And the children struggled together within her; and she said, If it be so, why am I thus? And she went to inquire of the LORD.
The children struggled ... within her, х wayitrotsªtsuw (H7533), Hithpael, dashed one another; Septuagint, eskirtoon, leaped] - used of the fetus in the womb: cf. Luke 1:41; Luke 1:44, where the same word is applied to the embryo Baptist. 'It is clear, from the expressions employed, that the movement of the children was an unusual and extraordinary one; and to the mind of antiquity nothing of that kind was without meaning' (Havernick).
If it be so, why am I thus? - i:e., as the Septuagint renders it, 'If I am to suffer such intense agony, why am I in this state?' But Keil and Delitzsch interpret it, 'since things are so, why do I live? - i:e., I am weary of life (cf. Genesis 27:46).
And she went to inquire of the Lord. The opinion of Heath ('Record of the Patriarchal Age'), that she repaired to a native Philistine shrine at Gerar, supported by the tithes of all Monotheists in that district, is inconsistent with her relation to Yahweh, the covenanted God of the Hebrews; and the hypothesis that in the family place of worship at Beer-sheba there might have been an oracle, is equally at variance with the usages of that early period.
A great many conjectures have been made as to the mode of her consultation-some, as Luther, supposing that she would apply to Shem; other, to Melchizedek or to Abraham (Genesis 20:7), who was still living. But she could not inquire either by shrine or by prophets (Exodus 18:15; 1 Samuel 9:9; 1 Samuel 28:6; 2 Kings 3:11), because both of these belong to the institutions of the theocracy. The only solution of the difficulty is, that Rebekah had prayed earnestly for light and direction, and that she had received an answer to her prayers in the way usual in the patriarchal age-in a vision or a dream.