The Second Time the Bible Says 'Love' (Genesis 24:50–67)

"And Isaac loved her" (Genesis 24:67). The verb is ahav (H157), and before this line it appears only once in the whole Bible.

Where does the Bible first use the word love?

The first time is two chapters back, and God says it, calling Isaac "your only son Isaac, whom you love" (Genesis 22:2). Scripture's first love is a father's love for his son, named by God in the same sentence that asks for that son on an altar.

The second time is here, and its subject is the same Isaac. The son who carried the wood up Moriah and came down alive now loves the bride who has been brought to him from far away. An English reader meets the word love on almost every page of a modern Bible and has no reason to count. Genesis puts the two uses in a row: the father loves the son, and then the son loves his bride.

The New Testament speaks of both loves in that order. At the Jordan a voice from heaven said, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased!" (Matthew 3:17). Paul writes that "Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her" (Ephesians 5:25). Genesis had set them side by side long before.

What did it mean to possess the gates in the ancient world?

To possess the gates meant to rule a city, because the gate was where its court sat and where it was defended. The blessing Rebekah's family gave her turns on two words. The first is sha'ar (H8179), the gate. In a walled city of the ancient Near East the gate was the town square and the court. Elders sat there and cases were heard there. One chapter earlier Abraham bought his burial cave "in the presence of all the Hittites who had come to the gate of his city" (Genesis 23:18). Whoever held the gate held the city's justice and its defence.

The second word is the verb yarash (H3423), to take possession, to inherit. Deuteronomy uses it dozens of times for Israel taking the land. So to possess the gates of your enemies meant sitting where the enemy's elders had sat and deciding the city's life from there. It was a large thing to wish on a girl leaving home on a camel, and it was larger than her family knew.

How did Israel first hear this blessing?

Israel first heard it as a blessing on their own mother, an Aramean, sent out with words that echoed God's oath on Moriah. They were a people taught to say when they brought their firstfruits, "My father was a wandering Aramean" (Deuteronomy 26:5). The father in that confession is Jacob, Rebekah's son. Genesis later calls her "the daughter of Bethuel the Aramean" (Genesis 25:20). When Israel heard an Aramean family bless their mother on her way out of Aram, they were hearing about their own beginning.

They also knew whose words those were. The LORD had sworn on Moriah, "Your descendants will possess the gates of their enemies" (Genesis 22:17). A nation that took the cities of Canaan, and later settled its own disputes at the gate, heard Laban's household repeat God's oath to Rebekah almost word for word without knowing it was His. Jesus picks up the same picture when He says of His church, "the gates of Hades will not prevail against it" (Matthew 16:18).

What was Isaac doing in the field?

Genesis says he went out to meditate, and most readers take that as prayer, turning over what God had done. "Early in the evening, Isaac went out to the field to meditate" (Genesis 24:63). The verb, lasuach, from suach (H7742), appears nowhere else in Scripture, and translators have long argued over it. Some ancient versions read it as to walk. Most connect it with siach (H7878), a verb for going over something out loud, in complaint or in praise. The psalms use siach for turning over what God has done: "I will reflect on all You have done and ponder Your mighty deeds" (Psalms 77:12). Read with that in mind, Isaac in the field at dusk is a man talking God's works over with Him.

Isaac had just come back from Beer-lahai-roi (Genesis 24:62). That well took its name from what Hagar told the LORD there, "You are the God who sees me" (Genesis 16:13). Isaac had come from the well of the God who sees, and that evening he "looked up" and saw. The same Hebrew phrase came on Moriah, when "Abraham looked up and saw behind him a ram in a thicket" (Genesis 22:13). Isaac looked up the way his father had looked up on Moriah, and once again what came into view was God providing for him.

What does this show about knowing God?

It shows that knowing God grows in the waiting, while we talk His word over with Him. Isaac was in the field at dusk, going over God's works with Him, when the answer to the oath sworn on Moriah came across the Negev on a camel. That is how we come to know God and be known by Him. We keep what He has said and talk it over with Him, evening after evening, until we look up and see Him keeping it.

Keep a record in the Doxa app of what God has said and done, so that on an evening like Isaac's you have His works in front of you to go over with Him.

This goes with today's Doxa Daily Lift: Rebekah Says 'I Will Go' to a Man She Has Never Seen (Genesis 24:50–67)