In our review of Genesis thus far, the men (Noah, Abraham,
Isaac) have received most of the attention. The women? Not so much. For
example, the Bible doesn’t even tell us the name of Noah’s wife. We hear a
little bit of Sarah
and Hagar but Rebekah is the first woman in Genesis who takes charge of a
situation and turns it to her advantage.
Before we get to her story in Gen 27, let’s rewind to Gen
25:19-34. The storyteller recounts that Rebekah was one more in a long line
of OT women who had difficulty conceiving. Eventually she became pregnant with
twins and received an oracle that the elder will serve the younger.
Jacob, the younger son (if only by a few minutes) became her
favorite and she no doubt indoctrinated him in the prophecy so that, when the
time was ripe, he took advantage of the situation to purchase the birthright
from Esau for a bowl of lentil stew. The birthright entitled the firstborn to a
double share of his father’s inheritance (Deut
21:17), so that may have been the most-lopsided financial deal prior to the
Dutch purchase of Manhattan Island from Native Americans.
Mother’s Little
Helper
Back to Gen
27. The story begins with Isaac, blind and at death’s door, wishing to
impart his blessing to Esau, his favorite son. Rebekah overhears their
conversation and fashions a plan for Jacob to steal the blessing. He offers a
couple of objections which Rebekah easily swats away.
Why does she try to deceive Isaac in this fashion? While it
might be the custom that the elder gets both birthright and blessing, perhaps she
rebels at the injustice of the practice in the case of twins. Or maybe she
argues that birthright and blessing go together. Having purchased the
birthright for a mess of pottage, Jacob is also entitled to the blessing that
goes with it.
Whatever her reasoning, Rebekah does most of the advance work
of preparing a couple of goats and dressing Jacob in Esau’s best garments. All
Jacob needs to do is play the part and is rewarded with a blessing of an
abundance of grain and wine and dominance over his brother.
Then, in what is one of the most pathetic scenes in the OT,
Esau arrives to find that Jacob has once again usurped him of his inheritance.
He pleads with Isaac to scrounge up one last blessing and gets a promise that
one day his descendants will throw off the yoke of Jacob’s descendants.
Esau vows that once Isaac is dead and the time of mourning
is past, he will kill Jacob. Learning of this, Rebekah tells Jacob to flee to
her brother Laban’s home in Haran and lay low until Esau cools down. She’ll
then send for him to return. Little does she know that Jacob will be away for
twenty years and she’ll never see him again. Moralists would say this is her
punishment for deceiving Isaac.
 |
| Isaac Blessing Jacob (1638) by Dutch artist Govert Flinck, a pupil of Rembrandt who borrowed from his style. |
Some Girls
Then, as a coda to this story (Gen
27:46-28:9) Rebekah complains to Isaac that Esau has married two of the
local girls and she doesn’t want the same to happen to Jacob. Isaac calls for
Jacob and sends him off to Laban’s home in Paddan-aram with a blessing. What?
Another blessing? I thought he was all blessed out. Seeing this, Esau tries to
please his parents by marrying within the family, taking one of Ishmael’s
daughters as a wife.
Critical biblical scholars point out that the reference to
Esau’s Hittite wives (Gen
26:34-35) and the coda belong together and both come from the P source. One
of the giveaways is the P source always refers to Laban’s homeland as
Paddan-aram while the J source calls it Haran. The P source provides a completely
different motivation – finding a suitable wife – for Jacob’s travel outside the
promised land. It is in the P source that the blessing of Abraham for offspring
and possession of the land is passed on to Jacob.
Other than the final v. 46, the obvious signs of multiple
sources such as contradictions, parenthetical comments, resumptive phrases
(such as “and he said again”), and so on are lacking in Gen 27. The awkward
etymology of the name Jacob in v. 36 may indicate an interpolation. And the
content of the blessings to Jacob and Esau could very well have been composed
by a later redactor. Other than those quibbles, the bulk appears to me to be a
unified piece.
Not everyone agrees. Some biblical scholars see four, five,
or ten different layers in Gen 27. For example, they claim Rebekah’s part in
the story was added by a later redactor, perhaps in an effort to shift blame
for the deception away from Jacob. Other layers would have heightened the
rivalry of the brothers or played up the hairiness of Esau. The result is a
convoluted explanation for the composition of the passage that does not appear
to need it (unlike Gen 14, for example, that reads
like a jumble).
Papa Was a Rolling
Stone
An intriguing analysis of this chapter from Adrien Bledstein
[1] turns the traditional explanation on its head. Instead of Isaac being duped
into bestowing his blessing upon the wrong son, Bledstein proposes that Isaac engineered
the entire episode to make sure the right son received the blessing. Her
interpretation requires one to read the canonical text as a whole instead of
treating the J and P strands separately.
In this telling, Isaac had his doubts whether Esau deserved
a blessing after he foolishly sold his birthright and married Canaanite women.
Yet he was bound by custom to give Esau the blessing. He purposely let Rebekah
overhear his instructions to Esau; she took matters into her hands and Jacob
played his part.
Isaac was not fooled for a moment, but before bestowing his
blessing, he had to test Jacob. Eight times Isaac questions Jacob’s identity
and each time Jacob either has a ready answer or had prepared his ruse (wore
Esau’s clothes that smelled of the field and goat hide to make his neck and
arms feel hairy). Satisfied that Jacob seemed to have thought of everything,
Isaac blessed him with an abundance of grain and wine (items that wouldn’t have
been very useful to the hunter Esau anyway) but held back the most-important blessing
of possession of the land.
When Esau arrives, Isaac pretends to be shocked and tells
Esau the content of Jacob’s blessing. It is at this point that Esau should have
asked for the Abrahamic blessing of the land that was withheld from Jacob but he
does not, thus failing his test and confirming Isaac’s suspicion that Esau is
not worthy it. He leaves Esau with the consolation prize that one day he will
break his brother’s yoke from his neck.
Now assured that Jacob is indeed the worthy successor, Isaac
is able to send him off to Paddan-aram with the Abrahamic blessing of numerous descendants
and possession of the land. Through plausible deniability, Isaac was able to
ensure the appropriate son received the Abrahamic blessing, not merely the
eldest son as custom would have dictated.
Have You Seen Your
Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?
While highly entertaining, this interpretation only makes
sense within the canonical text. It simply doesn’t work if you isolate the J and
P versions of the story. But the most obvious interpretation of the canonical
text is that Rebekah is controlling the events. Portraying Isaac as the master
manipulator takes away the dominance Rebekah has been given in the story. Bledstein’s
interpretation is just too clever by half.
I believe emphasizing Rebekah’s dominance is the point of
the narrative. The entire episode is very reminiscent of the first chapter of 1
Kings where Adonijah, the eldest surviving son of David, has assumed the
throne because the dying King has not named a successor. The prophet Nathan and
Bathsheba cook up a plan to “remind” David that he had once promised to name
Solomon as his successor. David pulls himself together long enough to make his
announcement and Adonijah is out. Just as in Gen 27, we see a mother deceive her
elderly husband to ensure the fortunes of her younger son over the rival claim of
an elder son.
The theme of the younger son being favored over the elder
(Abel over Cain, Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Judah over Reuben,
Ephraim over Manasseh) is a continuing motif in Genesis and one we will need to
explore in more detail in a future article.
[1] Adrien Bledstein "Binder, Trickster, Heel and
Hairy-man: Rereading Genesis 27 as a Trickster Tale Told by a Woman" Genesis,
A Feminist Companion to the Bible, ed. A. Brenner (Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press, 1993) 2:282-295
