What Does Genesis 29:11 Mean?

Then Jacob kissed Rachel and wept aloud. The kiss and the weeping together constitute one of the most emotionally loaded moments in the patriarchal narratives. The kiss in the ancient world could be a greeting among family members, which is how Jacob's immediate family-recognition kiss is usually interpreted: he kisses her as a kinsman greeting a relative, before she knows who he is. The weeping is the release of the journey's accumulated strain: the stolen blessing, the murderous brother, the long walk, Bethel's overwhelming night, the solitary road, and now the first familiar face, the family he sought.

The weeping aloud (literally "he lifted his voice and wept") is public, uninhibited, physical. Jacob is not a man who suppresses emotion: he is the patriarch who will weep for Joseph for twenty-two years, who cried in his reunion with Esau (Genesis 33:4), and who wept at the reunion with Joseph in Egypt (Genesis 46:29). His tears at Rachel's appearance are the first record of this characteristic. He is a man who feels deeply and expresses it physically.

The interpretive tension of verse 11 is whether Jacob's kiss is familial recognition or romantic impulse. Both are true. He kisses a kinswoman because she is his mother's family. He weeps because the long journey and the Bethel dream have brought him to this moment of arrival. And the tears are also for the beautiful woman he has just seen for the first time and will love for the rest of his life. Genesis does not separate these motivations; it presents them together in the single act of a kiss and tears at a well.