It was not without aim and interest that the Holy Spirit recorded the decease of Deborah, Rebekah's nurse, and the oak of weeping under which she was buried at Bethel. God means His people to feel the loss of a faithful domestic, and all the more if that fidelity covered a long space backward. Remarkable is it too that she should now be heard of, not in Isaac's tent but in that of Jacob. What many have inferred hence of Jacob's visits to his father ere this we leave: scripture is silent even as to when Rebekah died. But we may be sure that the aged nurse abode with her beloved mistress at least till then. A nearer bereavement was at hand.
“And they journeyed from Bethel; and there was yet some way to come to Ephrath; and Rachel travailed, and it went hard with her in childbirth. And it came to pass when it went hard in her bearing, that the midwife said to her, Fear not; for this also [is] a son for thee. And it came to pass as her soul was departing (for she died), that she called his name Benoni [son of my sorrow]; but his father called him Benjamin [son of right hand]. And Rachel died, and was buried on the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem. And Jacob set a pillar upon her grave, which [is] the pillar of Rachel's grave to [this] day” (vers. 16-20).
The moral government of God, now by the way, no more fails than His grace from the beginning to the end. Rachel had greatly sinned and kept her husband in the dark, when he unconsciously said that one guilty should not live. Her theft was not only a sin against her father, but in what she stole a heinous insult to God. And we have no evidence that there was soon adequate self-judgment. It is plain that Jacob at length became aware of idols in his household; the sin of which God's call to Bethel laid on his conscience as we have already seen. To take his beloved away was a chastening, not to her only but to him also.
1 Corinthians 11:27-32 is a most instructive teaching on the application of this truth, in which we learn the security of grace on the one hand, and on the other the Lord's dealing with the inconsistent ways of those that are His. The ignorance of the truth even among pious men, notwithstanding their ability and learning is strikingly betrayed in the mistranslation of a word all-important for the true sense. It is not “damnation” but “judgment” in ver. 29, expressly contrasted with “condemnation” in ver. 32. The Lord was then judging by sickness and even death the faulty state and walk of the Corinthian saints, that they should not be condemned with the world, that is, because they were His and to be kept from “damnation.” They were judged in this temporal way for the blessing of their souls. It is a universal principle of God, and as real in the O.T. as it is plain in the N.T. For God is and must be God everywhere. Only the display of grace under the gospel brings out, not only His sovereign grace but His moral government with special clearness.
Rachel's name for the new-born child expresses her sorrow; Jacob, whatever his natural feelings over the dying wife of his heart, looks forward in hope. But it is not in any degree a heavenly hope in Benjamin, as Abraham had in Isaac, received from death to resurrection in a parable; it is the pledge of Israel in power, when she that represented the former state passes away by death. Israel must at the close be brought through deep if not deadly affliction before emerging into victory through their long disowned Messiah over all their foes on the earth.
“Fear not” from the attendant was well-meant. From the Lord it had been a word of power. But He was calling her away from a scene where she had failed in testimony to Him, and compromised her husband too. How could she be trusted in training her offspring in His fear? God had added another son, as she had said in faith, when her firstborn was given. It was fitting that she should depart.
Little thought Jacob, when he erected a pillar of thanksgiving at Bethel in the place where God talked with him, that he would so soon after erect another pillar, and this of sorrow upon Rachel's grave. But he bows to the hand of chastening: whom the Lord loves, He chastises, and scourges every son whom He receives. Jacob could not know, as it was not yet revealed, that near this very Ephrath should be born the King of Israel, the pledge and type of great David's greater Son, whose goings forth are from of old—from everlasting, the smitten Judge of Israel, who gave up His guilty people, but will restore them, so that they shall abide, and He be great unto the ends of the earth. And the day hastens.
Rachel dies, but the pillar that records it stands in Israel's land and history till the kingdom. And her weeping for her children, as the weeping prophet wrote, is with truth and pathos remarkably applied when the King was born, and preserved from the murderous intent of the usurping Edomite, the Rome-favored enemy within. Benjamin himself typifies Christ, not at all as head of the church, but as the conquering Son of might when the kingdom is established in the land as indeed the earth, and the enemies perish before Him. Thus the two wives of Jacob aptly represent, the fruitful Leah, and mother of the nations, and Rachel, Israel's first loved, but only a mother after Leah had borne abundantly. Then of her who typified Israel after the flesh comes Joseph, the bright witness of Christ sold and separate from His brethren, at the right of him who had the larger rule of the world while the Jews were disowned, But at length she dying gives birth to the son of her sorrow, but son of his father's right hand; who shall devour the prey in the morning and at even divide the spoil (Gen. 49:27). “Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong.”
The effort of ancient fathers and modern theologians to make every type point to Christian associations is the fruit of ignorance as to the extensive and varied glories of Christ, if not effacing yet assuredly lowering the proper brightness of His heavenly exaltation and of the church's union with Him. The late Bp. Chr. Wordsworth was a learned and pious man; but his commentary here and everywhere yields the fullest evidence of this theological bias, shared by the Puritan, the Low, and the Broad Schools, no less than by his own, the so-called High, little as he might relish such companions. Faith alone rises to the enjoyment of heavenly things. Tradition has classes in its school to suit the lovers of antiquity and of novelty, of the law and of free thought. Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ our Lord.