The Send-Off - Genesis 28:1-10

28:1-7 - Jacob and Rebekah have tricked Isaac into giving the birthright blessing to Jacob instead od Esau, Esau is understandably furious and is planning on killing Jacob, so Rebekah convinces Isaac that Jacob has to leave where they live in Beersheba and go back to her homeland to find a wife among her family. Seems a little bit over-complicated, but that’s how they worked it out. Maybe if Rebekah had gone to Isaac and said “Esau is going to kill Jacob after you die so we should send Jacob away,” Isaac might have sided with Esau saying that Jacob deserved it for deceiving him, or he might have just not believed that his favorite son, Esau, would have been capable of killing his brother. Either way, Rebekah had to approach sending Jacob away by framing it as something else to Isaac. An interesting commentary on spousal interactions.

Isaac agrees to Rebekah’s plan and sends Jacob “to the house of Bethuel thy mother’s father,” to “take thee a wife from thence of the daughters of Laban thy mother’s brother.” We all know how long Jacob ends up being gone for, over 20 years, and I would imagine that Isaac died while Jacob was gone, and it seems like Isaac knew that this would probably be the last time he’d see his son, so he blessed him that “God Almighty bless thee, and make thee fruitful, and multiply thee, that thou mayest be a multitude of people; And give thee the blessing of Abraham, to thee, and to thy seed with thee; that thou mayest inherit the land wherein thou art a stranger, which God gave unto Abraham.”

In the blessing that Isaac gave Jacob previously, there was no mention of having a lot of descendants, not was there mention of “the blessing of Abraham,” which is spiritual and being given the land promised to Abraham by God. It would make sense that if Isaac really thought that he was blessing Esau, by withholding this portion of the blessing, then he would have been honoring Rebekah’s personal revelation that Jacob is that son that God chose to carry on the Abrahamic Covenant. Or maybe by this point, Isaac had been sufficiently chastened by God for trying to bless Esau instead of Jacob, like He had revealed to Rebekah.

Either way, at this point, Jacob had been given the position of “head of the household” by getting the birthright from Esau, he also received the birthright blessing where he was given the lands of plenty and the role of leadership, and now he has received the blessing of Abraham which is the blessing of a bountiful progeny and a promise of ownership of the land promised to Abraham by God. I don’t know if this is how the scriptures are meaning to convey that Isaac gave Jacob the priesthood blessings, or if he had done that already or how that worked exactly but Jacob leaves his family home and community and heads toward Haran.

28:8-10 – After Jacob leaves Beersheba and heads to Haran, Esau sees that the Hittite women that were his first two wives irritated his father. It doesn’t say anything about him caring that his mother disapproved, but then again, I don’t think it would. Anyway, Esau sees that his parents have send Jacob away to find a wife in the family lineage and decides to do the same thing and goes to Ishmael, “and took unto the wives which he had Mahalath the daughter of Ishmael Abraham’s son… to be his wife.”

Now the reasons why Esau did this are widely debated, anywhere from “he was trying to make amends with his father,” to “he was getting revenge on his father by going to the brother that hated him and sealed by marriage a pact to unite the divested first borns of the family to become the anti-Christ.” That last one was courtesy of the lecturer from the Torah Class and honestly, he has some great insights, but he really hates Muslims and it’s almost made me want to stop listening to him because it’s so distracting and vile.

Anyway, personally, what I think is that we have this man who should have been granted a certain position at birth being told his whole life that he was unworthy of it, probably before he was even old enough to do anything to actually disqualify himself from that position. I know exactly what that’s like and it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, “ok I haven’t done anything to show myself as unworthy, but I’m being treated that way, so may as well do what I want.” He’s been told his whole life that he’s unworthy, he’s been tricked and cheated and manipulated by his own mother and brother out of what should have rightfully been his. I think he’s gotten a raw deal, and this rushing out to marry someone that seemed to have the qualifications that would please his father says to me that he’s just trying to get his parents to love him, he’s trying to do what he thinks they want.

The fact that he does this now, shows that either he didn’t care that the marriage to Hittite women offended his parents or that he didn’t know. So they either never bothered to tell him what the standard of spouse is and only did that for his thieving brother, or he was treated as unworthy his whole life and he did whatever he wanted because when everything is wrong, then nothing is. Either way, I really feel for Esau, he really got the short end of that stick. Was he perfect? Of course not, he might not even have been a great guy, but I see how he is the victim in this story and it’s sad.