Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
Sent to Paddan-aram, and Esau marries again
Genesis 28:1-9
1 Isaac called Jacob, blessed him, and commanded him, “You shall not take a wife of the daughters of Canaan. · WEB
Isaac blesses Jacob a second time, this time knowingly and in his own name, and Esau tries to fix his marriages by adding another.
This is the second blessing of Jacob in two chapters, and everything about it is different from the first.
The first was obtained by a disguise from a blind man who thought he was speaking to someone else. This one is given deliberately: Isaac called Jacob, blessed him, and commanded him. His eyes are still dim and he knows exactly who is in front of him.
And the content has changed. The stolen blessing was about dew, grain, wine and dominion — prosperity and precedence. This one is the covenant itself: May God Almighty bless you... that you may be a company of peoples, and give you the blessing of Abraham, to you and to your offspring with you, that you may inherit the land where you travel, which God gave to Abraham.
Isaac names it the blessing of Abraham and hands it on knowingly to the son God had chosen. Whatever the fraud accomplished, it was not this; the thing that actually mattered was given a chapter later, in daylight, to a man the giver could identify. The deception got Jacob the dew and the grain, and God's promise came to him from his father's own decision.
The instruction attached to it repeats the family's one firm rule — no wife from the daughters of Canaan — and sends him to Paddan-aram , to his mother's family, on the same errand a servant once ran for his father. The difference is that Abraham's servant went with ten camels and gold, and Jacob goes alone with nothing, on foot, running for his life.
Then the paragraph turns to Esau, and it is one of the quietly sad passages in Genesis.
He watches. Esau saw that Isaac had blessed Jacob and sent him away... and that Jacob obeyed his father and his mother. He is standing outside his brother's commissioning, taking it in. And then a sentence that shows he has understood at least part of the problem: Esau saw that the daughters of Canaan didn't please Isaac, his father.
He has grasped that his marriages grieved his parents, which is more insight than he has shown before. What he does with it is the tragedy. So Esau went to Ishmael, and took, in addition to the wives that he had, Mahalath the daughter of Ishmael.
He adds a third wife rather than addressing the two, and he chooses from the line that was itself sent away from the covenant — the son of the slave, the branch that was blessed and not chosen. It is an attempt to please his father by half-copying his brother, and it misses in every direction at once.
Nobody in the passage tells him so. Genesis reports the decision and moves on to Jacob, and Esau is left in the last verse of his own paragraph, doing his best and getting it wrong.
settled What this mark means