Q. Thank you for the extensive discussion in your post “Why didn’t God give Esau back the blessing that Jacob stole?” Please I want to know the reward of Rebekah, considering her dangerous role in reshaping the history of her children against the will of her husband Isaac.
I think a good case can be made from the Bible that Rebekah recognized that the future of her family depended on Jacob rather than Esau being the head of the next generation and that she worked to help Jacob at some risk to herself, since her husband Isaac favored Esau. At the end of some biblical stories, we are told what the rewards were for people who advanced God’s purposes. We are not told anything like this specifically about Rebekah. But perhaps we can come to some conclusions about it.
While Rebekah was still expecting her twin sons, “the babies jostled each other within her,” and “she went to inquire of the Lord” about why this was happening. The Lord revealed to her that her sons would be the patriarchs of “two nations” and that “the older will serve the younger.” The Bible does not say of Rebekah, as it does of Mary when God revealed things to her about the destiny of her son Jesus, that she “treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” But we can certainly imagine that she did.
As the boys grew into young men, it became clear, as I say in the post you mention, that Jacob “was much better suited to assume the leadership of the Israelite family as it began growing rapidly into a group of tribes that would become a nation.” While Esau was the older of the two, “his responsibilities as the firstborn son weren’t important to him and he was likely to neglect them.” So Rebekah did, as you say, reshape the future of her descendants by helping Jacob to move into the position of leadership of the next generation.
However, she needed to overcome Isaac’s inclinations in order to do this. The Bible tells us that “Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the open country, while Jacob was content to stay at home among the tents. Isaac, who had a taste for wild game, loved Esau, but Rebekah loved Jacob.” In other words, Isaac seems to have favored Esau because he brought him the kind of meals that he liked, and this led Isaac to overlook the faults in Esau’s character.
As I also say in the post you mentioned, even after Esau sold his birthright to Jacob, Jacob still needed to obtain the paternal blessing that went with it. When Rebekah saw that Isaac was about to give this blessing to Esau, she told Jacob to go to Isaac and trick him into thinking that he was Esau. Jacob initially resisted. He objected that if his father realized who he was, he would curse him rather than bless him. Rebekah replied, “Let the curse fall on me. Just do what I say.” This statement can be interpreted in a number of ways, but one of them is that Rebekah was willing to risk even the curse of the family patriarch in order to promote the son she recognized would be the right leader for the next generation.
Esau became so angry when he discovered that Jacob had stolen his blessing that he vowed to kill Jacob. To save Jacob’s life, Rebekah needed to send him far away to live with her brother. He was gone for 20 years. The Bible does not mention Rebekah after Jacob’s return to his homeland, and some interpreters speculate that she died while he was away. We don’t know that for sure, however, and we should not read too much into the text where it is silent. It would be nice to think that she was still alive when he returned and that she was able to witness the reunion and reconciliation of her two sons. Hopefully she also saw her many grandchildren and realized that she had every reason to expect a bright future for the coming generations of her family. The text allows for that just as much as it allows for other possibilities, and if that was the case, then this itself would probably have been all the reward that Rebekah would have asked for.
Good Question 