Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Just because we have the opportunity to gain an upper hand does not mean we should take it

Commentary on Genesis 25:19-34

Matthew Schlimm

Isaac and Rebekah go 20 years without a child (Genesis 25:20, 26). Things look as hopeless for them as they did for Abraham and Sarah.

But both Isaac and Rebekah have access to God. Isaac turns to God, praying for a child, and God grants his prayer (25:21). Rebekah wonders why the twins within her “struggle” with (literally, “smash”) each other, and God responds to her directly (25:23).

God tells Rebekah she’ll have twins who will become two groups of people (Genesis 25:23). Esau clearly represents Edom (Genesis 25:30; 36:1, 8, 19, 43; Obadiah 8), while his brother Jacob clearly represents Israel (Genesis 32:28; 35:10; 46:2). It’s obvious that the two will not get along. Even at their birth, Jacob grabs Esau’s heel (25:26), foreshadowing the ways that Jacob will trip Esau so he doesn’t get what he wants. (In Hebrew, the name “Jacob” means “he will take away,” and it sounds like the word for “heel.”)

Favoritism

To make matters worse, Isaac and Rebekah display favoritism with their sons, Isaac loving Esau and Rebekah loving Jacob (Genesis 25:28). As we’ll quickly see, favoritism doesn’t just poison family dynamics. It ends in disaster, both with this generation (see 27:1–45) and with the next (see 37:1–36).

Exploiting the hungry

Early readers of this text would have identified with Jacob, who is renamed Israel in Genesis 32. Remarkably, Genesis doesn’t present a sanitized portrait of Jacob. There’s no rosy retrospection. Genesis looks unflinchingly at the founding Israelite. And it says that he, like all humans, has serious flaws.

In chapter 27, Genesis describes how Jacob used deception to thwart his dying and blind father’s plans, all the while robbing his brother of something priceless.

Here, Esau returns from an unsuccessful hunting trip (Genesis 25:29). The text says that “he was famished” (25:29). When wealthy people today say things like, “I’m starving,” they clearly exaggerate. Hunger in biblical times, however, wasn’t something to joke about. It was life-threatening and could force people to take dangerous journeys to places where food could be found (for example, Genesis 12:10–20). Esau is clearly malnourished and probably dehydrated. He even says he’s “about to die” (25:32).

In response, Jacob does not follow in the footsteps of others in Genesis who display amazing hospitality. He’s quite different from:

his grandparents Abraham and Sarah, who prepared a lavish feast for three strangers (18:1–8),
his relative Lot who provided shelter and food for two of these same strangers (19:1–3),
his mother Rebekah and uncle Laban who showed great hospitality to Abraham’s servant (24:16–25, 31–33).

The Bible insists those who are hungry deserve to eat. Proverbs 25:21 commands listeners to feed even their enemies.

Jacob has food that he’s already made (Genesis 25:29). It’s even the same color as Esau (25:30)! But Jacob refuses to feed his starving brother unless Esau first gives up his birthright (25:31).

A birthright, sometimes called “the right of primogeniture,” means all the privileges of being the oldest son. It includes privileges and leadership roles. Most concretely, it entails not just an inheritance but one twice the size of that given to any other son (according to Deuteronomy 21:17 and Middle Assyrian Laws). Most of us would never dream of asking our siblings for their inheritance when they are well—much less when they face desperate need.

Esau has no good options. He is, as already stated, near death. He knows that his inheritance will do him no good after he dies (Genesis 25:32). In his vulnerable state, he does what he needs to do to survive.

The passage ends by saying, “Esau despised his birthright.” Some interpret these words to mean that Esau thought little of his birthright all along and foolishly sold what he never should have relinquished. The biblical text, however, portrays him sympathetically. He is not, as Julie Galambush observes, “a fairy-tale ogre, and he does nothing to deserve Jacob’s abuse.”¹ The passage’s ending about Esau despising his birthright likely means that after he had to give it up, Esau hated even thinking about it.

Connecting with people’s lives

This story points to three important ideas today.

The first is the need for lavish hospitality. Jacob fails to show it, and he ends up suffering as a result. After he again exploits Esau in Genesis 27, he’s forced away from home and all that’s familiar. He’s forced to suffer under the hand of Laban, who is as exploitative as he is. When he’s eventually forced back home, his whole body fills with fear as Esau approaches him with 400 men (32:6–11). Genesis makes it clear: Just because we have the opportunity to gain an upper hand does not mean we should take it.

The second is the need for honesty about our ancestors. The people of Israel could have looked back at Jacob with selective memory, seeing him as a saint who never did anything wrong. Instead, they were honest about his faults. They had the courage to remember even the horrible things he did. Their ability to fully remember the past can inspire us today, particularly when some try to silence truthful accounts of the past. None of our ancestors were perfect. We do not need to pretend otherwise. Rather, we need to face the past unflinchingly both to prevent a recurrence of past atrocities and—just as important—to understand current realities.

The third is how we think about our enemies. It’s easy to portray them as horrible people who always do what’s wrong. But we can instead look at them sympathetically and wonder what we have done to cause divisions. Early audiences of this text would have had every reason to hate the Edomites, who cheered the Babylonians’ destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE (Psalm 137:7; Ezekiel 25:12; Obadiah 11–14; 1 Esdras 4:45). Genesis could have fueled the flames of that hatred. Instead, it suggests that Esau—who represents the Edomites—wasn’t always to blame. We and our ancestors have sins we need to confess and turn away from.