HEBREW WORD STUDY – I HAVE SOJOURNED – GARETI  גרתי 

Genesis 32:4-5,7:  “And he commanded them, saying, Thus shall ye speak unto my lord Esau; Thy servant Jacob saith thus, I have sojourned with Laban, and stayed there until now: (5)And I have oxen, and asses, flocks, and menservants, and womenservants: and I have sent to tell my lord, that I may find grace in thy sight. (7) Then Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed:

Practically all my life I have carried a negative view of Jacob. I remember hearing the story of Jacob way back in Sunday School in the beginner’s department. My Sunday School teacher using a flannel graph told the story of how Jacob plotted and stole his brother’s birthright.  Then he married two women and tormented poor Leah his first wife by loving and marrying her sister. I mean I was only six years old but I knew a man could not have two wives.  Then he capped that off by abandoning his Father in Law Laban.  I don’t know how the story was told but for some reason, I always felt sorry for poor old Laban.

Yet, the Jewish people honored Jacob as a righteous man and one of three patriarchs. So I went to the Talmud and the Genesis Rabbah, both works of Judaism and my Hebrew Bible where I learned some facts about Jacob that my Sunday School teachers never taught. Apparently, Jacob always regretted stealing his brother’s birthright and sought to reconcile with him.  Laban was a cruel and harsh man and trapped poor Jacob into an almost slave-like existence for 21 years.  Yet, through the miraculous work of God Jacob was able to accumulate enough wealth to leave his Father in Law and strike out on his own.  Then when he went to reconcile with his brother he fully expected to end up dead but went anyways because he knew the God he loved wanted him to attempt a reconciliation. 

We learn more of this when we examine the Hebrew words in Genesis 32.   Jacob sent a messenger to his brother to tell him two things.  He has sojourned with Laban and he had a wealth of livestock and servants.  Now just how is that bit of information supposed to win his brother over?  “Hey, I’ve been mooching off my father in law for 21 years and now abandoned him taking off with most of his wealth, just like I robbed you of your birthright.  See I haven’t changed, now let’s be friends” 

First Laban was not a poor old man.  He was the Mr. Potter of his time (You know that rich guy from It’s a Wonderful Life).   He was a worse cheater than Jacob.  Nobody in their right mind would get involved with this guy, but Jacob spent 21 years working for this cheapskate.  The key here is in the word gareti sojourned which comes from the Semitic root word ger which means a stranger or in our modern English term, a nobody.  He did not become an officer or a dignitary but was just a common laborer.  The word gareti according to the Midrash Tanchuma Buber Vayishlach 5 implied to his brother that the blessing he received from their father in Genesis 27:29 that he would be the master ruling over his brother was never fulfilled and that he had acquired wealth on his own and not from his father’s estate.  Gareti, sojourned also has a numerical value of 613 and by declaring that he was a sojourner he kept the 613 commandments or more precisely he did not learn from Laban’s evil doings.  He acquires his wealth legally and honestly.   

Something I never understood until now but according to Jewish teaching, Jacob may have acquired his brother’s birthright but he never claimed it and his brother received it anyway and now Jacob hoped that his brother would forgive him and since he had acquired none of the ill-gotten gains, he was not ruling over his brother, then no harm was done and he learned a harsh lesson after being forced to live with his wicked father in law.

Did his brother buy it?   How was he to trust what his kid brother was telling him after such a deceitful act 21 years earlier?  Jacob may have wondered the same thing, would his brother really believe this cockamamie story?  Yet, Esau not only did believe him but welcomed his brother’s homecoming.  That left me a little baffled until  I read something else in the Genesis Rabbah 75:4.  Remember that dream Jacob had of angels going up and down a ladder.  That was tied into this story for the Genesis Rabbah teaches that the word for messenger is male’akim which is really a reference to an angel.  God sent an angel to deliver Jacob’s message to his brother and how can you doubt the word of an honest to goodness angel.

What is the moral of this story?  I used a youthful indiscretion to cloud my opinion of a man who not only proved to be a righteous man but a true man of God.   We had this whole morality stage played out in the recent appointment of a Supreme Court Justice who nearly lost his appointment because people let an alleged youthful indiscretion overshadow a lifetime of righteous acts.  The old saying: “You can never live it down” should be put to rest and we should allow someone to live it down, like old Jacob.