The narrative of Rebekah's marriage informs us more than once about her Aramean origins: "Isaac took Rebekah the daughter of Betuel the Aramean... the sister of Laban the Aramean, to be his wife." (Genesis 25:19-20)

There was a place called Aram and the people from there were Arameans, but one wonders whether the Torah is merely giving us a geography lesson. Think for a moment about the statement in the Haggadah, Arami oved avi, which literally means, "My father was a wandering Aramean." (Deuteronomy 26:5) Some of the sages thought the words meant, "An Aramean (Laban) wanted to destroy my father (Jacob)," but this is rather difficult grammatically.

The German Jewish commentator Benno Jacob had a different theory. He wrote that "Aramean" indicates a human type, in the same way that "Canaanite" means a merchant and "Ishmaelite" is a caravan trader. What does "Aramean" connote, according to Benno Jacob? A shepherd. "My father was a wandering Aramean" thus means, "My ancestor (Abraham?) was a nomadic shepherd."

Along the same lines, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin links "Aramean" with ramai, a "deceiver", a point already made by Sforno on Genesis 31:20. The Aramean Laban, who was Rebekah's brother and Jacob's father-in-law, was certainly a deceitful man. Rebekah came from a family for whom honesty was not the best policy, and her son Jacob learned to his cost that Laban had made deceit into an art form.