Esau said, ‘Is he not rightly named Jacob, for he has supplanted me these two times: he took my birthright, and now he’s taken my blessing.’ Then he asked, ‘Haven’t you reserved any blessing for me?’
Isaac answered Esau, saying, ‘But I have made him lord over you and have made all his brothers his servants, and I have supported him with corn and new wine. What is left for me to do for you, my son?’
Esau said to his father, ‘Do you have only one blessing, my father? Bless me too, my father.’ Then Esau wept aloud. (Gen. 27:30–38)
Reading this passage, we cannot but identify with Isaac and Esau, not Jacob. We feel the father’s shock – ‘Isaac trembled violently’ – as he realises that his younger son has deceived him. We empathise with Esau, whose first thought is not anger against his brother but simple love for Isaac: ‘Bless me – me too, my father.’ Then comes Isaac’s helplessness – ‘So what can I possibly do for you, my son?’ – and Esau’s weeping, all the more poignant given what we know of him, that he is strong, a hunter, a man not given to tears. The scene of the two together, robbed of what should have been a moment of tenderness and intimacy – son feeding father, father blessing son – is deeply affecting. There is only one other scene like it in the Pentateuch: Hagar and Ishmael, alone in the heat of the desert, without water, about to die. The comparison is deliberate. Just as there, so here, our sympathies are being enlisted on behalf of the elder son.
There is another discrepant note. Unexpectedly, Isaac does manage to give Esau a blessing:
The fat places of earth can still be your dwelling.
[You can still have] the dew of heaven.
But you shall live by your sword.
You may have to serve your brother,
But when your complaints mount up,
You will throw his yoke off your neck. (Gen. 27:39–40)
The ‘fat places of earth’ and the ‘dew of heaven’ are plentiful enough, Isaac implies, for there to be enough for both sons. More significant is his qualification of Jacob’s supremacy. It will last, he says, only as long as he does not misuse it. If he acts harshly, Esau will ‘throw his yoke off’ his neck. For the first time, a doubt enters our understanding of the brothers’ respective fates. Until now we had been led to believe that the narrative had reached closure. The elder (Esau) will serve the younger (Jacob). So Rebekah was told; so Isaac said in his first blessing. Now, it is suddenly less clear. Perhaps Esau will not serve Jacob after all. Perhaps Jacob will misuse his power and Esau will rebel – a small incongruity, but a significant one.
The real doubt, however, lies in the way the text describes Jacob’s conduct. Whatever else the covenant is, we feel, it cannot be this: a blessing taken by deceit, a destiny acquired by disguise. Did God not say of Abraham, ‘I have known him so that he may instruct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord, doing what is right and just’ (Gen. 18:19)? Righteousness, justice, integrity, truth – these are key words of covenantal ethics, and we strain to see how they could be applied to Jacob’s conduct towards his blind father. Besides which, Isaac may have been deceived, but was God? The idea is absurd. Had God wanted the blessing to go to Jacob, not Esau, he would have told Isaac, as he told Abraham about Isaac and Ishmael. There is just enough discord to make us wonder if we have read the story correctly. In the end we will discover that our unease was justified and that nothing in the story is as it seems – but only at the end. The suspense is maintained until the final scene. Even then, only the most careful listening reveals the unexpected truth, because of yet another brilliant literary device. The final scene almost passes without notice because of the drama that precedes it. It is to this we must now turn.
—
The story of Jacob’s wrestling match with an unnamed adversary alone at night is the supreme enigma of the Bible.1 Told by Rebekah that Esau is planning to kill him, Jacob flees to his uncle Laban and stays there for some twenty years. Returning home, he hears that Esau is preparing to meet him with a force of four hundred men. He is terrified: ‘Jacob became exceedingly afraid and distressed’ (Gen. 32:7).2 He makes every possible preparation. He sends emissaries to Esau with large gifts of cattle and sheep. He prays. He divides his camp into two so that if one is killed, the other may survive. There then takes place the defining scene of Genesis, the episode in which Israel, the covenantal people, gets its name.
Alone at night Jacob wrestles with a stranger (32:22–32). As dawn is about to break, the man asks to be released. Jacob refuses to do so until the stranger has blessed him. He does so by giving Jacob a new name: ‘No longer will it be said that your name is Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and men and have prevailed’ (32:28). The episode is cryptic almost to the point of unintelligibility.
Who was Jacob’s unnamed adversary? The text calls him ‘a man’ (32:24). According to the prophet Hosea, it was an angel (Hos. 12:5). For Judaism’s sages, it was Esau’s guardian angel.3 Jacob had no doubt that it was God himself. He calls the place of the encounter Peniel, ‘because I saw God face to face, yet my life was spared’ (Gen. 32:30). The stranger implies as much when he gives Jacob the name Israel, ‘because you have striven with God and men and have prevailed’ (32:28). The clues seem to point in all directions at once, yet we cannot doubt that the episode holds the key to the identity of the people known to eternity as ‘the children of Israel’. Names in the Bible, especially when given by God, are not labels but signals of character or calling. Israel, later known as the Jews, are the people who struggle with God and men and yet prevail. What does this mean? The clue must lie in what happened next. But it is here that we encounter a succession of surprises.
Everything we have read thus far – Jacob’s fear, his frantic preparations, his nocturnal struggle – prepares us for a tense meeting. The last time we saw the brothers together, twenty-two years earlier, Esau had vowed to kill Jacob. We know that Esau is hasty, hot tempered, physical, violent. Yet when he finally appears, all the fears turn out to be unfounded. Esau runs to meet Jacob, throws his arms around his neck, kisses him and weeps. He shows no anger, animosity or threat of revenge. Suddenly we understand Esau’s character. He is, we now realise, an impulsive man who lives in the mood of the moment, quick to anger, quick to forget. He has none of Cassius’s ‘lean and hungry look’ or Iago’s cold calculation. The scene is pure anti-climax.
So overpowering is the sense of tension aroused, then released, that at first reading we miss two extraordinary details in Jacob’s behaviour when the brothers meet. The first is that he ‘bowed down to the ground seven times’ (33:3), prostrating himself before Esau. Each of his family members does likewise: ‘Then the maidservants and their children approached and bowed down. Leah and her children also came and bowed down. Finally, Joseph and Rachel came, and they too bowed down’ (33:6–7). The threefold repetition is emphatic. No less strange is Jacob’s use of language. Five times he calls Esau ‘my lord’, adoni. Twice he calls himself Esau’s ‘servant’, eved. As with the physical gesture of sevenfold prostration, so with his sevenfold use of the words ‘my lord’ and ‘your servant’ – this is the choreography of self-abasement.
But this makes no sense at all in the context of the wrestling match of the previous night. Jacob had just won a victory over his adversary. At the very least he had refused to let him go until he blessed him. The new name implied that henceforth Jacob should have no doubts about his ability to survive any conflict. A man who has ‘wrestled with God and with men and has overcome’ is not one who needs to bow down to anyone or call him ‘my lord’. We would expect Jacob to show a new-found confidence, not this wholly surprising servility.
Nor does it accord with everything else we had been led to believe until now. Rebekah had been told while the twins were still in the womb that ‘the elder will serve the younger’. Isaac had blessed Jacob, saying, ‘Rule over your brothers, and may your mother’s son bow down to you.’ If either the prophecy or the blessing were true
, it should have been Esau who bowed down to Jacob, Esau who called him ‘my lord’ and himself ‘your servant’. Yet when the encounter takes place, the roles are reversed.
Nor is this all. Esau at first refuses the massive gifts of cattle Jacob had sent the previous day by his emissaries. ‘I have plenty,’ he says. ‘Let what is yours be yours.’ Jacob replies in the following significant words:
‘No, please, if I have found favour in your eyes, accept this gift [minchah] from my hand, for to see your face is like seeing the face of God, now that you have received me favourably. Please accept my blessing [birkhati] that was brought to you, for God has been gracious to me and I have everything.’ (Gen. 33:10–11)
There are three puzzling features of this speech. Why does Jacob change his language, speaking first of a ‘gift’, then a ‘blessing’?4 In what conceivable way is seeing the face of Esau like ‘seeing the face of God’? And why, when Esau says, ‘I have plenty’, does Jacob say, ‘I have everything’?5
The most striking feature of the passage is its repeated use of the word ‘face’, panim. Jacob’s words to Esau, ‘to see your face is like seeing the face of God’, echo his statement after the wrestling match: ‘He called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, yet my life was spared.” ’ Altogether, chapters 32 and 33 (the preparations for the meeting, the night-time struggle, and the meeting itself) echo time and again with variants of the word panim. This is almost entirely missed in translation, because panim has many forms in Hebrew not apparent in English. To take one example, verse 32:20:
[Jacob said to his servants], ‘You shall say, Your servant Jacob is coming behind us,’ for he thought, ‘I will pacify him with these gifts I am sending on ahead; later, when I see him, perhaps he will receive me.’ (Gen. 32:20)
The word ‘face’ does not appear once in this translation, yet in the Hebrew it appears four times. Literally, it reads:
‘You shall say, Your servant Jacob is coming behind us,’ for he thought, ‘I will wipe [the anger from] his face with the gift that goes ahead of my face; afterwards, when I see his face perhaps he will lift up my face.’
There is a drama here and it has to do with faces: the face of Esau, of Jacob, and of God himself.6 What is it?
It cannot be coincidence that when Jacob had earlier taken Esau’s blessing, Isaac was blind. The deception was possible only because Isaac could not see. The text at that point is almost an essay on the senses. Deprived of one (sight), Isaac uses the other four. He tastes the food, touches Jacob’s hands (which Rebekah has covered with goatskins) and smells his clothes (‘Ah, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field the Lord has blessed’). He hears his voice (‘The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau’). Eventually, Isaac trusts the evidence of taste, touch and smell over sound, and gives Jacob the blessing. He does so only because he cannot see Jacob’s face. Somehow, the idea of a face connects the earlier and later scenes.
We have before us an extraordinary literary phenomenon. On the surface, this is a simple tale of sibling rivalry in which the younger supplants the elder. Everything points in this direction, from the prophecy before the twins were born to the deception itself. Esau, the strong, loses to Jacob, the quick-witted. The younger will prevail. Yet the discrepancies mount up. We identify with Esau, not Jacob. Isaac qualifies the blessing: Jacob may not always dominate. Then, after the wrestling match, Jacob unexpectedly reverses the roles. It is he, not Esau, who prostrates himself, calling himself a servant and Esau ‘my lord’. We tend to miss this because everything in the narrative directs our attention to Esau’s behaviour. Will he attack Jacob? If so, who will win? So surprising is his conduct – the embrace, the warmth – that we hardly notice that Jacob’s behaviour is stranger still. Only when we have noticed these discords do we go back and read the story again, in the light of all we have discovered subsequently. That is when we make the discovery that changes everything.
—
There was a second blessing. That is the detail whose significance we miss on the first reading. After the deception, Rebekah realises that Jacob is in danger because Esau is planning to kill him. She arranges for Jacob to escape. Her pretext is the fact that Esau had married two Hittite women. This was ‘a source of grief to Isaac and Rebekah’ (Gen. 26:35). This is her opportunity. She tells Isaac that it is imperative for Jacob to leave and go to her brother Laban, where he will find a non-heathen wife. Isaac agrees, and as Jacob is about to leave, he blesses him in these words:
May God Almighty bless you, make you fruitful and increase your numbers so that you become a community of peoples. May he give you and your descendants the blessing of Abraham, so that you may take possession of the land where you now live as a foreigner, the land God gave to Abraham. (Gen. 28:3–4)
This is a completely different blessing from the one Isaac had given Jacob thinking him to be Esau. The earlier blessing spoke of wealth (‘the dew of the heavens and the richness of the earth’) and power (‘Rule over your brothers’). The later blessing speaks of children (‘make you fruitful and increase your numbers’) and a land (‘the land God gave to Abraham’). This is what transforms our entire reading of the story.
Children and a land are the covenantal blessings. They are what God promised Abraham. They dominate the book of Genesis.7 Time and again God blesses the patriarchs – but always and only in terms of children and a land. He never promises them ‘the richness of the earth’, or that they will ‘Rule over their brothers’. Wealth and power have nothing to do with the covenant. They are not part of Israel’s destiny. What Isaac is doing in the second blessing is handing on to Jacob the legacy of Abraham, saying in effect: it will be you who will continue the covenant into the future.
This second blessing was given by Isaac to Jacob knowing that he was Jacob. There never was a need for deception. Isaac did not intend to disinherit Jacob, nor did he mean to hand on the covenant to Esau. The blessing he had reserved for his elder son was the one he knew to be right for him. Esau was a man of nature, physical, strong, a hunter – and Isaac loved him. That love is unmistakable and mutual throughout the narrative. The rabbis knew it. ‘No one’, they said, ‘ever honoured his father more than Esau honoured Isaac.’8 Isaac loved Esau even though he knew that the covenant would be continued by Jacob. Why? Because that is what it is to be a father. Isaac loved Esau for what he was, not for what he was not. He wanted to give him the blessings appropriate to him: wealth and power. These are natural, not spiritual, goods. Isaac knew that his children were different. Their paths would diverge. They warranted different blessings. The blessing Jacob took was never meant for him. Isaac had reserved for Jacob another benediction, given later: that he would continue the covenant of Abraham. To receive that blessing Jacob had no need for disguise.
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Recall René Girard’s thesis, set out in chapter 5, that the root cause of violence is mimetic desire, the wish to have what someone else has, which is ultimately the desire to be what someone else is. Nowhere in all of literature is this more clearly the case than with the biblical Jacob.
One fact stands out about Jacob’s early life. He longs to be Esau. He desires to occupy Esau’s place. He struggles with him in the womb. He is born holding on to Esau’s heel (hence the name Jacob, ‘heel-grasper’). He buys Esau’s birthright. He dresses in Esau’s clothes. He takes Esau’s blessing. When the blind Isaac asks him who he is, he replies, ‘I am Esau, your firstborn.’
Why? Because Esau was everything Jacob was not. He was the firstborn. He emerged from the womb red and covered in hair (Esau means ‘fully made’9). He was strong, full of energy, a skilled hunter, a man of the fields. More importantly, he was the child his father loved. Esau was a force of nature. He knew that homo homini lupus est, ‘man is wolf to man’. He had the strength and skill to fight and win in the Darwinian struggle to survive. These were his natural battlegrounds and he relished the contest.
Esau is the ar
chetypal hero of a hundred myths and legends. He is not without dignity, nor does he lack human feelings. His love for his father is genuine, as is Isaac’s love for him. Rabbinic Midrash, for educational reasons, turned Esau into a bad man.10 But that is not how he is portrayed in the Bible. He is a natural man, celebrating the Homeric virtues and the Nietzschean will to power.
It is not surprising that Jacob’s first desire was to be like him.11 The keywords of the Jacob story – face, name and blessing – are all about identity. Jacob wanted to be Esau. He experienced, as Freud thought all siblings do, mimetic desire. It was Esau’s face he saw in the mirror of his imagination. It was as Esau he took his blind father’s blessing. But Jacob was not Esau, nor was the blessing he took the one destined for him. The true blessing was the one he received later when Isaac knew he was blessing Jacob, not thinking him to be Esau.
Jacob’s blessing had nothing to do with wealth or power. It had to do with the children he would teach to be heirs of the covenant, and the land where his descendants would seek to create a society based on the covenant of law and love. To receive that blessing Jacob did not have to dress in Esau’s clothes. Instead he had to be himself, not a man of nature but one whose ears were attuned to a voice beyond nature, the call of God to live for something other than wealth or power, namely, for the human spirit as the breath of God and human dignity as the image of God.
It is now clear exactly what Jacob was doing when he met Esau twenty-two years later. He was giving back the blessing he had taken all those years before.12 The herds and flocks he sent to Esau represented wealth (‘the dew of the heavens and the richness of the earth’). The sevenfold bowing and calling himself ‘your servant’ and Esau ‘my lord’ represented power (‘Be lord over your brothers, and may the sons of your mother bow down to you’). Jacob no longer wanted or needed these things. His statement ‘I have everything’ means ‘I no longer need wealth or power to be complete’. He says explicitly what he is doing. He says, ‘Please take [not just my gift but also] my blessing.’ He now knows the blessing he took from Esau was never meant for him, and he is giving it back.
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