Abraham’s servant, in his quest to find Rebekah and bring her back for Isaac, is a type of the Apostles of Christ.
Isaac becomes ready for marriage following his “death and resurrection” on Mount Moriah. As a new Adam, Isaac must first go into death then rise again before receiving his bride—and his inheritance.
So the servant is commissioned by Father Abraham to find a worthy bride for his son. Abraham promises that the servant will not undertake this mission alone, but that the Angel of the Lord himself will go before him, and so it is certain that Isaac will find a wife.
The prospective bride Rebekah provides water for the camels of the servant, and she welcomes him into her home. In receiving the servant, she receives the one who sent him. She believes the testimony of the servant concerning the great wealth of Abraham, which is her inheritance if she will become the wife of the master’s son. Though she has not seen the son, she loves him. She is herself like Abraham, leaving her father’s house to enter into the Abrahamic blessings.1
So Rebekah is given to Isaac as his wife. He leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and is comforted following Sarah’s death.
Within Genesis, this episode is part of a recurring theme of the younger inheriting rather than the older. Of course, Ishmael was the older brother of Isaac, but we might recall that before either of them were born, the heir-apparent to the house of Abraham was Eliezer of Damascus:
And Abram said, Lord God, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus? And Abram said, Behold, to me thou hast given no seed: and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir. [Genesis 15:2-3]
If the servant in Genesis 24 is this same Eliezer of Damascus, and I strongly suspect he is, then we have an “older brother” happily giving way to the true heir of the house, and lending his support to the promised seed.
This kind of humble stepping-aside by the heir-apparent is what King Saul of the tribe of Benjamin ought to have done once David was anointed as his successor. Had Saul done this, he might have received blessing from the hand of David, even as his own son Jonathan gladly stood aside anticipating rule with David, rather than against him. Instead, King Saul raged and plotted in vain, setting himself against the Lord and against his Anointed. Saul tried to drive David out from his inheritance and hunt him down; David cried out to Saul:
Wherefore doth my lord thus pursue after his servant? for what have I done? or what evil is in mine hand? [1 Samuel 26:18]
By contrast, when the greater Son of David had come into the world, and after he had passed through his death and resurrection, he confronted Saul of Tarsus—of all places, on the road to Damascus: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” By the grace of God, Saul gladly regarded as rubbish all that he ever had or could boast about—even his descent from the royal tribe of Benjamin—and he threw in his lot with the Son of David as the true heir of God’s promises.
This Saul, like the other apostles, became a brother-guardian of the church in the first generation, protecting her virginity until her wedding day. The apostles are representatives from the Father and the Son (cf. Galatians 1:1). In Paul’s case, he was commissioned to go to distant lands to boast the virtues of the worthy bridegroom who has inherited the promises of Abraham, and to persuade a virgin bride to come to him.
What is the bride to do? She must receive the apostles warmly, provide for their needs, and believe their testimony about the Son (cf. Matt. 10:40-42). As the church marries the Son, God will be her Father, and he will freely give her all things as her inheritance.
Gordon J Wenham, Genesis 16-50, Word Biblical Commentary (1987; reprint. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015), 155; cited in James B Jordan, Trees and Thorns: Studies in the First Four Chapters of Genesis (West Monroe: Theopolis Books, 2021), 247.