An oath by the seat of the promise. Abraham, old, binds his senior servant with the strangest gesture in Genesis: "put your hand under my thigh" (yarekh). It is not idle — the thigh is the region of the covenant-of-circumcision sign (17:11) and the Hebrew idiom for a man's own offspring ("those who came from his yarekh"). To swear by it is to swear by the seed the whole promise runs through — exactly fitting for an oath about finding the wife of the son who carries it (the Bible knows this gesture only here and at 47:29, Jacob and Joseph, both about the promised line). Two things are forbidden: no wife from the Canaanites, and — twice, emphatically — the servant must never take Isaac back east. The promise runs forward; the son must not retrace the road out of Mesopotamia that God called Abraham down. The servant is left unnamed all chapter long — his whole character is his faithfulness — though Jewish tradition has always recognized him as Eliezer of Damascus, the steward who once stood to inherit everything (15:2), now sent to win the heir's bride and hand the inheritance on.

A sign designed to test character, not luck. At the well of the city of Nahor, at evening — "the time the women come out to draw water" — the servant prays. And what he asks for is the hinge of the whole chapter: not the most beautiful girl, or the richest, but the one who, asked for a sip, offers unbidden to water ten thirsty camels. A camel back from a journey can drink twenty-five gallons; ten of them is a staggering, back-breaking kindness to a stranger. The word for it is chesed — loyal, covenant love (the KJV's "shew kindness," the NWT's "loyal love") — and it rings through the chapter (vv 12, 14, 27, 49). The servant's theology is quietly radical: the mark of the woman fit to carry the promise is not her looks but her kindness. This is the third of the Bible's well-betrothal scenes — Rebekah here, Rachel for Jacob (ch. 29), Zipporah for Moses (Exodus 2) — the type-scene where the covenant future is met at a well.

"Before he had finished speaking." The answer outruns the prayer — Rebekah is already coming out before the servant's words are done (a line the narrator will repeat, v45, as the signature of a providence that runs ahead of us). And she does not merely pass the test; she exceeds it, running back and forth to the well until every camel is watered. Three Hebrew words describe her in these verses, and the overlap is worth marking (the KJV flattens the first two to "damsel"): she is a na'arah ("girl," v14), a betulah ("virgin," v16, "whom no man had known"), and — in the servant's retelling — an almah (v43). That last is the very word at the heart of the Isaiah 7:14 debate ("a almah shall conceive"): here the same Rebekah is all three at once, a young woman presumed chaste — which is exactly what almah means. The servant crowns her with a gold nose-ring and bracelets, asks whose daughter she is, and — hearing she is of Abraham's own family — bows and blesses "Jehovah, who has not forsaken his kindness and his faithfulness" (chesed ve-emet, the covenant word-pair for love that keeps its word).

Laban, introduced by his eyes. Rebekah's brother Laban "ran out to the man" — and the very next verse tells us when: "when he saw the nose-ring and the bracelets" (v30). In one stroke the narrator draws the whole man — the one who will later swap Leah for Rachel and cheat Jacob's wages ten times over (chs. 29–31) — and his hospitality already has an eye on the gold. Then the story is told a second time (vv 34–49). This is deliberate Hebrew art: the servant retells the entire day, and the small changes are the point — he calls Rebekah almah where the narrator said na'arah; he stresses that God led him "by the true way"; he trims his private doubts and foregrounds the family tie — a speech tuned to persuade Laban's house. He will not even eat until it is told (v33): the errand comes before the meal. And he ends where he began, on chesed ve-emet — "if you will deal in kindness and faithfulness with my master, tell me" (v49).

The bride who repeats Abraham's journey. Laban and Bethuel concede at once — "the thing has come from Jehovah; we cannot speak to you bad or good." But when the family stalls for ten more days, they do the remarkable thing of asking the woman herself: "Will you go with this man?" And Rebekah answers in a single word — elekh, "I will go" (v58). It is the whole faith of Abraham compressed into one syllable: she will leave her land and her kindred for a land she has never seen and a man she has never met — doing of her own free will exactly what the call once commanded Abraham, "go, you yourself, from your land and your birthplace" (12:1). And the blessing her family speaks over her seals the parallel: "may your seed possess the gate of those who hate them" — almost the exact words of the oath sworn to Abraham at the Aqedah (22:17). The promise passes to the second generation not by force but by a young woman's willing "I will go."

The field at dusk, and the tent restored. Isaac has come from Beer-lahai-roi — "the well of the Living One who sees me," where the angel once found the cast-out Hagar (16:14): the heir dwells where the seeing-God met the outcast. At evening he goes out "to meditate" in the field — la-suach, a word so rare no one is certain of it (to meditate, to pray, to walk, even to grieve — the rabbis made it the origin of the evening prayer); this translation keeps "meditate," the reading that best fits a solitary man at dusk who lifts his eyes and sees camels — and a bride — on the horizon. Rebekah sees him, gets down, and veils herself. And the chapter closes on the tenderest line in Genesis: "he brought her into the tent of Sarah his mother … and he loved her; and Isaac was comforted after his mother." The love comes after the marriage, not before; and the tent left empty by Sarah's death one chapter ago (23:19) is filled again. The grief of chapter 23 is answered by the wedding of chapter 24.