Endnote 4 – Jacob’s Terrible Burden

In the second-century B.C.E. pseudepigraphic book of Jubilees, it is said that “they gave up the strange gods and that which was in their ears and which was on their necks, and the idols which Rachel stole from Laban her father she gave wholly to Jacob” (Jubilees 31:1–3). But the import of this statement seems to have eluded the author of Jubilees. Josephus relates that “while [Jacob] was purifying his company accordingly, he lit upon the gods of Laban, being unaware that Rachel had stolen them; these he hid in the ground beneath an oak…” (Antiquities, (xxi) (2)–(3)). Again, however, the momentous implications of this, given his oath before Laban, are not drawn. Finally, Fokkelman (Narrative Art in Genesis, 1975), in commenting on the purification prior to revisiting Beth-El, states in passing that the Jacob-God relationship “may no longer be clouded by the presence of teraphim and other foreign gods,” and thus that the household gods of Haran must suffer the definitive humiliation of being put underground. How Jacob got the teraphim, and the effect that would have had on him, seems again to have been missed.