Jacob and Esau

Rebekah could not have children, so Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife. The Lord answered his prayer, and Rebekah became pregnant.

The babies pushed and struggled against each other inside her. “If it’s going to be like this,” she said, “why am I even alive?” So she went to ask the Lord.

When it was time for Rebekah to give birth, there were twins in her womb. The first came out red all over, and hairy like a fur coat, and they named him Esau. Then his brother came out, gripping Esau’s heel with his hand. They named him Jacob. At the time, Isaac was sixty years old.

One day Jacob was cooking stew when Esau came in from the fields, starving. “Please let me have some of that red stew,” Esau said to Jacob. “I’m starving!” That is why he was also called Edom, which means “red”.

Jacob said, “First sell me your birthright.”

“Look, I’m about to die,” Esau said. “What good is a birthright to me?”

“Swear it to me first,” said Jacob.

So Esau swore an oath to him and sold his birthright to Jacob.

Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew. Esau ate and drank, got up, and went on his way. So he treated his birthright as if it were worth nothing.

The Lord appeared to Isaac and said, “Don’t go down into Egypt. Live in the land I will tell you about. Stay here in this land. I will be with you, and I will bless you. I will give you and your offspring all these lands. I will keep the oath I swore to your father Abraham, and I will make your offspring as many as the stars in the sky. I will give them all these lands. Through your offspring every nation on earth will be blessed, because Abraham did as I said and kept everything I required of him: my commands, my rules and my laws.”

So Isaac lived in Gerar. The men there asked about his wife, and he said, “She is my sister.” He was too afraid to say she was his wife. He thought, “The men here might kill me to get Rebekah, because she is beautiful.”

After Isaac had been there a long time, Abimelech, king of the Philistines, looked out through a window and saw Isaac being affectionate with his wife Rebekah.

So Abimelech called for Isaac. “She is really your wife!” he said. “Why did you say, ‘She is my sister’?”

Isaac answered him, “I thought someone would kill me to get her.”

Abimelech said, “What have you done to us? Someone here could easily have slept with your wife, and then we would all have been guilty because of you!” Then Abimelech gave an order to all the people: “Anyone who touches this man or his wife will surely be put to death.”

Back in Abraham’s day, his servants had dug wells. The Philistines had blocked every one of them by filling them with dirt. Then Abimelech told Isaac, “Go away from us. You are much stronger than we are.”

So Isaac left there. He set up camp in the valley of Gerar and lived there. After Abraham died, the Philistines had blocked the wells dug in his day, so Isaac dug them out again. He called them by the same names his father had used.

Isaac’s servants dug in the valley, and there they found a well of fresh, flowing water. But the herdsmen of Gerar quarreled with Isaac’s herdsmen. “The water is ours!” they said. So Isaac named the well Esek, which means “Argument”, because they argued with him. Then his servants dug another well, and they quarreled over that one too, so he named it Sitnah, which means “Hostility”.

Isaac left that place and dug another well, and this time nobody argued over it. So he named it Rehoboth, which means “Wide Spaces”. “Now the Lord has made room for us,” he said, “and we will grow and prosper in the land.”

Isaac went up from there to Beersheba. That same night the Lord appeared to him. “I am the God of your father Abraham,” he told him. “Don’t be afraid. I am with you, and I will bless you. I will give you many offspring because of my servant Abraham.” Isaac built an altar in that place and prayed to the Lord, calling on him by name. He set up his tent there, and his servants dug a well there.

Then Abimelech came to him from Gerar, with his friend Ahuzzath and Phicol, the commander of his army. Isaac asked them, “Why have you come to me, when you hated me and sent me away?”

They answered, “We have seen clearly that the Lord is with you. So we said, ‘There should be an oath between us. Let’s make a covenant with you. Promise that you won’t harm us, just as we never harmed you. We treated you well, and we sent you away in peace.’ And now the Lord has blessed you.”

So Isaac made them a feast, and they ate and drank. Then, in the morning, they got up and swore an oath to one another. Isaac saw them off, and they went away from him in peace.

That same day, Isaac’s servants came with news about the well they had been digging. “We have found water!” they said. He named the well Shibah, which means “oath” or “seven”. That is why the town is still called Beersheba, “well of the oath” or “well of seven”.

When Esau was forty, he married two Hittite women: Judith, Beeri’s daughter, and Basemath, Elon’s daughter. They made Isaac and Rebekah very unhappy.

“Here I am,” Esau answered.

“Look,” said Isaac, “I am old, and I don’t know when I will die.

“So take your weapons, your quiver of arrows and your bow, and go out into the fields and hunt some wild game for me. Make me the tasty food I love. Bring it to me, and I will eat it and give you my blessing before I die.”

Rebekah heard Isaac speaking to his son Esau. When Esau went out to the fields to hunt game and bring it home, Rebekah spoke to her son Jacob. “Listen,” she said. “I heard your father talking to your brother Esau. He told him, ‘Bring me some game and make me a tasty meal. I will eat it, and I will bless you in the Lord’s presence before I die.’

“So now, my son, obey me and do as I say. Go out to the flock and get me two good young goats. I will cook them into a tasty meal for your father, just the kind he loves. Then you will take it to him to eat, so that he will bless you before he dies.”

“But my brother Esau is a hairy man,” Jacob said to his mother Rebekah, “and I’m smooth-skinned. What if my father touches me? He will see that I am tricking him, and I’ll bring a curse on myself, not a blessing.”

His mother said to him, “Let the curse fall on me, my son. Do what I say. Go and bring me the goats.”

So Jacob went, got them, and brought them to his mother. She cooked a tasty meal, the kind his father loved. Esau, her older son, had good clothes that were with her in the house. Rebekah took them and dressed Jacob, her younger son, in them. She put the young goats’ skins on his hands and on the smooth skin of his neck. Then she handed her son Jacob the meal and the bread she had made.

“Here I am,” said Isaac. “Which of my sons are you?”

Jacob said to his father, “I am Esau, your firstborn. I have done what you asked me to do. Please sit up and eat some of the game I hunted, and then give me your blessing.”

“How did you find it so fast, my son?” Isaac asked him.

“The Lord your God gave me success,” he answered.

“Come close, my son,” Isaac said to Jacob, “so I can feel you and find out if you are really my son Esau or not.”

Jacob came up close to his father Isaac. Isaac felt him and said, “The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are Esau’s hands.” Isaac didn’t recognize Jacob, because Jacob’s hands were hairy like his brother Esau’s. So he blessed him.

“Are you really my son Esau?” Isaac asked.

“I am,” said Jacob.

Isaac said, “Bring it here to me, and let me eat some of my son’s game, so that I can bless you.” So Jacob brought it to him, and Isaac ate. Jacob brought him wine too, and he drank.

His father Isaac said to him, “Come close and kiss me, my son.” Jacob came close and kissed him. Isaac smelled his clothes and blessed him.

His father Isaac asked him, “Who are you?”

“I am your son,” he answered, “your firstborn, Esau.”

Isaac trembled violently. “Then who went out hunting and brought me game?” he said. “I ate all of it before you came, and I blessed him. Yes, he will be blessed!”

When Esau heard his father’s words, he cried out very loudly and bitterly. “Bless me, me too, my father!” he said.

But Isaac said, “Your brother came and tricked me, and he has taken your blessing.”

Esau said, “No wonder he is named Jacob! He has cheated me twice. He took my birthright, and now he has taken my blessing!” Then he asked, “Haven’t you saved a blessing for me?”

Isaac answered Esau, “Look, I have made him your master and made all his relatives his servants. I have given him grain and new wine. What is left for me to do for you, my son?”

“Is that the only blessing you have, my father?” Esau said. “Bless me, me too, my father!” And Esau wept out loud.

Someone told Rebekah what her older son Esau had said, and she sent for Jacob, her younger son. “Listen,” she told him, “your brother Esau is making himself feel better by planning to kill you. So, my son, do what I say. Run away at once to my brother Laban in Haran. Stay with him for a while, until your brother’s rage cools down. When his anger has turned away from you and he has forgotten what you did to him, I will send for you and bring you home. Why should I lose you both in one day?”

Then Rebekah said to Isaac, “I am sick of living because of these Hittite women. If Jacob marries a Hittite woman like these, one of the women of this land, what good will my life be to me?”

Isaac called for Jacob and blessed him, and he gave him an order: “Don’t marry a Canaanite woman. Go now to Paddan Aram, to the home of Bethuel, your mother’s father. Marry one of the daughters of Laban, your mother’s brother.

“May God Almighty bless you. May he give you a large family, so large that you become a whole community of peoples. May he give you and your offspring the blessing he gave Abraham, so that you will own the land you travel through, the land God gave to Abraham.”

So Isaac sent Jacob off, and Jacob went to Paddan Aram, to Laban. Laban was the son of Bethuel the Syrian. He was also Rebekah’s brother, and Rebekah was the mother of Jacob and Esau.

Esau saw that Isaac had blessed Jacob and sent him away to Paddan Aram to get a wife there. He saw that his father had told Jacob not to marry a Canaanite woman. He saw that Jacob had listened to his father and mother and gone to Paddan Aram. And Esau saw that his father Isaac did not like the Canaanite women. So Esau went to Ishmael. Besides the wives he already had, he married Mahalath. She was the daughter of Abraham’s son Ishmael and the sister of Nebaioth.