“Tis a Gift to be Simple”: A Retelling of the Story of Esau and Jacob
Sermon preached by the Rev. John Elliott Lein at St. Thomas à Becket Episcopal Church on July 12, 2020, on the following texts: Genesis 25:19-34, Psalm 119:105-112, Romans 8:1-11, and Matthew 13:1-9,18-23.
Good morning! It’s good to be back.
I have a confession to make: I really, really love the Hebrew Bible, what we Christians usually call the Old Testament. As we move into the season after Pentecost in Year A, I’m excited about the opportunity offered in our lectionary to step our way through these books from the beginning—the book of Genesis.
Starting today, the next four lectionary selections feature the life of a very special figure in the story of Israel. So I invite you to follow along as we trace the path of a flawed yet fascinating character through both real and metaphorical hills and valleys.
Genesis contains 50 chapters, and our reading today is from the 25th. The first 11 covered the “primordial history” from creation to the patriarchs; then 14 chapters on the life and events of the first patriarch, Abraham; and we’ve caught glimpses of the second patriarch, Isaac, as a mostly passive presence mixed into the background.
It’s the third patriarch, Abraham’s grandson Jacob, who takes over the story by force of personality and closes out the rest of the book—literally, as the book ends when he dies. These next 25 chapters, fully half the book, deal with his life and family.
* * *
Paralleling the story of a few weeks ago featuring Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, and Isaac, we begin with an initially-barren woman who ends up with two children—this time as twins.
Rebekah’s pregnancy is hardly a good omen—her children struggle so mightily against each other in her womb that she shrieks out, “This?! What even is my life?” And off she trots to get an answer out of God.
In classic oracle fashion (1), the reply comes:
“Two nations struggle;
two peoples divided.“Prevail, one will;
younger, older; serve, one will.”
Rebekah hears what she wants; the younger will serve the older in a reversal of tradition. Hidden in the Hebrew syntax, masked in most English translations, is an faint possible ambiguity between object and subject of the sentence (2). We’re left to ask: is life’s every movement fated, or do we have the ability to choose yet then must accept the consequences of our choices? Hold that thought.
* * *
And so the magical moment of birth arrives. The eldest emerges red and hairy like Austin Powers on the Oscars’ carpet, while the younger “hauls heel” on out of there (3).
The play on words in naming throughout these stories is lost in English.
The eldest is dubbed “Esau,” but it’s actually “Edom” that is in the author’s mind. You see, this story is both fully that of these two specific individuals AND representative of two later nations, as the oracle predicted. Esau’s line becomes the nation of Edom, a sworn enemy of the Israelites who come from Jacob’s line. The tribe is named after the cliffs of red stone bordering their highlands, and one of their territories is called “Seir” which means “hairy.” The hairy red guys—I get the sense our narrator is taking a dig.
Jacob, or “ya’akov,” is a riff on the Hebrew for “heel.” How would you like that for a name? Every party, you know somebody would ask: “so how’d you get that name anyway?” “Well, when I was born I was holding onto my brother’s heel, so Mom said ‘just call him Heel-Grabber!’”
And so our two young lads, “Shaggy-Red” and “Heel-Grabber,” grow up. On the surface, life may seem idyllic as they roam the fields and lounge in tents, but there’s a dark undercurrent lurking in our narrator’s words. We see that the father loves the hunting eldest most, salivating over the wild game brought in (4), while the mother’s preference for her youngest is stated without condition. Maybe not the healthiest family dynamic here.
Keep the narrator’s descriptions here in mind as we move to first of two encounters: “Esau was a skilled hunter” and “Jacob was an honest man.” Talented hunter. Forthright man. Got it?
* * *
Scene: Jacob the younger stirred the pot (5)—of vegetable stew—and Esau the elder stumbled into the tent: exhausted, empty-handed, empty-bellied.
The “mighty hunter” grunted:
“Me hungry! That red...er...that red stuff—me fill belly.”
No joke—the narrator pulls no punches in this depiction. Not only does he have Esau forget the word for “stew,” he has him refer to eating like an animal rather than a human (6).
In contrast, Jacob is smooth and calculated.
“Sure brother—just one thing. Give me your birthright, your claim to the family line and property, and you can help yourself.”
Esau could care less.
“Me dying! Birthright not food. Take—give food!”
Jacob grinned and handed the pot to his brother. Esau shoveled it down in rapid, brutish fashion and stalked off without a second thought (7).
Thus ends the first encounter between the “skilled hunter” and the “man of plain-dealing.”
* * *
The second encounter comes a chapter later. Isaac is getting older and frailer, his vision has failed, and he thinks it’s about time for him to croak. Turns out he’s still got another twenty years to go, but anyway, he decides to set his affairs in order and settle the estate on his eldest son, his favorite, Esau. So he calls Shaggy in and says in a quaver,
“Old am I, and I know not the day of my death. So go, hunt me some meat, make me a dish, and I will bless you before I die.”
But Rebekah had overheard, and goes immediately to the Heel—er, Jacob. Having convinced themselves that fate decreed the younger to be heir over the elder, the two set in motion a grand deceit. Jacob, “the Honest Man,” had only one concern—would he get caught? No, Rebekah reassured him.
And so Jacob entered his father’s tent, clothed in his brother’s clothes, carrying a mimicked dish, with hairy goat skins wrapped around his smooth-skinned forearms.
When Jacob spoke, Isaac asked, “Who are you, my son?”—a deep question indeed. Three times he interrogated his son, and three times Jacob deceived with words, touch, smell, and taste. And so Jacob the younger received the firstborn’s soul-blessing before dashing out in the nick of time, as Esau came in from the fields with his own dish.
Confident where Jacob was nervous, Esau delivered a formal request for blessing and was shocked to hear, “And who are you?” When both they grasped the extent of Jacob’s trickery, Esau’s momentary reserve broke, and he cried out in anguish, “Bless me—me also—father!” Isaac replied, “Alas! Your brother came with deceit, and took your blessing.”
Esau declared:
“Jacob is rightly Heel-Sneaker—Cheater!—for now he has tripped me twice. Birthright and blessing—taken.”
And—get this—Jacob is the “hero” of our story. No, really. He “wins.”
By the end of the book, he has a big family, he’s wealthy, and yes, he’s the third patriarch of a new nation.
That’s the lesson. Clever cheaters succeed, the naive and trusting lose. It’s fated to be. Right?
I want to suggest there may be a subtler reading (8), hidden just under the surface.
Remember when our narrator described Esau as a skilled hunter, and Jacob as a simple/straight-forward man? What if both were deeply ironic statements? After all, Jacob is about as far from innocent as one can get, which is hinted at in the root of his name—not tam from “pure” but ya’akov from ’aqob, “crooked”—yet skilled at deceit.
* * *
So also maybe Esau is not the skilled hunter and war-leader his father desires, being too simple- hearted and generous for the vocation. Maybe Isaac is projecting onto his eldest his own frustrated longing, rather than truly seeing him.
For a scruffy, lumbering beefcake, Esau is surprisingly gentle, emotional, and caring. Maybe he truly “despises” the vocational burden of the patriarchal leader bound up in his “birthright”—yet he longs for his father’s blessing. Even in the moment of ultimate betrayal, when revenge on Jacob flashes across his mind, Esau hesitates to act for fear of hurting his father. Given ample opportunity later, Esau never actually threatens his brother. In fact, after Jacob leaves and it’s decades later when they finally meet again, we see Esau “run and hug and kiss and cry” (10) in sheer joy of seeing his brother, and he eagerly invites Jacob to join him in travel and living together again.
What of Jacob? We’ll see more of his story in the next few weeks. And it’s a story filled with more deceit, betrayal, and lies. Sometimes Jacob bests his opponents, sometimes he’s bested. But the deeper story is that he can’t escape the cycle. The exact way he betrays is the way he is betrayed (11). Knowing himself suspicious, he suspects others (12).
Yes, he “succeeds” in the outward dimensions recognized in competitive society. But when I really think about it, it’s the truly naive, simple, innocent Esau who seems to have inward peace and the ability to give and receive love that Jacob never fully finds. In claiming fate, Rebekah and Jacob both receive what they ask for, and they receive its consequences as well.
Will there be redemption for “the Cheater”? Can Jacob find a new name? Is he helpless before the fates, or can he choose differently? We’ll have to wait and see.
* * *
For today, we might consider what success might truly mean, and what we might be forced to sacrifice in order to attain what we may have been told is of utmost value.
Maybe Esau shows us a different way to be a hero, outside the traditional script. Maybe a certain kind of success costs more than it’s worth.
Maybe it’s a gift to be simple.
AMEN.
NOTES:
Many ancient oracle or divination traditions were intentionally open-ended, to assist the inquirer in discerning their own decision rather than making it for them. Was God allowing Rebekah to make her own moral judgement here, choosing her own fate and that of Jacob, rather than decreeing it? It seems possible.
Suggested by respected Jewish Hebrew scholar Richard Elliott Friedman, mentioned by Robert Alter in his translation notes.
Lit. “And came the-first red all-over like a-hair-mantle...and then came his-brother seizing his-heel...”
Lit. “...for the game in his mouth.” It’s ambiguous whether the “his” is Esau figuratively bringing home food in his mouth like a lion, or if it’s Isaac who is referring to having food placed in his own mouth. Either way, Isaac’s love seems to be based on Esau’s function in sating his hunger.
Lit. “And boiled-up Ja’akov boiled-food...” The Hebrew verb used for food preparation here has a direct meaning of “boil up, seethe, act proudly, presumptuously, rebelliously.” The English connotation of “stirring the pot” is faithful to the original.
Lit. “Gobble from the red...red...that.” The action Esau requests here uses a verb that occurs nowhere else in the Bible but is used in rabbinic Hebrew for the feeding of animals (the related word in Arabic means: “speak confusedly, utter indistinct sounds”, as in gobbling/gibbering).
In Hebrew, Esau “ate n’drank n’stood n‘went,” described in an intentionally abrupt and rapid-fire way.
Indebted to Sarra Lev’s essay “Esau’s Gender Crossing” in Torah Queeries, pp. 38-42. The stereotypes are reversed; think Kronk and Yzma in the Disney animation “The Emperor’s New Groove,” where the macho-looking Kronk is actually a gentle, kind soul and the slick, “beautiful” Yzma is the evil, vindictive enemy.
The Hebrew translated “simple” or “quiet” is tam which suggests integrity and innocence. In biblical idiom, a person’s heart can be contrasted between two terms related by word root to either tam or ya’aqob: crooked (‘aqob) or pure (tom).
Genesis 33:4
Jacob uses the skins of kid goats in his deception here. Later in his life, his son Judah fakes the death of Jacob’s favorite son Joseph using the blood of kid goats. And then later Judah is tricked by his daughter-in-law involving the payment of kid goats.
He doesn’t seem able to truly believe Esau has forgiven him, and self-banishes himself after their meeting. Later his sons are unable to believe that their brother Joseph has truly forgiven them, which leads him to break down and cry.
