Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
The voice is Jacob's voice
Genesis 27:1-29
1 When Isaac was old, and his eyes were dim, so that he could not see, he called Esau his elder son, and said to him, “My son?” He said to him, “Here I am.” · WEB
Four people act badly in one room, and the blessing that God had already assigned is obtained by a lie that nobody needed to tell.
Every person in this chapter is in the wrong, and the narrative is scrupulous about distributing it.
Isaac begins it. He is old and blind and intends to bless Esau — a son who sold his birthright for a bowl of stew, married two Hittite women who grieved both parents, and about whom God had said before either boy was born that the elder will serve the younger Genesis 25:23. Isaac is proceeding against an oracle he must have known and against his son's own record. And the passage tells us what governs him: he wants venison first, savory food, such as I love, and the blessing is arranged around a meal.
Rebekah is listening at the door, which is how she learns of it, and her response is not to appeal to the oracle. It is to organize a fraud in detail — the goats, the cooking, Esau's clothes, the skins on the hands and neck — and to overrule her son's one hesitation with a line she will pay for: Let your curse be on me, my son. Only obey my voice.
Jacob's objection is worth noting for what it is not. He does not say the plan is wrong; he says What if my father touches me? His concern is being caught, and the risk he names is that he would seem to him as a deceiver — which is precisely what he is about to be.
And then he does it, and the lie is worse than the plan required. I am Esau your firstborn is direct enough. But when his father asks how the hunting went so quickly, he answers: Because Yahweh your God gave me success. He brings God into the deception as a witness, and does it in a sentence that quietly disowns him — your God, not his.
The scene is unbearable in its details. The blind man is suspicious throughout and cannot resolve it. He asks who is there, feels the hands, remarks on the voice, and asks a second time — Are you really my son Esau? — and receives a flat I am. He requires a kiss and smells the clothes. Four separate attempts to verify, all defeated by a disguise his wife assembled.
And his own sentence names the truth he cannot act on: The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau. He heard exactly who it was and trusted his hands instead.
The blessing itself is what everyone wanted: dew, fatness, grain and wine, nations bowing, lordship over his brothers, and the promise given to Abraham that those who bless him are blessed and those who curse him cursed.
What has to be held together is that the outcome was God's and the method was not. God had assigned the younger son the greater place before the twins were born, and no deception was required to bring it about. Jacob got what was already his by promise, by a means that cost him twenty years of exile, a father he never saw again, and a mother he never saw again. Genesis never says the fraud was necessary. It shows a family trying to manage God's purpose by fraud, achieving it, and paying for it for a generation.
settled What this mark means