The Good Wife

28:10 After scamming his father into giving him a special ritualistic endorsement, and ripping off his twin brother of the family fortune, Jacob was living life on the lam. He headed over to his uncle Laban’s house to lay low for awhile, and maybe hook up with a cousin or two.

On the way he stopped in the middle of nowhere and slept on the ground, using a rock as a pillow. That night he dreamed he saw a tall ladder going from the Earth way up into the sky. There were lots of shiny angels flittering up and down the pretty ladder. Suddenly Yahweh himself appeared standing at the very top of the ladder and saying “I am God. Let it be known that the real estate you are laying on I hereby give to you… and as usual I will let you have many offspring etc. and so on and so forth. Oh, and by the way, I will also take it upon myself to be your very own personal bodyguard.”

Jacob woke up from the nightmare absolutely terrified. “God must live right here on this very piece of land where I was sleeping and no one bothered to even tell me about it” he reasoned wildly. “This is a scary and horrible place. This must be the actual gateway between Earth and Heaven. Furthermore,” he rationalized “if God will be my personal bodyguard then he must also be my personal God and therefore I will certainly pay him the appropriate amount of taxes.” Jacob commemorated the mundane but mildly entertaining dream by dumping a bunch of oil on the rock that he had used for a pillow.

29:1 Oddly refreshed by his nightmare, Jacob went on his merry way and as he neared his destination he met some shepherds out tending their sheep in a field. One of them turned out to be his cousin, a pretty young girl named Rachel. He kissed her and then started crying because he was the sensitive type.

Jacob finally made it on down to his uncle Laban’s place and helped out with the chores for about a month when finally Laban said “You can’t keep working for free. It’s not right. How much should I pay you?” Jacob answered “I will work for seven full years if I can have Rachel in payment.” Laban agreed that this was a fair price and fair terms so Jacob began working off the seven year mortgage on Rachel.

When the seven years payment plan was over and it was time take delivery, they had a huge party to celebrate the upcoming wedding. But then at the ceremony Laban punked Jacob and pulled a hilarious switcheroo. Instead of Rachel being the bride under the heavy veil, Laban secretly substituted her older sister Leah. Whoa lordy mercy comedy ensued when Jacob didn’t even notice and in fact had wild honeymoon sex with Leah all night long. It was well into the next morning when he finally noticed it wasn’t Rachel he was penetrating. He thought this to be a slight breach of contract so he went to his uncle to complain. “Hey! What’s the deal shorting me on the goods? You tricked me.” Laban laughed and said “Well around here the oldest always gets married first, that’s just how we roll, but I can understand why you might be a little bit upset about the quality of the merchandise. I’ll tell you what. For only another 7 years work I’ll let you have Rachel too. Think about it, you wind up having two wives and for only 14 years of hard work. That’s a bargain!” So Jacob worked another 7 years and married Rachel, the one whom he really loved. Jacob hated his first wife Leah; absolutely hated her. Oh but he still had lots of sex with her, sure, pretty much all the time, angry sex probably.

Yahweh knew that Jacob hated Leah and loved Rachel so just to mess with him he allowed Leah to have lots of children, and didn’t allow Rachel to have any at all. Rachel was very envious of her older sister being pregnant all the time and she said to her husband “Jacob, damn it you get me pregnant right now this instant or I swear to you-know-who I’ll just die.” Jacob became irritated at Rachel and yelled back “Am I some sort of pregnancy god who controls who gets pregnant or not?” Rachel didn’t really have a good come back for that one so she said “Good one. Oh alright then, here, have sex with my maid, Bilah.” “Um, Ok” said Jacob and proceeded to produce a couple of boy children by way of Bilah the maid.

By this time Leah was beyond child bearing years but so as not to be outdone by her younger sister she said “Here Jacob, come have sex with my maid too!” Leah’s maid was named Zilpah. So Jacob seeded the furrow with both Bilah and Zilpah, and just about everybody was kept pregnant. With all the wives and maids demanding a proper plowing, Jacob kept pretty busy.

One day Leah’s son Reuban brought some mandrakes back from the wheat field. Rachel said to Leah “Give me that reputed fertility spell component and known hallucinogenic alkaloid, I need it for some good ol’ get-pregnant pagan magic.” Leah balked at the demand and said “It’s bad enough that you convinced Jacob to stop having sex with me but now you also want my magic roots too?” But Rachel was desperate and negotiated. “Hmm, I tell you what I can do Leah, for a few of those naked-man-shaped tubers I’ll convince Jacob to hook up with you tonight. How about that? Deal?”

When Jacob came home that evening Leah dashed out to meet him and said “You must come to my bed and do me majorly tonight for I have paid for it with some weird vegetable.” He said “Yeah whatev, OK let’s do it” and that night the elderly Leah became pregnant again. Jacob continued to bed Leah a bunch more times and she had a bunch more children. Fortunately for the poor childless Rachel, Yahweh had not completely forgotten about her either and eventually he mellowed out a little, or maybe it was the mandrakes, but anyway she was allowed to have a couple of children of her own.

30:25 Jacob finally said to uncle Laban “You know, it’s been kind of fun but I think I would like to go home now.” Laban pleaded “No no, please, I mean, it really helps to know one of God’s favorites in this crazy world. You just name your price and I’ll pay you to stay.” So Jacob said “I’ll tell you what, I’ll be your cowboy for awhile longer, but I get to keep all the livestock born with spots and you get all the ones that are born colored solid.” Laban agreed to the strange arrangement and Jacob proceeded to selectively breed the herds.

Jacob’s big plan to genetically manipulate the cows was to make some wooden rods, paint spots on them, and mount them over the watering troughs. Oddly enough, the speckles on the rods somehow altered the animals’ DNA. Soon the herds consisted of mostly speckled cows. The strongest cows were especially speckled. The program was making Jacob rich. Laban’s sons accused Jacob of some kind of scientific shenanigans. They called him a cheater. Of course Jacob had always felt that Laban was the big cheater, what with switching cousins around on him at the wedding.

Meanwhile a vision of an angel came to Jacob in a dream and advised him that it was high time to get out of there and head back to Canaan with his winnings. Jacob rounded up his herd of speckled cows, kids, slaves and wives, and hit the road for home sweet home.

Unbeknownst to Jacob, Rachel had stolen her father’s gods on the way out of town. These were actually just some fun-sized figurines made to resemble his deities of course, but Laban noticed them missing from the shelf and was quite upset about it. They were very important to him; pretty much his favs. Laban and his men chased after Jacob’s entourage and caught up with them about a week later. Yahweh had personally warned Laban not to talk to Jacob about the crime but he did anyway. “What’s the big idea taking off without saying goodbye, and why did you take my favorite religious paraphernalia?” Jacob answered “Your little gods are missing? If one of my crew has your gods I swear to my god we will kill them by god and retrieve your gods.” Of course he didn’t realize that his beloved Rachel was the one who absconded with the sacred thingumabobs.

Laban and his men searched everyone’s tent and when they came to Rachel’s tent she sat on the figurines and said “Excuse me for not getting up, I’m, I’m, um, um, menstruating.” Strictly speaking there was nothing more terrifying to Laban’s men than a discussion involving a visit from Rachel’s aunt Flo, so the confused and horrified men rapidly apologized and backed out of her tent while avoiding direct eye contact. Thus the idols were not located and Jacob started yelling at Laban for accusing him of petty god theft. Laban yelled back but both men eventually calmed down and agreed to be friends. They piled up a bunch of rocks to commemorate the event, and well naturally they killed and burned an animal or two for Yahweh, but that goes without saying.

Jacob continued on towards home and sent a message ahead to his brother Esau along with a forgive-me gift of a few hundred head of spotted livestock. He prayed to Yahweh “Please don’t let him beat me up even though everyone knows I obviously deserve it.”

32:24 That evening a mysterious man came by and got into a superstar wrestling match with Jacob. The grand event lasted the whole night. The big beefy stranger turned out to be none other than the champion smiter himself, The Mighty Yahweh. It was an epic match up but by dawn Jacob had Yahweh in a pretty good hold, like an illegal death grip full nelson super-jam crusher monster choker headlock or something, and refused to let him go. Yahweh repeatedly begged to be let go but Jacob just held on tighter and started slamming Yahweh to the ground over and over, and this was all in spite of the fact that Yahweh had already managed to pull Jacob’s hip out of joint with some classic moves of his own. When Jacob had thoroughly made his point and finally let his god loose, Yahweh declared him the winner by officially changing Jacob’s name to Israel, and as a bonus prize, he promised to use his powers to give Jacob good luck at some undetermined point in the future. Jacob was amazed that he had actually seen Yahweh face to face and lived, let alone pinning him in a No-Holds-Barred-Uber-Match-of-the-Millennium. Because of the injury that happened to Jacob’s hip joint that night in the glorious Hombre-a-Dios, many Jews still don’t eat thigh meat to this very day.

When Jacob got closer to home he saw Esau coming at him with 400 men. He was understandably nervous and assumed he was about to get his ass royally kicked, but his brother greeted him with kisses and even tried to return the thoughtful herd of lovely gift cows that Jacob had sent ahead. Esau kept saying “Ah you shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t have” over and over. After the happy reunion Jacob paid cash for a big spread of property right in the middle of the country that Yahweh had officially given him already anyway, and set up a huge tent like the good old days.

34:1 Out of all the rugrats that Jacob’s wives and maids kept cranking out, there was only one daughter. Her name was Dinah. A handsome prince named Shechem saw Dinah out in the field one day and he promptly removed her virginity without proper clearance. However, he also fell deeply in love with his victim and treated her with ever so gentle kindness and said very nice things to her after the raping. He even asked his father to arrange forcing her to marry him. So Shechem’s dad went to Jacob and said “Look here, you, you people. You are pleasant enough people most of the time. We welcome you to our land, most of the time. Let’s be friends, beginning with a wedding between my boy and that silly girl he raped.” Jacob answered “We will be all too glad to integrate our people with your people but only if every man and boy in your whole country will each agree to cutting off that damnable fleshy part of his penis.” Shechem agreed to participating in this strange obsession with truncating the male genitalia and a nation-wide mass ceremonial circumcision took place.

The peculiar penile procedure left Shechem’s men painfully sore in an area between their legs. They could barely walk from the severe discomfort. Two of Dinah’s brothers, Simeon and Levi, took advantage of the Canaanites’ uncomfortable condition. They went out with their armies and stabbed them all to death with swords while they were still hunched over and unable to properly defend themselves. Then they killed Shechem himself and brought their sister Dinah home. Naturally they also stole all the country’s wealth, enslaved all its women and children, and destroyed everything else.

When Simeon and Levi returned home in triumph with their sister Dinah, Jacob said “This victory stinks! Now when the other Canaanite tribes hear about this they will all gang up and wipe us out.” His sons responded “But you saw how at least one of them treated Dinah like a cheap little whore!” Yahweh had been watching all of this and saw the danger of the Canaanite situation. He suggested to Jacob that he move away from there for awhile. Yahweh was even helpful enough to terrorize the Canaanites to keep them from chasing after Jacob while he got away. He also reminded Jacob that his name was now officially changed to Israel so he should please start going by that. Perhaps to cheer him up he promised Israel he could expect a bunch more offspring.

35:17 Not much else happened for awhile except wife Rachel died giving birth, grandpa Isaac died getting old, brother Esau bought a bigger place across town, and Leah’s son Reuban got caught dusting the credenza with Bilah the maid.