Genesis 25:29-26

Hey, friends.
Hey, welcome back, everybody.
Pressing on through Genesis 25 today near the end of the chapter
as we look at kind of the first
instance of
strain between Jacob and Esau.
We saw yesterday in the birth narrative that there is this kind of implied competition or this kind of
tension between them, and today we see it begin to
play itself out.
We keep in mind here the
description we were given yesterday,
Esau being kind of an outdoor man,
a hunter, a
sort of rugged individual,
Jacob being a little more quiet,
maybe a little more intellectual, and I think
you’d have to say maybe even a little more scheming.
I mean, there’s a sense in which
there’s some of that going on in these stories.
So certainly in the next one,
but maybe in this
one too.
So verse 29 here,
“Once when Jacob was cooking stew,
Esau came in from the field and he was famished.
Esau said to Jacob,
‘Let me eat some of that red stuff,
for I’m famished.’ Therefore
he was called Edom.
Jacob said,
‘First,
sell me your birthright.’
Esau said,
‘I’m about to die
of what use is a birthright to me.’
Jacob said, ‘Swear to me first.’ So he swore to him
and sold his birthright to Jacob.
Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew,
and he ate and drank and rose,
and went his way.
Thus Esau despised his birthright.” So let’s kind of work backwards here.
This talk of birthright is likely foreign to us,
not something we know,
but the oldest in this society
is accorded the rights of birth,
literally the birthright, the birth order,
and it is the oldest,
the firstborn male, that is privileged to the entire inheritance.
Anything else that the parents
would choose to do for younger,
they have the freedom to do,
but it is assumed by custom,
by tradition, by culture, that the oldest male is going to receive certainly the majority of
the inheritance, if not the entire inheritance.
That position in the birth order was treasured
and was protected by that custom,
and so that’s what’s at stake here.
Yeah, so, you know,
we’ve got to be careful here to not exaggerate the characters and the
characterizations happening here, but there are some things that we need to see here.
We’ve got
the outdoorsman who we saw explicitly yesterday,
Isaac likes because of the game he brings home.
Ironically,
it is the outdoorsman who’s hungry.
He’s famished,
and, you know, we even get this
exaggeration of this idea that I’m going to die,
which I don’t think most biblical interpreters
read that to be a factual statement,
that he was so malnourished,
he was upon death’s door,
but rather a sign of impatience and a sign of exaggeration,
sort of this idea that in the moment of being hungry,
he sort of loses his mind,
his stomach is ruling instead of his head,
whereas the exact opposite connotation now comes to Jacob.
You use the word “scheming.” I think you very much do have
an intentional kind of reference here that there’s a capitalization upon,
Jacob is capitalizing upon
his brother’s momentary distress,
and when he calls upon his brother to pay the most extravagant
price that one could pay for a bowl of food,
what we end up seeing happen is the one tricks or
outsmarts or maybe just straight up takes advantage of a brother’s situation,
and in doing so he bends
not just the family inheritance towards himself.
It calls into question,
quite frankly, we’ll talk about this more, it calls into question the entire plan that God has had from the beginning.
It causes the reader to ask,
“Is Jacob scheming somehow going to put into question all of this promise
language?” And it makes a really interesting sort of instigation to action in this text.
Yeah, I need to be way up front with my personal bias here.
Jacob is a difficult character for me.
He’s not a character that I resonate with,
he’s not a character that I particularly like,
but he is a fundamental character,
in some ways the fundamental character of the rest of this book,
and he is shrewd,
he is bold,
he takes risks, but they work out for him,
and he certainly is not opposed to taking advantage of others.
He plays a game in which he seeks to
get an advantage over other people, and he does so regularly,
and here we have him doing this to his brother.
And there is a note of judgment in this story,
it ends with this phrase,
“Thus Esau despised his birthright.” In other words,
it wasn’t important enough to him to refrain from doing this,
and I don’t want to cast dispersion on Esau unfairly,
but you do have to wonder about the fact that this
takes place essentially in the kitchen,
not in the kitchen the way we eat,
but I mean,
they’re in the place where the food is made,
he’s in the place where food is prepared,
and Esau seems unwilling to wait or to put in his own effort,
and in his knee, his hunger,
he acts
from his emotional center,
and he wants something,
so he says, “Yeah, I don’t care, take the birthright and give me the food.” And there’s a kind of earthiness to that,
there’s a kind of impulsiveness.
On the whole,
Jacob is going to be celebrated for these kind of things,
but it’s a little harder for me to get there.
Yeah, there’s a sense in which reading
Jacob’s stories moving forward are challenging,
and you know, it’s uncomfortable,
Clint. I mean, realistically,
here verse 30,
let me put this up for you,
Esau says to Jacob,
“Let me eat some of
that red stuff.” You know,
commentators make the note that Esau is not even linguistically advanced
enough to call it by what it is.
He just calls it by the color,
right?
Give me some of that stuff in the ball.
And very clearly, Jacob, who now turns the conversation immediately to,
“All right, let’s talk about the birthright.” Like,
clearly, these characters are being intentionally shown
to have substantially different values,
as we saw even set up in that sort of Genesis text that
we talked about, the genesis of these two twins being born,
the one who’s grabbing the heel of the other,
right?
So we’ve already had these characterizations introduced in the story,
but you know, I think, Clint,
it does introduce a pattern.
It also introduces the inciting action,
and the scriptures are written with the point of showing us God’s plan,
but it’s done so within
the context of human drama.
And the human drama here is that these brothers have now had the
first act.
You know, in any sort of narrative story,
you have the inciting action.
The inciting action has been accomplished in this story.
The birthright has been sold.
What we now
are all going to wonder is what’s going to come of this,
and what’s going to come of Isaac and
Rebecca, and what’s going to come of these brothers’ relationship,
and then ultimately, what’s going to come of God’s plan,
and that’s what everything after it is going to answer.
Yeah, and in no way is this a random story.
Jacob has his sights set on the birthright.
He needs the birthright, and he needs the blessing,
and this is step one.
And he could have started
for, “You do my chores.” He could have done,
you know, there are hundreds.
He is after what his
brother possesses.
He wants to displace his brother.
His name, remember, means the one who
replaces, the one who supplants.
He is living that out here in their dining area, in their kitchen,
and he gets that specifically from his brother.
We’re going to mostly just brush chapter 26.
It’s a fascinating chapter in that we have seen every one of these stories before,
but this time they’re about Isaac instead of Abraham.
So Isaac goes into Gerar,
and he
tells people that his wife is his sister.
And then the king,
Abimelech, again we see,
says,
“How have you done this?
And we want you to leave,
and we’ll give you possessions, but
you’ve put us at risk.” And so he sends him away,
and God restates the covenant that he will bless him.
And then there’s conflict over a well and property.
And again, Isaac prevails.
And again, God says, “I will bless you and make you a great nation.” It is amazing that these almost word for
word are stories that were told about Abram.
And now to make sure that we don’t miss the fact
that God’s covenant promise comes down and now rests on Isaac,
we get them told again with Isaac
as the main character,
as if history is repeating itself as God continues to bless him and make of
him a great nation.
From a practical standpoint,
we end this series of stories knowing that Isaac
has even more than he had.
Even what he received from Abraham has now been expanded greatly.
He and that’s part of the reason of these stories existing.
But it is interesting.
I think the Scripture very much wants us to make the connection now between Isaac and Abraham.
So two quick things towards that point,
Clint.
First of all,
just the recognition that we said
that very much Isaac in the Scriptures gets very much a shortened attention span versus Abraham and
some of the stories that follow.
This is the point we’re trying to make,
that you get to this entire chapter 26.
And he doesn’t even get his own unique stories, right?
He’s getting stories that we’ve
heard before that are mirrors or parallels of his own father’s story.
So it is an identification
once again of whose promise,
whose line, whose seed, whose heritage is at play here.
And this is God’s promise at work.
And we see that reflected in the fact that Isaac is really in many ways
reliving these stories.
Another thing that we see here,
and I want to just put this up again quickly,
is this verse 28.
And this is the king of the Philistine speaking here, Abimelech.
“We see plainly the Lord’s been with you.
Let there be an oath between you and us,
and let us make a
covenant with you so that you’ll do us no harm.” It’s just a reminder once again that where we see
names in the Old Testament,
some of the authors and the family of faith who pass this down to us
had in mind more than just names.
It had in mind entire people groups and alliances and nations and histories.
And these stories
flesh out those relationships.
This is why even today,
reaching into the 21st century,
conflicts that exist in the area of Israel are complex
because they reach back to the very genesis of the peoples.
And it’s embedded in the history of who they are.
As Christians,
Gentile Christians specifically who come to texts like this,
we miss some of the nuance of that.
The danger,
and honestly,
the thing we lack,
Clint, when we miss that nuance
of the text is we may not have Philistines per se in our life,
but we all have those people who
fit categories in our mind.
And so I think there is a lesson to be learned from texts like this,
that even though there are times and places where there are people who fit into some stereotype,
that they still interact with God’s promise.
God’s promise is for all,
and we see these people work into the story.
Yeah,
and again, these are the stories not only of individuals,
but of nations, of countries, and we have to keep that in mind.
And to your point,
Michael, about Isaac,
you know,
Isaac is a transitional character.
It’s interesting if you read the covenant promise here, verse 24,
“And the very night the Lord appeared to Isaac and said,
‘I’m the God of your father Abraham.
Do not be afraid,
for I am with you.’ And then listen to this,
‘I will bless you and make your
offspring numerous for my servant Abraham’s sake.'” There is a sense as you read Isaac’s stories that
he’s kind of a placeholder.
Genesis is about to become fascinated with Jacob.
Jacob is a major
player in the story.
The Scripture has already told us myriad details about Abraham’s experience.
Isaac gets a chapter,
as you’ve said,
of stories we’ve heard before,
and he gets a promise that
will be done because of Abraham.
And so he’s an interesting character in this story.
I want to just read the end of this chapter,
and then it sets us up for getting into some of the other territory tomorrow.
“When Esau was 40 years old,
he married Judith, daughter of Bethheal the Hittite,
and Basimath, daughter of Elan the Hittite,
and they made life bitter for Isaac and Rebecca.”
So Esau has two wives that are both of the Hittites,
and to this family that already has
a hint of some favoritism,
and perhaps we certainly know from the end of the story some division
that’s hinted at only so far.
Now we add these two women who bring even more dividedness and contention,
and they make life bitter for Isaac and Rebecca.
So this is not a fun family gathering,
and that’s going to get probably only more so.
Yes, no.
A family counselor does not look to the
part of Genesis for what to do in the midst of family systems.
That’s 100% certain.
And I want to point out here,
the end of Abraham’s life is filled with grief,
sadness, of course, with the loss of losing Sarah.
We had that whole scene of burying and being brought to the earth.
What’s different about Isaac as we turn to tomorrow and we look to this pivotal scene
where in his age this major contention really takes foot.
We discover that here the promise
is still present, but his story doesn’t end the same way that Abraham’s does.
So that’s maybe a
little hook for tomorrow.
Hopefully you join us.
But I find tomorrow’s text, Clint,
really, we’ve not seen anything like it in Genesis thus far,
and I think it’s striking we see it with Isaac.
He gets one chapter of really fleshing out sort of the middle part of his life,
but really the meat of it comes at the end,
and I think that’s interesting.
You know, and tomorrow we start on
the Jacob and Esau story maybe more proper.
We’ve just had the prelude of it today.
And Michael, I think,
check me here, but I would say that this is one of the stories that people think they know
and yet are very surprised when they get into it.
We learn it as kind of a surface level
in Sunday school and in church,
but when you dig,
this whole next chapter is devoted to almost a
single event, and it is layers and layers deep,
and it is well crafted.
And I think even if it’s
a familiar story for you,
you may find out that there’s some things in it that we’ve not necessarily heard before.
It’s amazing.
We’re going to discover.
We need to just stop so we
can talk about tomorrow.
We’re going to discover God picks people who we probably wouldn’t pick,
and that’s actually good news when you turn it back on its head.
Yeah, so thanks for being here
today.
Hope we get a chance to see you tomorrow,
and have a good night.