Rebekah-A Dedicated Daughter Series

Bach never wrote an opera, but the closest thing to it was

his Coffee Cantata. He became quit an expert on coffee

because in his day coffee drinking was the popular vice

much like drugs have become in our day. There were laws

against it and spies roamed the city sniffing the air to catch

people in the act of roasting coffee beans. Frederick the

Great was disgusted with the increase of coffee drinking

among his subjects. He was brought up on beer, and many

of the great battles had been won by soldiers nourished on

beer. The king felt that coffee drinking soldiers would not be

strong in their warfare against his enemies. \

The cantata of Bach is about a father who was greatly

disturbed about his daughter was hook on coffee. If she does

not get it three times a day she says, "I'm no better than a

piece of dried up goat meat." Papa tries everything-he

argues, he threatens, but nothing works until he promises to

find her a husband if she will kick the habit. She agrees, but

in the closing trio she confides that she will only marry a

man who will let her drink all the coffee she wants. This is

Bach's idea of a prodigal daughter. It is a rather mild

rebellion in comparison to the Prodigal Son. We know that

daughters can be equally rebellious and as foolish as sons,

but the Bible seldom reveals a bad daughter. There are sons

galore who bring grief to their parents, but very few

daughters.

The Bible is much more son oriented than daughter

oriented. But there is more about daughters then we realize.

Believe it or not, there are about 500 references to daughters

in the Bible, and about 90 of them are in Genesis, which

makes it the most daughter oriented book in the Bible. Most

of Genesis is about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and his 12 sons.

But here in Genesis 24 we see entire long chapter of this

male dominated book revolving around the young daughter

Rebekah who would become the grandmother of the 12 sons

of Jacob.

Rebekah got in on God's plan for history because

Abraham did not like the girls he saw in Canaan. They were

idolaters and corrupted by their culture. He did not want

his son Isaac to marry one of these girls, and so he sent his

servant Eliezer back to his native Mesopotamia to find a

daughter among his brother's family. This was probably the

longest journey in the Bible to find a wife. It was a 6 weeks

trip across the desert. In our culture we don't send servants

out to shop for a wife. We prefer to see the merchandise for

ourselves and make our own choice. Isaac is 40 years old,

and yet he does not go along to have some input. He just

took the one the servant selected, and they had a long and

fruitful marriage. They had their fights, but they overcame

them and became the grandparents of the 12 tribes of Israel.

For some reason the Patriarchs had a hard time having

daughters. Abraham had just 2 sons-Ishmael and Isaac.

Then Isaac had his 2 boys-Jacob and Esau. Then Jacob had

the 12 sons from his 4 wives, but then Leah finally came

through with one daughter named Dinah. She is the only

daughter we know of for 3 generations in that family tree.

Because of this lack of daughters the line of Abraham had to

go back to the family of Nahor his brother to find their

wives, for girls were abundant in his line. It gave us

Rebekah, Rachel and Leah. It is a strange reality, but it is

still true today that some families tend to have all boys and

others have all girls, But the majority get a mixture of the

two. Such was the case with the family of Rebekah. She

had a brother named Laban.

The thing that surprised me in studying the families of

Genesis is that many of them just had 2 children. I guess I

assumed that most families were large in the Bible, but if you

read with the intent to count, you discover that families with

from 1 to 5 are the majority, and 2 or 3 are very common.

Part of the problem in counting is that daughters are often

not listed, for the family tree followed the sons. That is why

it is rare to have a passage like the one we are looking at

where a daughter plays the leading role on the stage of

history. She was not forced to play it either, but chose to

play it by her own will. It was a male dominated world, but

we see that the males who dominated Rebekah's life