But Rebekah Loved Jacob

A sermon for July 12 by Jamie Howison on Genesis 25:19-34

Further into this cycle of the stories of the matriarchs and patriarchs of Israel we go. After last Sunday’s story of how Isaac and Rebekah’s marriage began, we move quite quickly into the story of the birth and then the youth of their twin sons, Jacob and Esau. Between last week’s story and tonight’s, though, a couple of quite significant things have taken place. First of all, widowed after the death of Sarah, Abraham has remarried, to a woman named Keturah. Together they have six sons—remember, it was an heir that Abraham and Sarah had waited for, prayed for, pleaded for, and then waited some more. That son was born long after hope had been lost, and had been named Isaac—Laughter—in remembrance of how both Abraham and Sarah had laughed at the absurdity of it all. And now without any apparent difficulty, Abraham has fathered six more boys with Keturah?

These six sons are presented as the fathers of the semi-nomadic peoples of the trans-Jordan region and Arabian Peninsula, while the descendants of Ishmael—Abraham’s son by the servant woman Hagar—are said to be the peoples of those same general regions. This is why, of course, Islam also traces its deepest roots to these stories, because they too stand in the Abrahamic line. Yes, chapter 25 verse 5 notes, “Abraham gave all he had to Isaac,” yet the text does go on to say that he gave gifts to his other sons while he was still living and commissioned them to go eastward to establish communities for their peoples. Here Walter Brueggemann notes, “The text provides a striking presentation of the tension between election to promise and a generosity which embraces all peoples.” Yes, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah are presented as the chosen, covenant people, but not in a way that is meant to be ungenerous, unmerciful, or unloving toward the others. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks remarks in his own reflections on what he calls “the most radical of monotheism’s truths” indicated in these texts: “God may choose, but God does not reject. The logic of scarcity—of alpha males and chosen sons—has no place in a world made by a God whose ‘tender mercies are on all his works’” (Ps. 145:9) (Sacks, Not in God’s Name)

This is a very important theological point to keep in view, and one that is poignantly illustrated just a few verses later.

Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people. His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, east of Mamre, the field that Abraham purchased from the Hittites. There Abraham was buried, with his wife Sarah. (25:8-10)

He is buried by his sons Isaac and Ishmael, together. One might have assumed resentment, estrangement, hostility between the two, and maybe there had been some. One might have assumed that Hagar would have taken Ishmael far, far away. Yet here he is, side by side with his half-brother Isaac, together burying their father right beside the body of Isaac’s mother Sarah. They are able to set aside any differences, and accept that any tension Ishmael might have felt over Isaac’s apparent election to promise could not negate God’s generosity which embraces all peoples. Together they can do right by their father, bury his body in the place he had so carefully selected, and simply let things be.

This is, of course, a remarkable prologue to the story of Jacob and Esau, two brothers whose story—and rivalry—is oh so complicated.

The story begins with a bit of genealogy, and then this: “Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife, because she was barren; and the Lord granted his prayer, and his wife Rebekah conceived. The children struggled together within her…” Barrenness is a recurring theme in these stories, as are surprising births. There are twins in her womb, and their movement makes Rebekah almost impossibly uncomfortable. When Rebekah prays about his she is given a word that points to all that will follow in the conflict between these twins.

And then this: “When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents.”—oh, such different personalities, echoing Cain and Abel from the very early chapters of Genesis. “Isaac loved Esau, because he was fond of game; but Rebekah loved Jacob.” Dramatic foreshadowing, if ever there was some! Not only the differences between the two sons, but the potential for real conflict between their parents.

In our text the incident is described in just a handful of verses, so I’d like to read to you how Frederick Buechner imagines the scene in his remarkable novel, Son of Laughter. This imaginative way of retelling the stories is something that the writer Reynolds Price once described as “a serious way of wondering,” and in many respects is it not unlike the way the rabbinical tradition engages ancient texts. I’m picking up here at a point that finds Jacob out tending the flocks, while Esau has been ranging the area in search of wild game. Listen.

For dinner Rebekah had sent me off with a pot of red beans which she had boiled up thick with mutton fat and sesame. I had a fire going and was warming them over it when suddenly I found Esau looming over me. He had a black goatskin thrown over his shoulders. His game bag hung empty from his girdle. I was squatting on my heels by the fire. He was looking down at me with his brow furrowed.

“I’ll give you anything you want for that,” he said. He pointed at the beans. “That lovely, mushy stuff,” he said. “I smelled it from the other side of the hill it smelled so good. I haven’t had a bite since this morning.”

I said, “you’ll give me what?”

At this point Esau offers his prized throwing stick, his knife, even a servant girl. No. No. No. He would have to think of something else.

What he thought of was to all at once pull me to my feet and hug me till I thought my bones would snap.

“Oh I’ll love you forever, I’ll love you to death, and for only what’s left in your dear little bowl!” he said.

He covered me with kisses—my face, my neck, my shoulders. I could not help returning his embraces. Even in the womb we had hugged, battled… He rolled his eyes at the beans. He groaned.

I said, “You’ll give me anything?”

“Anything. Everything,” he said. The smile broadened till it cracked his face in two—the furrowed, bloodshot stare above, the big square teeth below.

And soon as Buechner describes it, Jacob is having Esau swear away his birthright.

“My seed, not your seed,” I said.

“Your seed,” he said.

“Father, and first.”

“Father.”

“Twice everything.”

“Twice,” he said. “Everything. I swear it.”

“So be it,” I said. “Take and eat then.”

He took it. He squatted by the fire with the bowl on his knees but did not immediately eat it.

He raised the bowl to sniff it with his eyes shut. He scooped some beans on the flat of his thumb and touched them with the end of his tongue. Then he put them into his mouth and sucked his thumb, turning it this way and that way between his lips. Then a whole fistful, then another, each time sucking all five fingers like teats. He winked at me. When he was finished, he embraced me, kissed me.

That is how Jacob got what Jacob wanted and Esau got what Esau wanted. As to which of them got the better of the bargain, who can say?

Here Buechner is pointing toward the fierce storm Jacob is busily pulling down on his own sorry head. This conning his brother out of his birthright might not actually have been taken entirely seriously by Esau, but Jacob certainly believed it should be. A bit further into the story Rebekah will conspire with Jacob—“Rebekah loved Jacob,” remember—in another con, this time pulling a fast one on Isaac himself, deceiving him into giving Esau’s blessing to Jacob. But oh, that just causes further division and sends Esau into such a rage that Jacob has to flee for his life. It is a life that will get more and more complicated, as he gets himself into deeper and deeper binds. We shall watch all of that unfold over the coming weeks, but for now this.

This portion of the story speaks to one of the grand themes of the whole Genesis cycle and well beyond. God so often chooses the unlikely, the one born out of order, the one who seems precisely the wrong person for the job. That is true of Abraham and of Sarah, certainly of Jacob, but later also of the Moabite woman Ruth, of David—the youngest brother in his family, and a shepherd boy at that—and of hesitant and reluctant prophets such as Amos and Jeremiah. It is of course a keystone in the New Testament, from the moment young Mary is called to bear the child who “will be called the Son of the Most High,” and extending through Peter, the enthusiastic yet faltering disciple, Thomas the doubter, and Saul the relentless persecutor of the Jesus movement who, as Paul, becomes its greatest proponent. Time and again it is the last and the least and lost and unlikely who feel the Spirit’s tap on the shoulder.

Who me? Yes you. Why not you? Don’t tell me your life is more complicated, your failings more profound, your weaknesses and blind spots deeper than those of Jacob. Of course they’re not. So be ready for that tap on the shoulder, however subtle it might be. God calls us all.