Bethel is barely behind them. God has just renewed the covenant, repeated the promise of a nation and kings and land, and Jacob has poured out his drink offering on the pillar. Then, a short way down the road, his wife is dying in a hard labor that will not end well. The God who spoke at Bethel let the very next steps of the same road be among the hardest Jacob ever walked.
The midwife tries to comfort her. 17"Do not fear, for you have another son." Years ago Rachel, desperate for children, had cried, "Give me children, or I shall die!" (Genesis 30:1). Now she is dying of the child she asked for. With the last strength she has, she names him Ben-oni, which means son of my sorrow. Whatever else this boy will become, his mother wants it known that his birth cost her everything.
Jacob gives him a second name. Benjamin means son of my right hand, and Jacob lets her grief stand exactly as she spoke it without correcting it into something more encouraging. He knows something about two names. He was Jacob the deceiver until God met him at the Jabbok and called him Israel, and both names stayed true of him the rest of his life. Now he does the same for his son. Ben-oni stands, and Benjamin stands beside it. Rachel's sorrow is allowed to be the truth it was, and Jacob's naming is a different truth beside it, that this son will also be honored, remembered, and loved.
Rachel is buried on the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem, and 20"Jacob set up a pillar over her tomb." Generations later Jeremiah uses her as the picture of a mother's grief that cannot be consoled. "Rachel is weeping for her children" (Jeremiah 31:15). Matthew quotes the words over the murdered infants of Bethlehem, the same town (Matthew 2:18). Jeremiah's oracle goes on past the weeping. A few lines later the LORD says, "There is hope for your future" (Jeremiah 31:17). Bethlehem holds both the weeping and the answer to it, and so does this chapter.
The chapter ends on a different death. Isaac is a hundred and eighty, and he breathes his last and is gathered to his people, old and full of days. Then the text tells us who is standing at the grave. 29"His sons Esau and Jacob buried him." The brothers who could not share a country without one of them planning murder now stand shoulder to shoulder at their father's tomb. This time grief is what brings two enemies together.
Two pillars stand in this chapter. One marks the place where God renewed his promise, and the other marks a grave. Both are allowed to stand, side by side, and Scripture asks us to hold them together as it does.
You carry your own Ben-oni, a loss you named honestly because you could not name it any other way. Faith lets a second name stand beside the first, as Jacob did, because the story is not finished at the grave, and the cost of the first name stays.
Prayer
Father, we have our own Ben-onis, losses we named honestly because we could not name them any other way. Thank you that you do not ask us to pretend the sorrow away. Thank you that you can speak a second name over what we have buried without erasing the first. Hold together what we cannot, the pillar of your promise and the pillar of our grief on the same road. In Jesus' name, amen.