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Let’s take a moment to catch a glimpse into how big and spread out the family of Abraham was by the time we get to the birth of the twins, Esau and Jacob. As you know Abraham came to the land of Canaan believing a promise by God to give him that land and make his descendants to be a great nation. He and his wife Sarah had no children at the time and so they brought his nephew Lot just in case he could count as a descendant. They wandered the land nomads with no children to speak of.
This childlessness threatened God’s promise. So, Sarah took matters in hand and convinced Abraham to have a child by her Egyptian slave girl, Hagar. It was a common practice back then that when a slave girl was giving birth Ma’am would stand over her pretending to be the one giving birth so that she would call the child her own. Thusly, Ishmael became Abraham’s actual firstborn, but not a child of the promise.
Not long after that God opened Sarah’s womb so to speak. She was in her 80’s and Abraham in his 90’s. Their first and only child, Isaac, was born. As you would expect, Sarah became jealous of Hagar and Ishmael and certainly did not want Ishmael to receive the birthright inheritance due the firstborn son when it “rightfully” should be Isaac’s. So, she had Abraham send them away into the wilderness and knowing better than to refuse her, reluctantly did so. He sent them off with only a wineskin of water and a loaf of bread. God saw this act of injustice (if not attempted murder) and saved them and promised to make a great nation from Ishmael as well.
Ishmael eventually settled in what we call Saudi Arabia and like his half-nephew Jacob, he too had twelve sons. You may also remember that it was to a caravan of Ishmaelites that Jacob’s sons sold their brother Joseph and they in turn sold him to Pharoah. Story for another day but mind you, if you let your cousins get too distant, you may wind up in the slave trade together. Just saying.
Time went by and Sarah died. Not long after, Isaac and Rebekah marry only to remain childless for twenty years. Abraham also remarried and at the ripe young age of more than 110 he sired another batch of children. His second wife’s name was Keturah and they had six sons and 7 grandsons and some great-grandsons. Abraham left everything he owned to Isaac, his most favoured son who was not really his firstborn son. The firstborn son was Ishmael, but we won’t talk about that. To his other children, Keturah’s children and to the children of some concubines, he simply gave gifts. Abraham sent them all away too. He sent them east into what we call Jordan today. It was the promised child, Isaac, who was to be the only one of Abraham’s offspring to live on the land God had promised Abraham. But, just imagine the expanse of it all, Abraham’s descendants were spread out from Israel to Saudi Arabia to Jordan. Please notice how Abraham sent the “illicit” children away to other lands and gave Isaac, the child of the promise, the Promised Land.
That gets us to today’s reading concerning the birth of Isaac and Rebekah’s twin sons, “the Twins”, Esau and Jacob and the little problem of the birthright due the oldest son. The descendants of Abraham are a massive extended family. As you might guess, this could prove problematic, but interestingly not among the array of half-siblings that were spread out all over the place. The problem lay between the twins, Esau and Jacob.
The birthright matter is important. The birthright wasn’t simply a matter of who gets the bulk of the inheritance and the father’s blessing. The oldest son indeed got the bulk of the estate while the other sons got a pittance and daughters got nothing and yes there’s nothing fair there. The birthright also entailed that the oldest son would be the spiritual leader of the family once the father passed. The big thing about the birthright was that the one who wields it is the one who bears the family honour, the family reputation. It wasn’t simply a matter of the estate. It was about the family name, the reputation. Moreover, in the matter of Abraham’s family the birthright also involved the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham. The oldest son would be the one through whom we should expect that God would fulfill the promise.
Reading along in this story, as it does involve the fulfillment of God’s promise, we might could expect that for the “royal family” here things would be storybook perfect. Everything should be all “Will and Kate”. It seemed to start that way. Isaac and Rebekah were a love-at-first-sight-match-made-in-heaven couple, married for life, no polygamy or concubines. It was just the two of them and the twins. Things should have been perfect just like the Cleaver family from Leave It to Beaver, but it wasn’t. There’s sibling rivalry, deception, parents playing favourites, and one grand estate dispute. The only things missing from the deal were a gallery of paparazzi and a tabloid.
Esau and Jacob must have been fraternal twins as there was nothing identical about them. Esau was biggish and hairy and his skin tone was a bit reddish. He loved to hunt and to be out in the fields. One could say he was short-sighted, lived for the moment, couldn’t see past his belly. He seems to have been the more aggressive of the two brothers, an alpha-type oldest sibling. He was loud and lived for the day. I’m stepping out on a limb and saying that he probably wasn’t someone you’d want making decisions pertaining to the future of the family business nor the one who would give the family the best reputation. On top of everything, he traded his birthright to his twin brother for a bowl of stew which makes it seem that he just really didn’t care about the role and the politics of being the oldest brother. One could argue that this stew thing was just a fake trade with no signed papers or anything and so nothing really changed, but still, the birthright was a serious matter and Esau didn’t seem to care about it. Oddly, Esau was his father’s favourite. Isaac loved the wild game he cooked. Should we ask if maybe that’s kind of a shallow reason?
For Jacob, on the other hand, the birthright mattered. We could play with sibling personality and birth order dynamics psychology stuff. From that perspective, we could say that Jacob being a twin probably had a chip on his shoulder about being treated as the youngest sibling, labelled a mama’s boy who was sheltered and spoiled, simply because he came into the world a few minutes later. When in actuality, he was the smarter, more responsible twin who actually cared about the family honour and the promise. Those are personality characteristics typical of the oldest sibling that Esau should have had. Yet, Esau was the carefree “let’s go hunting and camping instead of dealing with things” kind of guy which are personality characteristics we would expect of a youngest sibling. In this stew for birthright deal, to me, it appears Jacob is simply proving he would make the better oldest sibling.
So, if we were to psychologize the whole situation, Jacob was more like the oldest sibling than Esau was and yet he was forced into the role of being the youngest sibling simply because he was born a few minutes later. It would have been a completely different world for him if he had just come out first. On top of it all, and I will withhold comment on it, we have parents playing favourites here and that never goes well. There was indeed some sibling rivalry there and I’m sure Jacob got pushed around a bit by his brutish big brother for being a “Mama’s boy” who hung around the tents with the women folk. I think things were unfair for Jacob. Just because Esau came out first shouldn’t mean he should get the lion’s share of the inheritance and bear the family honour and all that especially when he wasn’t qualified. That’s my opinion and with me being the youngest in my family, it’s not all that unbiased.
Sadly, Jacob gets painted in a bad light. I’m sure we have all heard our fair share of sermons and Bible study lessons that portrayed Jacob as not just clever but conniving, a trickster who was covetous of his brother’s birthright and would do anything to get it. He’s also the one, who at his mother’s behest, steals his blind father’s deathbed blessing by pretending to be Esau. Then, when he was in a faraway land shepherding his father-in-law’s sheep, he miraculously winds up with all the sheep. One could say he did that by trickery as well.
But, I’m not so sure about painting Jacob in such a negative light. He is described here not as conniving or wily, but as “quiet”. The Hebrew word there means “perfect, righteous, peaceful.” I don’t know why the translators use “quiet” unless maybe they mean “still” in a prayerful kind of way. As a point of interest, this is the word used to describe Job’s “righteous” character. So, let us consider that there was a bit of depth, one might say spiritual depth to Jacob. He wasn’t brutish as was his brother. He stayed around the tents as opposed to living in the fields with the livestock. He was his mother’s, Rebekah’s, favourite, I think, because she knew that Jacob was the one to receive the birthright and his father’s blessing because God had told her so. One can say that quite often it is the case that “Mama knows best” and it was she who instigated a lot of the stuff for which Jacob gets called dishonest and conniving. We are also safe to wager that she told her favourite son that God had told her while she was pregnant that there were two nations wrestling inside her and that the older would serve the younger. We call him a conniving, self-seeking trickster, but he really wasn’t. Jacob sought what God wanted for him but would be denied him because of birth order politics.
Well, I’ll wrap this up by saying that the family of Isaac, Rebekah, the twins Esau and Jacob, the family of the Promise, was not a perfect family and yet God worked through them. There was rivalry, deceit, and favouritism just like any of our own families. And so, we shouldn’t beat ourselves up if our families are not perfect. Imperfection and brokenness aside, it was God’s promise and their pursuit of it that mattered. So also with us, our families are imperfect and broken as well, but that’s not what defines us. What defines us is our desire to follow Jesus and become like him, who is the firstborn Son of God who bears the honour of this church family and each of our families included in it. Amen.
