Laban, with whom Rebecca had grown up, was a crafty, knowing, worldly man. It is plain that, on the occasion of Eliezer’s visit, he had been moved only by the _gifts_. They made a ready way for Abraham’s servant; as we read, A man’s gift maketh room for him. Proverbs xviii. 16. Laban was evidently the stirring, active, important one in his father Bethuel’s house. He had a taste for occasions which called for management. And all this is a very bad symptom. It is a bad symptom when one carries the bag. It is bad to find one prematurely managing and clever, or, at any period, fond of occasions where skill of that kind is to be exercised, having an aptness in conducting either state affairs or family interests. And just such an one was Laban; and Laban was the brother of Rebecca; and Rebecca had passed all her life, till her marriage, with him; and the family character, in this only great action in which she is called to take a part, sadly betrays itself. If Abraham and Sarah had brought the foul, unclean compact between them, as they left their father’s house to walk with God, so did Rebecca bring this family character, this Laban-leaven, with her. We have _nature_ in its pravity with us after our conversion; and we have our own _fleshly characteristics_ also, as well as the common pravity of nature. And we have to rebuke them sharply, that we may be sound, that is, morally healthful, in the faith. Tit. i. 13. And this lesson is afresh pressed upon us, from the story of this distinguished woman in this chapter. But there is more of the same kind. Jacob, as well as his mother, Rebecca, got his mind formed by this same earliest influence. He was all his days--I mean, all his practical, active days--a slow-hearted, calculating man; and in this family scene, in chap. xxvii., we find him to be such an one--a ready, intelligent pupil of his mother, Laban’s sister, and whose favourite child he had been from his birth. So that as Laban had been corrupting his sister Rebecca, Rebecca had been corrupting her son Jacob. And further still, as this same chapter tells us, Isaac, whose mind and character, as we have seen, had been so remarkably formed by his early life in Sarah’s tent, had sunk into the indulgence of some of the low desires of nature. He loved his son Esau, because he ate of his venison. This was poor indeed, and something worse than poor. And this love of venison, we may surely suggest, must have encouraged Esau in the chase; just as Rebecca’s cleverness, got and brought from her brother’s house in Padan, formed the mind and character of her favourite Jacob. And thus one parent was helping to corrupt one of the children, and the other the other.