After his 14 years of service for wives Leah and Rachel, Jacob wants to quit his job herding his father-in-law Laban's flocks, and go home to his own people (remember Isaac and Rebecca and brother Esau?). But Laban is not keen to lose such a good worker - his flocks have done VERY well since Jacob took over.
He asks Jacob, what shall I pay you? and Jacob replies that he will take all the spotted and speckled sheep and goats and every black lamb from Laban's flocks, and Laban can keep the rest. Sneaky old Laban (remember the wife switcheroo?), promptly takes all the speckled, spotted and black animals and sends them off with his own sons.
So Jacob gets a little weird.
He takes fresh (moist!) branches from different trees, peels away the bark, and leaves the stripped rods in the animals' water trough. Presumably the rods thus stripped are speckled and spotted, because the animals then come to drink, and they mate in front of the rods, and their offspring are speckled and/or spotted. Also striped. And remember, Laban took away the black lambs? I think he must have left the black sheep, because Jacob had his own flocks face (really?) Laban's black animals so that they would breed black lambs too. He bred the strong animals in front of the magic rods for his own flocks and the feeble animals he left for Laban's flocks.
Now I know I'm not the only dirty mind who sees phallic imagery here.
I have E.A. Speiser's Genesis commentary from the Anchor Yale Bible series, and he points out that the story is mentioned again in the next chapter from another point of view (E -- this one is J). In Gen 31.38, the time that Jacob has spent in Laban's service is 20 years - 14 for the women and 6 for the flocks. So this breeding plan did take a little time to become successful.
...Jacob finds a way to outwit his father-in-law, through prenatal conditioning of the flock by means of visual aids - in conformance with universal folk beliefs. (p. 238)
Universal folk belief?!?!!
Richard Elliot Friedman in his Commentary on the Torah notes
Jacob sets up the peeled (phallic?) sticks where the animals mate. When they mate in front of the sticks, they have offspring that have patterns like those on the peeled sticks. It is unclear if this was believed to work genetically, or was thought to be a practice of sympathetic magic, or was thought to be miraculous. ... (p. 103-4, n. 30:39)
This was a hard chapter to read. Lots of words that I had to look up and probably won't ever need to know again. Peeled poplar rods anyone? Sometimes it's hard to take the time to really READ the words when I just want to get to the story.
I did like the beginning of this chapter, when Reuben went off to get the mandrake love fruits for his mother Leah. The word for the love fruits is דודאימ (dudayim). It has the same ד ו ד (dalet - vav - dalet) root as the words for beloved, kinsman (or -woman) and of course, David.
Found a great photo of the fruit and an article about them at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at the Cloisters Museum and Garden blog:
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