“Return, and I Will Be with You”: Divine Agenda and Genesis 31:1–24

From a perspective shaped by and within the paradigm of theological interpretation of Scripture, I engage Gen 31:1–24 (1) by considering the whole of Genesis as the appropriate cotext within which to engage the smaller textual units, and, also, (2) by focusing on the theological nature of this whole narrative. Thus, I argue that one theological dimension of the book, namely, the “divine agenda,” provides a useful frame for considering some of the challenging textual details of the passage. I offer interpretations of those textual data that accord with this paradigm, and which, I hope, will be appreciated by those even outside of this paradigm.