- How much has your understanding of ‘God' changed over the years? What bought about the change, and why?
- Reflect on the encounter between Laban, Jacob and his wives over their departure and the household gods. Can you think of any three people or groups (in the gospels, in current literature or in your experience) who faced a similar situation and behaved differently?
- Is the story the Rape of Dinah or the Rape of the Hivites? One wrong neither excuses another nor justifies it but every time we enthuse with righteous indignation over the one ought we perhaps also to remind ourselves of the other, and check that our enthusiasm to pull the speck out of our brother’s eye does not blind us to the beam in our own?
- Identify a Jabbok moment in your own experience? Give it a name. Evaluate what you gained and what you lost. How different has life been since? Now give thanks, or confess, or pray for the ‘other’ involved in the result according to which is appropriate.
For Further Exploration
Bible Commentaries. Charles M Laymon (ed), The Interpreter’s One Volume Commentary on the Bible, Abingdon Press, 1971; Gerhard von Rad, Genesis, Old Testament Library, SCM Press, London, 1961; R N Whybray, ‘Genesis’ in John Barton & John Muddiman (eds), The Oxford Bible Commentary, OUP, 2001.
Narrative Readings of the Bible. David M Gunn and Danna Nolan Fewell, Narrative in the Hebrew Bible, Oxford Bible Series, OUP, 1993; J P Fokkelman, Reading Biblical Narrative. An Introductory Guide, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky, 1999; Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror, SCM Press, London, 1984; Trevor Dennis, The Book of Books, Lion, Oxford, 2003; Gerald O West, Reading Other-wise, Society of Biblical Literature, Atlanta, 2007.
Supplementary. Gita Sereney, Cries Unheard, The Story of Mary Bell, Macmillan, London, 1998; Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Vintage, London, 1991; a play, Stolen, by Jane Harrison about five Aboriginal people stolen from the ‘stolen generations’, and a film, Rabbit Proof Fence, in which a fourteen-year-old Aborigine girl escapes with her sister and cousin from a 1930s Australian government camp planning to assimilate them into white society.
