What Does Genesis 24:11 Mean?

The young woman was very beautiful, a virgin; no man had ever slept with her. She went down to the spring, filled her jar and came back up. The narrator's note that Rebekah was very beautiful and a virgin serves the same function that the same notation serves for Sarah in Genesis 12: the qualities that will matter for the narrative are identified in advance. Her beauty is relevant to the story that follows; her status as a virgin is the covenant credential that makes her a suitable bride for the covenant heir. The spring, not the well's surface, required going down and coming back up, a daily physical labor that is the practical background to what the servant will observe.

The mention of Rebekah's beauty in the same breath as her virginity is the narrator's balance: she is noteworthy in both appearance and character. The tension between beauty and virtue will play out in the chapter's encounter, the servant's prayer asked for a character quality the woman would demonstrate unprompted, not for a beautiful woman. The convergence of beauty and the quality the servant prayed for in the same person is part of the chapter's overall demonstration that the divine choice exceeds the human criteria the servant could specify.

Jesus's description of the church as his bride, holy and blameless, presented to himself in splendor, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish (Ephesians 5:27), draws on the covenant-bride language that Rebekah's introduction embodies. The bride prepared by the Spirit for the Son is, in the New Testament's metaphor, both beautiful and pure: the two qualities that the narrator identifies in Rebekah at her first appearance at the well. The pattern of the bride's preparation in Genesis 24 shapes the New Testament's language for what the Spirit is doing in the world in preparing the church for the Son.