Esau

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Esau is the elder of the twin sons of Isaac and Rebekah in the book of Genesis: a hunter and man of the open country, brother of Jacob, and the figure the biblical narrative names as the forefather of the Edomites. The name is bound up in the story’s own wordplay — he is born red and hairy, and the text links him by sound to Edom (“red”) and to Seir, the hill country its descendants would hold.

The narrative gives him two losses. In the first, returning famished from the hunt, he sells his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of red lentil stew, a bargain the text treats as a man despising what he was owed. In the second, the blind and dying Isaac means to bless his elder son, and Jacob — coached by Rebekah, his skin disguised in goatskin to mimic Esau’s roughness — takes the blessing in his place. Esau’s cry when he learns of it, and the lesser blessing his father can still give him, are among the sharper passages of grief in the Hebrew Bible. The two brothers part in enmity; years later, when Jacob returns from exile braced for war, they meet and weep and embrace instead, and Esau turns back to his own land.

Read as more than a man, Esau became a type. The brothers struggle already in the womb, and the oracle Rebekah receives — that the elder shall serve the younger — frames the whole cycle as a contest of peoples rather than persons: Israel and Edom, the two nations descended from the twins, whose later hostility the patriarchal story is in part written to explain. Jewish tradition hardened this further, reading Esau as Edom and Edom in turn as Rome, so that he came to personify the oppressing empire. The line “Jacob I loved, Esau I hated,” from the prophet Malachi, is taken up by Paul in the letter to the Romans as a proof-text for divine election made before either child had done anything — a use that fixed Esau, in much later Christian reading, as the figure of the one passed over.

What scholarship can establish is narrower than what the tradition made of him. The Esau cycle is an origin story, an account told by one people of why a neighboring and kindred people existed and why relations with it ran as they did; Edom was a real Iron Age kingdom southeast of Judah, and the narrative’s interest in it is historically intelligible whether or not any individual ancestor lies behind the name. The portrait is not wholly unsympathetic. He is rash and shortsighted in the bargain over the stew, but the wrong done at the blessing is done to him, and the reconciliation scene gives him a generosity the schemer Jacob does not match. The later weight he carries — rejected brother, hated nation, emblem of the worldly against the chosen — is reception laid over a story whose own Esau is a more divided thing.

→ Related: Isaac · Cain · Book Of Malachi · Epistle To The Romans