Twins - Genesis 25:11-26

25:11-26 - I really like the Torah Class app and I’m learning a lot but when we got to these verses that discuss Ishmael’s sons, the teacher went into a anti-Muslim, pro-Israeli rant and I really didn’t like it. I am pro-Palestinian and love Muslims so it really kind of irritated me, so if you are listening to those classes, know that I like a lot of the information that they put out but I don’t like all of it. Ishmael lived to be 137 years old and had at least 12 sons, also known as “twelve princes according to their nations.” It would seem like Isaac’s line wasn’t the only prolific progeny. Isaac marries Rebekah but “she was barren,” and unlike what happened with his father, Isaac didn’t take any concubines that we know of, nor did Rebekah urge him to. They seemed perfectly content to wait upon the Lord. Now there are several factors here that are different, Isaac and Rebekah aren’t elderly, so it’s possible that when Abraham and Sarah were that same age, they were also content to wait upon the Lord’s timing. It comes to the point where after 20 years of marriage and no children, “Isaac entreated the Lord for his wife, because she was barren.” The lecturer on the Torah Class podcast notes that the struggle with infertility that Isaac and Rebekah suffered wasn’t as spelled out for us as it was with his parents. All we hear is that Isaac prayed for Rebekah to have children and she did. Should we assume that in the whole 20 years of waiting, it had never occurred to Isaac to pray for God for a child? Definitely not, but it wasn’t part of the Lord’s timing yet. The lecturer also pointed out that God commands us to pray but that he doesn’t need our prayer, the commandment to pray is for our benefit, because we desperately need prayer to be close to Him, so maybe Isaac only needed to ask for the blessing of children, but my guess is that it wasn’t just God waiting on Isaac to ask for 20 years. Isaac’s prayer worked “and Rebekah his wife conceived.” Even though this was Rebekah’s first pregnancy, surely she had been around pregnant women her whole life and had seen their struggles and how it went with them, so when she started to get a crazy amount of movement coming from what she could only have assumed was one baby, she felt that it was abnormal “and she went to inquire of the Lord.” I think it’s interesting to note here that Rebekah didn’t take her concerns to Isaac and ask him to ask God about her problem. She took her problem directly to God himself fully expecting to receive an answer to her question. God did answer her question saying, “Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels… and the elder shall serve the younger.” I’m just going to come out and say it, I don’t like Jacob, I never have, and it’s not just a passive disinterest, like I really don’t like him. I identify with Leah, I feel like we have very similar circumstances and I do not like the way Jacob treated her, so basically everything about him just irritates me. When we come to the statement that the elder shall serve the younger, and we consider that Jesus taught that to be the master is to be the servant, then to me, that says that the elder would be more Christ-like because they would be the servant. Now, I don’t really think this is applicable here because they didn’t know about Christ at this point and I think the “serve” statement is more about who has domination over the other politically, but that’s what I always think when I hear that phrase. After the proper amount of gestational time, “there were twins in her womb, and the first came out red, all over like an hairy garment; and they called his name Esau.” It has been speculated that this “hairy” nature is something like a genetic condition where Esau had an abnormally large amount of hair all over his body like a wolfman type of disorder. I don’t necessarily think that that’s true, lots of babies are born with hair all over, especially when they are premature like most sets of twins usually are. After Esau was born, “came his brother out, and his hand took hold on Esau’s heel; and his name was called Jacob.” I know that this is meant to convey the idea that even as babies, these two brothers were fighting for dominance, literally clawing at each other to get the advantage, but as someone who has worked in women’s health for many years, it seems very unlikely that the second baby was actually grabbing a hold of the first baby’s foot while being birthed. They most likely had separate gestational sacs which means there would be the amniotic barrier preventing them from actually touching, and then babies are all slimy which would most likely prevent one baby’s slimy hand from getting a decent grip on the other baby’s slimy foot.