Genesis 29:20
So Jacob served seven years for Rachel: and they seemed but a few days, because of the greatness of his love.
Open Genesis 29:20 in the Motif Searcher, word by word across all five texts →Show on the spiral →The verse in its languages
- Vulgate (Clementine)
- Servivit ergo Jacob pro Rachel septem annis : et videbantur illi pauci dies præ amoris magnitudine.
- Septuagint (Swete)
- καὶ ἐδούλευσεν Ἰακὼβ περὶ Ῥαχὴλ ἑπτὰ ἔτη.
- Hebrew (WLC)
- וַיַּעֲבֹ֧ד יַעֲקֹ֛ב בְּרָחֵ֖ל שֶׁ֣בַע שָׁנִ֑ים וַיִּהְי֤וּ בְעֵינָיו֙ כְּיָמִ֣ים אֲחָדִ֔ים בְּאַהֲבָת֖וֹ אֹתָֽהּ
Haydock's commentary
For Rachel. It was then the custom to buy or to pay a dowry for a wife. (Chap. xxxiv. 12; Osee iii. 2.) Herodotus says, i. 196, that the Babylonians sold their beautiful women as high as possible, and gave part of the price to help off the more deformed. The Turks do the like. (Calmet)
A few, &c. So highly did he esteem Rachel, that he thought he had obtained her for just nothing, though delays naturally seem long to lovers. (Tirinus)
Calmet supposes that he was married to her the second month after he arrived at Haran; and on this account, easily explains his words, as love made all labour tolerable, and even easy, in the enjoyment of the beautiful Rachel. Usher also places the birth of Ruben in the first year of Jacob's service, A. 2246[the year of the world 2246]. But Salien and the context decide, that he waited full seven years, and then obtained Lia, by fraud, of Laban; and seven days after, Rachel. (Haydock)
He was then 84 years old! (Du Hamel)
From Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary, 1859, in the transcription made by Todd Easton and kept online by John Paul Wohlschied at johnblood.gitlab.io/haydock.
The Fathers on this verse
St John Chrysostom Homilies on First Corinthians, Homily XXXIII
And this very Jacob, served he not for wages with his kinsmen twice seven years? Was he not together with the bondage subject to mockery in respect of that trick? What then? Did he feel the mockery? Did he count it behaving himself unseemly, that being a freeman, and free born, and well brought up, he endured slaves’ treatment among his own kinsmen: a thing which is wont to be most vexing, when one receives opprobrious treatment from one’s friends? In no wise. And the cause was his love, which made the time, though long, appear short. “For they were,” saith he, ( Gen. xxix. 20 .) “in his sight as a few days.” So far was he from being galled and blushing for this his bondage. Justly then said the blessed Paul, “Love doth not behave itself unseemly.”
St Jerome The Letters of St. Jerome, To Eustochium
40. Love finds nothing hard; no task is difficult to the eager. Think of all that Jacob bore for Rachel, the wife who had been promised to him. “Jacob,” the Scripture says, “served seven years for Rachel. And they seemed unto him but a few days for the love he had to her.” Afterwards he himself tells us what he had to undergo. “In the day the drought consumed me and the frost by night.” So we must love Christ and always seek His embraces. Then everything difficult will seem easy; all things long we shall account short; and smitten with His arrows, we shall say every moment: “Woe is me that I have prolonged my pilgrimage.” For “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” For “tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, and experience hope; and hope maketh not ashamed.” When your lot seems hard to bear read Pau …