JACOB

Nowhere is the art of the narrator more clearly shown than in his picture of Jacob's old age. He pervades the story, although he appears so little in direct evidence. Wherever he does appear, his acts and his speech are so simply in keeping with his situation as an old man, and, it may be added, with what he has been. He has largely fulfilled his part, a part filled with strenuous and varied activity, and now he begins to fade into the background of the piece. When he does emerge, it is not to take prominent action any more. Other figures occupy the active and eager foreground, while he stands back as part of the surroundings. Yet always one is compelled to feel behind the strenuous figures that fill the foreground the greatness of him who stands behind. He is never negligible, never less than himself. Jacob's active life is past, but his influence is not, his real power is not. He does not thrust himself forward, but he is always referred to and consulted. He is recognised as forming the N final court of appeal. His word carries weight, though the arm which once rolled the stone from the well mouth is paralysed. It is a gracious picture of what old age might be, equally honourable to both sides. He is not meddlesome, but commands deference by the width of his experience and the weight of his character.

1. A Link in the Chain.

"Jacob dwelt in the land of his fathers' sojournings: now these are the generations of Jacob." Behind him lies a great and gallant history, and now the history is sweeping out past him to larger horizons. Those for whom he has made life free and possible are being called to play their part. Before he goes, he has time given him to feel, not merely to think with his head but to feel with his heart, how he is but a passing incident, a link between the generations. Behind him are Abraham and Isaac, before him are the generations of Jacob. He is the bearer of the tradition which shall bind these generations together.

He watches the hot and eager youths break out into the untried fields of life. To them it is all so new, and so much is to be won there by the strength of their own right arms. But he knows, with the patient wisdom of age, that the thing which has been is that which shall be. Only he does not thrust his wisdom on his sons or on anybody. When, however, they are baffled by the new experience of famine, terrified by the novel thing which they have never seen before, bewildered by something in which their strength is useless, they come back to the old man in the tent. And he jibes lightly at them. Things will never come right through your sitting down to look at one another. Egypt used to be Abraham's granary. Go down and buy corn there; and go now, or you may grow too weak to go at all.

He has learned not only the practical wisdom which knows the value of prompt action. He has learned to consider what seem trifles and to ponder what to others are negligible facts. When Joseph tells his ambitious dream, the account makes his father thoughtful. He sees, perhaps, how his own trifling gift of the sleeved coat has stirred the ambition of Joseph, and how the young man's mind has begun to awake to its native power. Jacob remembers a day when Rebecca, being ambitious for her son, put a savoury mess of kid's flesh into his hands and bade him carry it into Isaac's tent. He recognises how out of so trifling an event has come all this life which he and his sons now share. The brethren see in the dream the conceited fancy of a spoiled boy; and they grow hot and angry in the desire to snub the dreamer. Jacob sees the awaking of the sense of power, the kindling of self-confidence in a man. He ponders it, because it is big with great issues.

The sons have the privilege of youth, its privilege of seeing little and having few hesitations. Hence they take swift action, so soon as Joseph annoys them. But Jacob knows how much has gone to make them, how it is the land of his fathers' sojournings in which they live. Their work is all conditioned by a past which they have been too impatient to recognise, and into the spirit of which they have never thought it necessary to enter. Their life has been made possible and is being moulded by factors and elements of which they never dream. Jacob is the bearer of a mighty tradition: and the ten sons have not had the wisdom to serve themselves heirs to its meaning. Joseph is nearer it than they. He has something of the spiritual temper, the moral alertness which made Abraham arise to find a land where he might serve God, and which guided Isaac while he lived there. Since the past has given the land to the men who had these qualities, it is possible that the control of the future will come to the man who has inherited them. Jacob ponders the dreams, because they may after all be true.

Little is said about Jacob's inner life, until at its very close he himself tells what were the things which meant most to him — the first altar he built and the first grave he dug. The silence is largely due to the fact that, after stormy passages, the life has found its great lines of development When voyagers set out over dim and perilous seas, it is fascinating to hear of what befell them on the way, and how they bore themselves before unexpected dangers. But, when they have reached their haven and built their homes, interest in their proceedings is apt to flag, for they do in their homes very much what all men do, work and are happy. It is difficult to interest men in happiness. When the soul has found its peace, its blessedness is hard to describe. What God's fellowship means, only the spirit which lives in it can rightly measure, but it can never rightly tell. Not only because the matter is too large for utterance, but because it is difficult to tell what bread does. It satisfies. The contented heart finds its satisfaction in God. Jacob has had more difficulty than many men to conquer himself and learn the peace of God's will: but that fills the heart of the wise, patient old man who sits in his tent in the evening of his life with the knowledge of how few are the things which cannot be borne.

To him comes the news that his favourite son is dead. Death is a sore test; for, when a man has learned how few things are indispensable, he grapples the few things more closely to his heart; and love is chief among the few. The death of a child is a terrible test to a father as to whether he can any longer believe that the Ruler of all means well by him. Jacob believed that not only had his hope in his favourite son come to an end, but that the one of his race who could carry on the great tradition had been cut off. To him, as he crouches in his tent over the stained robe, it seems as though not only his hope, but the hope of Israel, had come to an end. To the narrator, as he tells the story, there are present the fulfilment of all Jacob ever attempted and the beginning of a vaster achievement. God has His purpose to fulfil: and behind man's envy and human hunger is He who can guide all things so that they bring to pass His will.

2. What might have been — A Dream.

There was a man who had a vision. And in his dream it seemed that he stood on a mound in the desert beside the caravan-track which runs through Edom to the frontier of Egypt, and that an angel stood on his right hand. It was night, but a crescent moon hung clear in the sky. By its light he could see a group of black tents at the wayside, and even, since one of these had been left open to the night air, could see the five men and a lad who occupied it. The boy was a captive, for his hands and feet were bound; but, while the others slept, he had gnawed through the thong on his right wrist, and was writhing himself free from his bonds with the silent supple movements of a healthy animal. As he writhed, a yellow cur began to bay the moon outside, and the sound threatened to wake one of the men, who already turned uneasily in his sleep.

A great passion of sympathy with the captive boy, one against five, ran through the watcher, and he made as though he would strangle or drive away the baying cur. But the angel touched him on the arm to say, "You may not meddle with these, for they are real." Turning him round, however, he showed the same scene on the other side, and said "You may do what you will with these."

So the man, being very sure of his own purpose and its wisdom, drove away the baying cur, so that the sleeper merely grunted once or twice in his sleep, and then lay still. The lad was able to steal out of the tent unheeded, and, breathing deeply once or twice, to run for liberty. All the night he ran, steering by the stars: all the day he hid, to sleep and prepare for further flight. When dawn was breaking on the second day, he ran into the tent of an old man, who held a stained cloak even in his broken sleep. The two fell into each other's arms, and the man who had the vision was more satisfied than ever with the thing he had done.

The scene shifted, as scenes do in our dreams, and leave us undisturbed by the rapid change. All the land lay panting under a long drought. The cracked and gaping earth yielded nothing, for the streams had dried up. Men in Canaan ate the last of their poor stores, and at last, when nothing was left, set off Southward to see whether they might yet find corn in Egypt. But, when they reached the frontier, they found it closely guarded to prevent any from passing that way. The famine was in Egypt, and there had been none to advise the storing of the provision from the plenteous years. So Egypt permitted no more hungry mouths to enter her territory, and set a patrol to guard her frontier. Wearily the travellers turned to go, but with the death of hope half their number died. The weak and the old and the little children dropped beside the route, where men had no heart left to bury them. And, when the strongest came back to Palestine, the Canaanite devoured the remnant. The fairest of the women went into Phoenician harems, and bore children who were taught to worship Baal and Ashtoreth. The men were drafted into slave-gangs, tugged at the oars of the Tyrian war-galleys, died in the Tarshish mines.

The Canaanite waxed strong in the land, so strong that, when Assyria and Babylonia broke into the West, he was able to withstand their onset. Tyre and Sidon leagued themselves together, gave unity of purpose to all the Canaanites, and were able to resist the attack from the East. They began to stretch out their arms over the coveted Mediterranean, from access to which they had held back the new-comers, and to build up colonies. Carthage in North Africa, Massilia in France, Tarshish in Spain, had already succoured the mother country against the wasting of Asshurbani-pal and the rush of Nebuchadrezzar; and their success bound them more closely together and made them more insolent in their strength. They set themselves to turn the Mediterranean into a Canaanite lake.

The dreamer was now in Rome; and it was not Rome, confident in her power, selling the site of Hannibal's tent in open market, but Rome, hunger-bitten and afraid, gathering her strength for a last struggle with Carthage. She had conquered once and twice, but her victories had been wasted, for beaten Carthage had called on unbeaten Tyre, and Tyre had sent triremes, warriors, food. Rome was at her last resources. The dreamer saw a slow procession wind down from the Capitol, where the leaders had gone up to make their vows to the gods and pray for their protection. He stood at Ostia and saw them embark on the last ships Rome could equip for what must decide her fate. And in the crowd which watched with him he saw no able-bodied men, he noted that the very cordage of some of the triremes was made of the hair of women, he felt that the public treasury was drained to the last sesterces.

He watched the triremes go, and he watched till he saw one come back like a wounded bird, trailing its slow way across the sea to announce that to-morrow the Carthaginians would be in Ostia.

He looked abroad and saw all Europe., In it there was no Rome with her law, no Judaea with her faith. No Roman had marched out, planting his firm feet on the lands, sending his long sure roads across mountain and morass to bind the nations into one, and to teach them the meaning of an ordered peace. And there had been no Judaea to lift before the vision of the men who travelled on those roads, the promise of the city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. There was nothing but the Canaanite with his cynical worship of the power of money, his radical disbelief in human liberty, his sweating slave-gangs and his beastly gods.

And, as the man looked and bethought himself, he remembered how in his self-confidence he had silenced the yellow cur that bayed the moon. As he remembered, he bowed his head between his knees to weep over the thing he had done. But, as he bent, the angel stooped, and raising him up, turned his face the other way.

3. A Glimpse of what was, and is.

There was the desert with the caravan road winding through it. The crescent moon was paling out before the dawn. The cool breeze was making early travel pleasant, and southward, swinging down the long road to Egypt was a bunch of camels. High on the back of one was Joseph, the bondslave of Midian, the bond-slave of God's purpose in His world.

Men are but shuttles flung to and fro by the hand of Omnipotence; but, as He flings them. He weaves evermore His own purpose, the ends of His Providence, the aims of His redemption. And the Hebrew believed, not only that there was such a purpose, but that it was given to him to know something of its meaning. The thoughts of God were very great, but were not strange thoughts to him. They were controlled not only by an omnipotence which he could never fathom, but by a wisdom which he was invited to share, and by a love and pity on which he could rely. Because he believed it, he put his hand to his work, weak and faltering though it was, with a new humility and a new confidence, for it was taken up and fulfilled by the might of God. The faith gave him victory over the world; for, having it, he could endure captivity and put the world under his feet.

"Jacob dwelt in the land of his fathers' sojournings: now these are the generations of Jacob." A man is but the link between the past and the future, yet he may bind them together by faith in the unseen Providence which controls them both.