Craziness. I don't think God was mentioned once in the whole chapter. The result is not p retty. We talk a lot about peaks and valleys and deserts in our walk, let's pray those are short and painless.

To your comment about the Levites... this does seem to be God's way. Paul is another big example of course. But even just the Israelites as a whole are really not a good group of people and by anything I can see no reason why God would have picked them to be His people and the ancestors of Jesus. God certainly didn't pick them based on his works, and we don't earn God's favor by our works either. Jacob is no exception himself having just done some gnarly trickery to his father and brother and still receiving promises and blessings from God. I think we want to feel better about ourselves when we make better choices than others, but we all deserve the same fate right? The severity or frequency of sin certainly his impact on our lives and the lives around us, but in terms of our standing with God it makes no difference right? Many of our Biblical heroes I've been learning through just reading the Bible have lived lives much darker and filled with much more severe sin than any of ours will ever be.