Genesis 25:19-34 Commentary

Since the fulfilling of God’s covenant with Abraham hinged hugely on Abraham’s having descendants, you would think that in the childbearing department things would have gone more easily.  And yet in story after story we deal with some level of infertility that becomes a deep source of concern and that God eventually is said to step in and resolve in semi-miraculous ways.  Seems like God kept stacking the deck against himself.  First he begins with a pair of childless senior citizens—and even then takes 25 years before bringing about a promised son—and now once we move on to Isaac, we discover that for nearly 20 years of marriage, Isaac’s wife Rebekah was unable to conceive, too.

Here, too, we are told God intervenes and eventually Rebekah bears twin boys.  But honestly, you’d expect this whole covenant fulfillment thing to spool out more smoothly.  Maybe it was God’s way of conveying that the keeping of this promise was going to be all about God in the long run.  It is grace and not human achievement that will get it done.  This may in part be what motivated the evangelist John to note in the prologue to his gospel that all who will become children of God through the work of the Word made flesh will get their status in the divine family not in the usual way children get born or because some human male impregnated his wife but ever and only by the will of God alone.

In any event Rebekah brings two boys into the world and their story will occupy that next chunk of Genesis in narratives that are sometimes downright rollicking with drama and intrigue.  The very names of the twins are arresting: Red and Heel-Grasper.  Red came out first but was in hot pursuit by the brother who seemed, even while still in utero, to be trying to pull Red back so as to put himself in first place.

Although twins, the custom of the day was that the one born first, Red or Esau in this case, would be the recipient of whatever blessings and wealth the father had to lavish upon him.  Heel-Grasper or Jacob was destined to be second fiddle.  This never sat well with Jacob but lucky for him his brother Esau was never, shall we say, the sharpest knife in the drawer.  Jacob on the other hand appears to have inherited from his mother a family tradition of tricks and deceptions and schemes.  Later Jacob will meet up with his Uncle Laban and those two titans of trickery will duke it out for years until finally Jacob gets the best of his uncle, who is lucky to escape his dealings with his nephew with the shirt on his back.

First things first, however, and so we get this first story about Esau and Jacob in Genesis 25 (by the way, it’s telling we usually say these stories are about Jacob and Esau, naming the younger twin first.  Our tendency to name Jacob first shows how this will all turn out!).

Esau is a man of the open fields.  He seems to be a man’s man, an outdoorsmen, a skilled hunter whose ability to serve up wild game for his father’s dinner makes him the favored son for Isaac.  Jacob, on the other hand, is a homebody, a momma’s boy.  He loves domestic work and most especially seems to have had a flair in the kitchen.

As the Genesis 25 story unfolds, there is a sense in which things look rather coincidental.  Esau comes in from the fields with a ravishing appetite and when he just so happens to catch a whiff of a fine-smelling red lentil stew Jacob has whipped up, his mouth waters and his judgment wavers and he basically says he’d pay any price for a bowl of that stuff.

However, I picture a lot of this a bit differently.  Jacob had observed his brother for a good long while.  Esau was always coming home and declaring himself to be on the brink of starvation and Esau was always saying he’d give anything to sate his rumbling stomach.  So no, Jacob did not just happen to have a particularly aromatic stew on the stove whose odors got picked up on by Esau by accident.  Jacob timed this just right and did everything he could to fan the smell of the stew in the direction from which Jacob knew Esau would be coming.

What’s more, his suggesting that Esau sell off his birthright blessing was not some random idea off the top of Jacob’s head.  He had already named his recipe for that particular day “Birthright Stew” and the recipe also noted “Serves 1.”  Esau was set up and proved every bit as easy a mark as Jacob assumed would be the case.

Jacob never did anything without having a plan.

Jacob lived by his wits and the wits he had were plenty expansive.  He would get ahead in life on his own terms and it will be years before he comes to a better understanding of himself and of God (and in the Revised Common Lectionary we will get to that turning point story of Genesis 32 in three weeks on August 6).  This Genesis 25 story of how crafty Jacob out-maneuvered his impulsive older brother sets the tone for much of what is to come.

As we have noted before, the Bible is an honest book.  We tend to shine up and domesticate stories like Jacob and Esau so they become more tidy as we tell them to children in Sunday School.  But the actual biblical portraits of people like Jacob are more nuanced if not downright raw at times.  Yet these are the warts-and-all folks who are the targets of God’s lavish grace.  And if we can see ourselves inside this picture as flawed in our own ways, then it’s good to know that God does not abandon us so quickly if at all despite our own less-than-savory traits or habits.

Illustration Idea

Years ago a friend contacted me after reading one of my sermons from a series I did on The Book of Genesis.  This was a man who had experienced a lot of brokenness in his family and particularly in things involving a couple of his children.  In my sermons on Genesis—as in what I have here in this CEP sermon commentary on our first Jacob and Esau story in Genesis 25—I noted that there was a lot of drama in these stories and that so often families in the Bible are what today we would label as “dysfunctional.”  My friend noted that this got him to looking at a lot of other stories in the Bible involving families and he was struck by how few of them were intact.  As I noted in another recent commentary, some Bible stories that center on families look a whole lot less like the harmonious folks on The Waltons or Little House on the Prairie and more like the cut-throat families one saw in other TV shows like Dallas or Dynasty (and though I have not seen any of it, does the more recent TV series Succession fit here too?).

My friend took comfort and solace in this fact.  God maybe does not abandon us because we don’t have our acts together all the time, including in the context of our families.  This insight felt to my friend like a grace.

And it was.