Page:Woman and the Bible.pdf/16

12, Rebecca was a leader of the "ton" in Israel. She met a strange young man at a well and without any introduction to the strange man, he "adorns her with earrings and bracelets" and she invited him home with her.

I never in my life heard a preacher condemn Rebecca for flirting with a strange man, but they call her one of the "mothers in Israel," and Paul calls Rebecca one of the "holy women of old."

If a girl in this day should do as Rebecca did, she would be classed with the "fast set," and if the girl of today should flirt with a strange man, accept presents from him and go into a "far country" to marry another strange man, she would be barred out of decent society.

Rebecca, it is written, married Isaac and she has the distinction of being the first woman on record who presented her husband with a pair of twins. After this event Rebecca gets in some fine work as a disobedient wife, a deceitful, hard hearted, intriguing woman and one that always had her own way by hook or by crook. I shudder to think of the domestic pandemonium and cyclones in the home of Isaac and Rebecca on account of the twins Jacob and Esau. Rebecca cheated her own son Esau out of his birthright and gave it to Jacob, then deceived and deluded her dying husband.

She was an all-round domestic diplomat that managed the men of the family with such skill that she did as she pleased and made them do as she pleased too. Rebecca has another distinction, but it is not silence and submission as the preachers would have women believe.

When her son Esau married, Rebecca is the first woman on record who hated her daughter-in-law, but since that day there "have been others."

Now, there's Lot's wife. The sacred historian did not think her worthy of a name of her own. May be