Somehow I had never noticed a detail in the Jacob at the well story.
Gen 29 (LXX)
1 And Jacob started and went to the land of the east to Laban, the son of Bathuel the Syrian, and the brother of Rebecca, mother of Jacob and Esau.
2 And he looks, and behold! a well in the plain; and there were there three flocks of sheep resting at it, for out of that well they watered the flocks, but there was a great stone (megas lithos) at the mouth of the well.
3 And there were all the flocks gathered, and they used to roll away the stone from the mouth of the well, and water the flocks, and set the stone again in its place on the mouth of the well.
4 And Jacob said to them, Brethren, whence are ye? and they said, We are of Charrhan.
5 And he said to them, Know ye Laban, the son of Nachor? and they said, We do know .
6 And he said to them, Is he well? And they said, He is well. And behold Rachel his daughter came with the sheep.
7 And Jacob said, it is yet high day, it is not yet time that the flocks be gathered together; water ye the flocks, and depart and feed them.
8 And they said, We shall not be able, until all the shepherds be gathered together, and they shall roll away the stone from the mouth of the well, then we will water the flocks.
9 While he was yet speaking to them, behold, Rachel the daughter of Laban came with her father's sheep, for she fed the sheep of her father.
10 And it came to pass when Jacob saw Rachel the daughter of Laban, his mother's brother, and the sheep of Laban, his mother's brother, that Jacob came and rolled away the stone from the mouth of the well, and watered the sheep of Laban, his mother's brother.
I never noticed this little heroic tale before. Here Jacob upon seeing Rachel is able to perform a superhuman feat of rolling away a great stone that otherwise took many ordinary men to move.
Stones (as interpreted at least) are loaded with symbolism in the Bible. Ancient Sages and Rabbis often thought of these individual stories of stones collectively. In a sense they all meant something identifying Israel(Jacob) as a people with a shared experience. The very same stone was believed to have literarily moved from story to story. The stone even eventually became the foundation of the Temple.
Water likewise is theologically loaded. The Torah (Law) was thought to be symbolized by the water from the well Jacob opened by rolling away the great stone.
With stones having rich symbolism, it is not surprising the Gospel plays on that as well. Jesus is famously called 'the living stone' and the foundational 'cornerstone of God's Temple' aka 'the rock that followed them'. Even in the resurrection story (Mark 16:3,4) the 'great stone' (megas lithos) is rolled away from the tomb to release Jesus' waters of life. When the women arrive at the tomb the stone had been rolled away and Jesus gone.
Again, I find a masterful reuse of OT imagery and symbolism in the Gospel stories.
The revisor known as Matt added yet another 'great earthquake' (he liked earthquakes) to the scene and for some reason felt the need to say an 'angel of the Lord had rolled away the stone'. I suspect he was playing off the role angels were said to play in the giving of the Torah but then again he might have just felt something was missing from Mark's bare-bones narrative. I wonder though if he missed the Marcan parallelism, that superhuman Jesus, like his typological progenitor Jacob, rolled the stone (himself) away himself.