn’t a part of? All that is possible, asking her to get him the water could have just been customary or practical. The significant part here is that he only asks for water for himself, but she after she gives him the water, she offers, “I will draw water for thy camels also, until they have done drinking,’ and she hasted, and emptied her pitcher into the trough, and ran again unto the well to draw water, and drew for all his camels.” She answered the exact words that Eliezer had told to the Lord and then did it, even when the work got hard, she was probably tired after her 10th trip to the well. The IM notes, “considering the capacity of a thirsty camel, one can well imagine how much effort it took for Rebekah to draw water by hand for ten camels. Not only was she beautiful but she was a willing worker and was quick to serve.” Again, this statement really bothers me because it counts her physical attractiveness as a characteristic that seems like a prize and it gives off a very subservient vibe, like “my perfect wife that God gave me is so beautiful, but she’s also happy and hard working.” What about everyone else who works hard and serves but just happen to not be beauty queens? She stopped everything she was doing to help a man, who by all accounts probably could have gotten his own water, because she lacked the pressing responsibilities to return home immediately. Again, what about the rest of us, what about the single mom working 3 jobs who serves when she can, but doesn’t have the time or energy to physically stop everything and dote on an able bodied man? It just screams subservience, and obedience and the beauty of a woman as a reward for a man. It seems like I’m projecting a little bit here, and honestly I didn’t have this much to say before I started writing, so I guess it’s in there, it appears I’ve been slightly triggered, I’m going to have to think about this. Eliezer found an amazing woman who has so far appears to be an excellent candidate to marry Isaac, but he didn’t go right into the sale pitch, he was “wondering at her held his peace, to wit whether the Lord had made his journey prosperous or not.”