Project Genesis




Rachel and the Idols

Question: A few questions about Genesis, Chapter 31:19 and 31:34: Why did Rachel keep her father’s idols? Why didn’t she throw them away before or after Laban caught up with her family? Was her early death related to this, and the curse that Jacob gave to the one who had the idols? I learned that if a person doesn’t deserve the curse it will never be fulfilled. Why didn’t she tell Jacob about the idols, at least after his curse so Jacob could revoke his words. Jacob was punished here as well by losing Rachel. Why?

Answer: Thank you for your very interesting question. Some parts of it are hard to answer completely. We don’t know very well what these idols were or what their value was; there are a number of opinions. The commentary of Rashi says that Rachel took them to help her father, to pull him away from idol worship. The Midrash says that the idols were eventually buried in the city of Shechem.

One place you might want to look for clues is to study the parallel incident with Rachel’s son Benjamin later. He also was accused of stealing. There also, his peers said that the one found with the stolen object was deserving of death. Now in Benjamin’s case, the object was a divining cup. It could therefore be that Rachel felt she couldn’t just throw the idols away. If they had similar abilities to the cup, Rachel may have felt that the only safe thing to do was to keep them away from her father.

Your point about a curse not being fulfilled unless it is deserved is quite correct.
Our sages say it in the Talmud in Tractate Makos 11a. (See there the contrast with “the curse of a sage”, which is always based on some level of reality.) Indeed, we can see this idea from the two incidents I compared. Benjamin, who was completely innocent, was completely unharmed. On the other hand, Rachel would not have died just for the theft – she had good intentions – but the theft created an opening for Jacob’s curse to take effect.

As you point out, Jacob surely did not want Rachel to die. However, in the Torah words are incredibly powerful, more so the words of someone like our father Jacob. I expect he did find out about what she did, but I don’t know that he could take his words back once they were spoken. Once a thought has become real to the extent of being verbalized (Numbers 20:3 “You must carry out whatever has come out of your mouth“), it is harder to remove its reality.

Best wishes,
Michoel Reach

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