Read Genesis 24 carefully. Follow Bethuel, the father of Rebekah, and see when he shows up, and when he stops showing up.
Isn’t it odd for Rebekah’s father to be so uninvolved with the important parts of the story?
While this doesn’t seem like a good reason to end a man’s life, there is a clue – something peculiar in the text that isn’t discernible in English. It relies on an odd spelling.
Before we get to Bethuel, look carefully at verse 33. The food was set “before him,” but Eliezer does not eat yet. He insists that he wants to tell his story.
Food was set before him to eat, but he said, “I will not eat until I have told about my errand.”
Genesis 24:33 (NKJV)
When Eliezer finished the story, look at how the Torah shows us Laban and Bethuel:
Then Laban and Bethuel replied, “The matter has come from the Lord; so we cannot speak to you bad or good. Here is Rebekah before you, take her and go, and let her be the wife of your master’s son, as the Lord has spoken.”
Genesis 24:50-51 (NASB)
The wickedness of Laban: he speaks before his father.
The wickedness of both: they speak of Evil (ra) and Good (tov), reversing the order of God’s tree, bringing up Evil first.
And it’s only after this that everyone eats and then goes to sleep. The next the morning, Bethuel is nowhere to be seen, ever again.
Then he and the men who were with him ate and drank and spent the night. When they got up in the morning, he said, “Send me away to my master.” But her brother and her mother said, “Let the young woman stay with us a few days, say ten; afterward she may go.”
Genesis 24:45-55 (NASB)
Strange.
So here are the conclusions: Bethuel has died; this is why Laban and Rebekah’s mom ask her to stay longer. She declines, and perhaps there is a spiritual lesson here about one who has discovered the promise of God: “Leave your father’s home, and go to a land I will show you.”
But… why did he die? What did he do, other than be possibly identified as a wicked man?
Let’s go back to verse 33:
Food was set before him to eat, but he said, “I will not eat until I have told about my errand.”
Genesis 24:33 (NKJV)
The phrase we read “when food was set before him” contains an anomaly. The “set before him” should be spelled וַיּוּשַׂ֤ם.
Vav, yod, vav, shin, mem.
But it is… “misspelled.” It is spelled ויישם.
Vav, yod, YOD, vav, shin, mem.
There’s an extra yod!
The pronunciation is the same, but the extra yod is there, staring back at the reader. And the rabbis say that when you add this extra yod, assume something extra was added to the story. To the food.
From this, they conclude that Bethuel POISONED the meal for Eliezer.
Who would receive the camels’-load of wealth if Eliezer died? Who would know what happened to him?
So when they all eat in verse 54, the angel from verse 7 is there, and he swaps the plates: Eliezer’s for Bethuel’s!
And that’s the teaching about Bethuel, the wicked father of Rebekah.
So perhaps Rebekah is called away from her earthly father, in order to join the house of a Heavenly Father.