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In Genesis 31, Jacob decides that he’s had enough of his father-in-law, Laban, and in the end is pushed to escape secretly. His most beloved wife, Rachel, for whatever reason, takes her father’s teraphim idols, and it’s with this pretext of theft that he angrily greets the large family after chasing them seven days.

Jacob, innocent of any knowledge of his wife’s theft, is outraged by the accusation and basically exclaims:

Nu! So search us. If, somehow, you can find one of us has taken your gods, that person shall not live!¹

This harshness is from personal upset, but is also theological: Jacob could not understand one of his family having the motivation to take possession of forbidden idols.

The question is: was Rachel’s early death² a result of this “curse” from Jacob?

Rashi thinks so. Ibn Ezra of course disagrees:

There are those who say that [Jacob’s declaration] is a prayer [or curse], and for this reason Rachel died on the journey. If so, such a person should let me know who cursed Pinehas’s wife [who also died during childbirth³].

Ibn Ezra, prefers simple literal readings, and needs not see the patriarchal stories as supernatural.⁴ And usually I would agree with him, enjoying critical, plain readings of the text and his precise attention to language.

But in this case, I think Rashi is right: although the stories are told quite separately, the text clearly juxtaposes Jacob’s promise that the perpetrator will not live and the fact that he did not know of Rachel’s theft, implying that he was unwittingly cursing her. The story of her stealing the teraphim nearly seems meaningless without this accidental curse. And it just adds to the unlucky image of Rachel’s life: replaced at the wedding by her sister; barren and jealous; eventually with one son, but dying giving birth to the second, in the great irony that it was her loving husband’s curse in innocence that sentenced her to death. Indeed, this does not prove Ibn Ezra wrong, but it is easy to lose the bigger picture and its narratives when focussing on literalities.

Possibly the ambiguity is intentional, and the link between the two narratives is meant to be irresolute. It represents the uncertainty of fatalism and causality and irony.

Do others out there think Ibn Ezra is right on this one and the two narratives are unconnected? Siding with Rashi? Prefer the intentional ambiguity?

Notes:

1. Roughly paraphrasing Gen. 31:32. [↩]
2. While giving birth to Benjamin, Gen. 35:17-18. [↩]
3. 1 Sam 4:19-20. Ibn Ezra seems to have noticed stark similarities between the two accounts (Rachel and Pinehas’s wife), such as the midwifes telling the mother in pain “don’t worry, at least it’s a boy…” [↩]
4. He may also fear the dangers of considering too much of Genesis as aetiology, essentially myths describing why things are the the way they are in the world, or why, for instance, Rachel was fated with death at childbirth. [↩]