Household GODS — small domestic idols or figurines (KJV 'images'), used for luck and divination and, in the customs of that world, apparently bound up with family inheritance rights. Rachel steals her father's teraphim as she leaves (31:19), and why she wanted them the text leaves open: to press the inheritance Laban denied her (v. 14), for their supposed protection, or — the rabbis' kinder guess — to wean her father off idolatry. She hides them in the camel's saddle and sits on them, and 'the gods of Laban' end up sat upon (31:34). The word recurs across the Bible as a mark of forbidden worship — in Micah's shrine (Judges 17-18), in Michal's bed-decoy for David (1 Samuel 19:13), and among the idolatries Josiah purges (2 Kings 23:24). → first discussed at Gen 31:19