February 12, 2010, Matthew Cochrane, What's in a Name? Rebekah Edition
Editor’s Note: Before my firstborn son was born, over three and a half years ago, I wrote a post explaining why we named him James. It was one of the first pieces I ever wrote and, to this day, still ranks as one of my personal favorites. A year ago today my beautiful daughter Rebekah was born. I always meant to write a similar piece on why we so named her but time escaped me and she decided to come three days before her due date. After her arrival time management took on a whole new meaning and I never got around to that post. A year later and I still feel like I owe her a post. Her first birthday seemed like an appropriate time to finally pay off that debt.
I once heard my late, beloved pastor say to give a baby a name they can live up to. I have never forgotten that advice and, when the birth of our daughter was rapidly approaching, it had rarely been more relevant. With the gender of the baby known by all for a quite a while during Karen's pregnancy, we decided to keep her name a secret until her birth, much to the chagrin of our family and friends. When choosing her name we definitely did not want to simply pick the trendiest name or find a name that went really well with her last name; we wanted to give her a name she could live up to.
We named her Rebekah, after the Rebekah in the Bible; Isaac’s wife. We are first introduced to Rebekah in the twenty-fourth chapter in the book of Genesis. At this point in the Biblical narrative, Abraham was old and advanced in years. His longtime wife and companion, Sarah, was dead. Abraham knew his son, Isaac, needed a wife but did not want him to take a Canaanite woman as his mate. Abraham therefore took aside his oldest and most trusted servant and charged him to return to Abraham's homeland to find a suitable wife for Isaac.
Taking choice gifts and ten camels as a sort of dowry, the servant departed for the city of Nahor in Mesopotamia. Upon his arrival, the servant prayed to God asking for a sign to show him which local girl would make a suitable wife for Isaac. The sign he asked for? The first girl who would serve him and his camels water from the nearby spring. While he was still praying, Rebekah approached the well. We immediately discover her natural beauty and virtuous lifestyle:
The young woman was very attractive in appearance, a maiden whom no man had known. She went down to the spring and filled her jar and came up.
Her virginity was important, not only as a crucial part of her virtuous character, but also to ensure that the offspring would be Isaac’s. This was essential since God had chosen Isaac’s progeny to advance the messianic line.
When Abraham’s servant asked her for water she “quickly” gave him some to drink. When he finished, without prompting, she offered to draw water for his camels also. The story continues:
So she quickly emptied her jar into the trough and ran again to the well to draw water, and she drew for all his camels.
Rebekah’s willingness to help without being asked and her “quick” actions prove she had a servant’s heart, extending even to strange, thirsty guys hanging out near the local watering hole. This, coupled with her beauty and virtuous lifestyle, are some of the reasons we decided to name our daughter after Rebekah, but neither are the main reason.
After meeting her family, Abraham’s servant asks Rebekah’s family to let them depart right away. They ask that she be allowed to stay with them a bit longer:
And he and the men who were with him ate and drank, and they spent the night there. When they arose in the morning, he said, "Send me away to my master." Her brother and her mother said, "Let the young woman remain with us a while, at least ten days; after that she may go." But he said to them, "Do not delay me, since the LORD has prospered my way. Send me away that I may go to my master." They said, "Let us call the young woman and ask her." And they called Rebekah and said to her, "Will you go with this man?" She said, "I will go."
Rebekah left her family, her friends and her whole world behind – immediately – to marry someone she had never met in a strange land. She could not have done this without faith. Of this passage Wilmington’s Bible Handbook states:
Rebekah is a type of the church. Before anyone can be a part of Christ’s bride, he or she must answer the question Rebekah answered: “Are you willing to go with this man?”
Rebekah’s answer was simple and straightforward: “I will go.” And this is what we pray our Rebekah most embodies from her namesake: her faith. While it is important our Rebekah lives a virtuous and chaste lifestyle as a godly young woman, and while we definitely hope she has a servant’s heart, always willing to help others in need, we mostly pray that her faith in God is strong.
Of course, Rebekah was not perfect. Like everyone else after the Fall, she was born with a sinful nature and this becomes all too apparent during the Biblical narrative. A few chapters after we meet her, Rebekah infamously helps her son Jacob cheat his twin brother, Esau, out of his rightful blessing from Isaac. Not willing to trust the Lord’s guiding hand, she decided to scheme and take matters into her own hands to help her favored son. Yet even this action did not stem from lack of faith. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin writes:
Rebekah, again, divinely informed of the election of her son Jacob, procures the blessing for him by a wicked stratagem; deceives her husband, who was a witness and minister of divine grace; forces her son to lie; by various frauds and impostures corrupts divine truth; in fine, by exposing his promise to scorn, does what in her lies to make it of no effect. And yet this conduct, however vicious and reprehensible, was not devoid of faith. She must have overcome many obstacles before she obtained so strong a desire of that which, without any hope of earthly advantage, was full of difficulty and danger…These examples certainly show that error is often mingled with faith; and yet that when faith is real, it always obtains the preeminence. For as the particular error of Rebekah did not render the blessing of no effect, neither did it nullify the faith which generally ruled in her mind, and was the principle and cause of that action.
Though she is only a year old, it is readily apparent how appropriate this name was for our daughter. Our Rebekah has already displayed so many of these traits, good and bad, from her namesake. As any parent with more than one child could tell you, it is simply amazing how siblings can turn out to be so different. James is our thinker. He has amazingly good verbal skills and loves to sit quietly and “read” through his books or inspect and examine something that has taken his interest. Rebekah is our doer. She doesn’t know half the words that James did at her age but has already been walking for a good month, something James didn’t do until he was fourteen months old!
But that’s Rebekah: all go, no pause. She loves to be on the move. She refuses to sit still for long and wants to touch, taste and see everything. If you tell her she can’t do something that only redoubles her effort to do the forbidden action. Like her namesake, I could see her leaving at the drop of a hat. Also like her namesake, I could see her refuse to submit to God’s timing and wrongly take matters in her own hands. Of course, we hope that she learns to avoid these pitfalls of her namesake. But it is our most fervent prayer that our daughter bears the same proof of a robust faith in God, a godly lifestyle and heart filled with compassion as her namesake.
