Esau

← Encyclopedia

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.

Born red, born hairy

The twins fight before they are born. Rebekah, barren and then suddenly pregnant, feels them struggling inside her and goes to inquire of the Lord; the answer she receives is the hinge on which the whole cycle turns — two nations are in her womb, two peoples already divided, and the elder shall serve the younger. Then the births themselves are staged as a single contest in two acts. The first child comes out red all over, hairy as a cloak, and they call him Esau. The second follows with his hand gripping his brother’s heel, and they call him Jacob.

Almost every name in the passage is a pun, and the puns are the narrative’s way of folding a man into a people. Esau the red one prefigures Edom, ʾedom, the ruddy land and nation; Esau the hairy one prefigures Seir, śēʿīr, the rough hill country southeast of the Dead Sea that the Edomites would hold, the word for “hairy” and the name of their highland reaching for the same sound. Jacob’s name, set against the heel he grasps, ʿaqeb, will be turned later in the cycle into a verb of supplanting — when Esau, robbed a second time, cries that his brother was rightly named, for he has now overreached him twice. The text does not derive these names by the rules of philology so much as it makes them rhyme: a man’s body at birth, the color and the roughness of him, sounded out until it becomes the body of a nation. Esau enters the story already an etymology of Edom, already more than himself.

The two losses

The narrative gives him two losses, and they are of different kinds. The first he brings on himself; the second is done to him.

In the first, Esau comes in from the open country famished, and finds Jacob cooking a stew of red lentils. He asks to gulp down some of the red stuff — the text lets him reach for it by its color, ʾadom, and notes that this is why he was called Edom — and Jacob names his price: the birthright, the elder son’s double portion and standing, sold on the spot for a single meal. Esau swears it away, eats, drinks, rises, and goes, and the narrator closes the scene with a verdict rare for its bluntness: thus Esau despised his birthright. It is the one place the text passes open judgment on him. He has traded the long inheritance for the short hunger, the lasting thing for the thing in front of him, and the bargain is treated less as theft by Jacob than as contempt by Esau — a man who could not see past the day.

The second loss is the famous one, and here the moral weight shifts entirely. The blind and dying Isaac means to bless his elder son before he dies, and sends Esau out to hunt and prepare the meal that is to precede the blessing. Rebekah, who has carried the womb-oracle since before the birth, moves while he is gone. She dresses Jacob in Esau’s clothes and binds goatskin over his smooth arms and neck, so that the half-blind father, feeling for the son he cannot see, takes the rough touch and the smell of the field for proof and gives away the blessing he meant for the other. When Esau returns with his game prepared and learns what has been done, Isaac trembles violently, and the elder son cries out — a great and exceedingly bitter cry, in the Hebrew Bible’s own phrasing, asking whether his father has only one blessing, begging to be blessed too. The blessing already given cannot be recalled; the spoken word, in this world, is a thing that has left the hand and cannot be taken back. Isaac gives Esau a lesser word instead — a life by the sword, away from the fatness of the earth, serving his brother, until at last he should break the yoke from his neck. The cry over the lost blessing is among the sharper passages of grief in the Hebrew Bible, and it is grief on the side of the man the tradition would later cast as the villain. The wrong at the blessing is done to Esau.

Enmity and the weeping

Esau resolves to kill Jacob once their father is mourned, and Rebekah sends the younger son away — to her brother Laban in Paddan-aram, ostensibly for a wife, in fact to outlast the murder in his brother’s heart. The two part in enmity, and the cycle leaves Esau to take wives among the daughters of the land — Hittite and Canaanite and Hivite women whose names Genesis records, a grief to Isaac and Rebekah and a quiet mark of the line going its own way, outside the endogamous marriages the patriarchal narrative prizes.

Years later Jacob returns from exile rich and afraid, having heard that Esau is coming to meet him with four hundred men. He divides his camp, sends wave after wave of livestock ahead as a gift, wrestles a stranger through the night at the ford of the Jabbok and is renamed Israel, and limps toward the reunion braced for war. What he meets is not war. Esau runs to him, falls on his neck, kisses him, and the two of them weep. The brother who had every claim to vengeance gives it up at the sight of him; he is reluctant even to take the gift, saying he has enough, and accepts it only when Jacob presses. Then he turns back to his own country, to Seir, and the brothers separate for good — not in hatred now but in difference, each to his own land and his own descendants. It is the most generous Esau in the whole cycle, and it is set against a Jacob still maneuvering, still hedging, declining to travel at his brother’s pace and never in fact following him to Seir. The reconciliation scene gives Esau a magnanimity the schemer does not match.

From a man to two nations

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. Genesis closes the account of Esau with a long genealogy that completes the move from person to nation outright: Esau is Edom, settled in the hill country of Seir, father of chiefs and a line of kings who reigned in Edom before any king reigned in Israel. The man dissolves into the map. From that point the figure is read less as an individual than as the ancestor through whom one people accounts for the existence, the kinship, and the long rivalry of a neighbor.

Jewish tradition hardened this further. In the aggadic readings gathered in Genesis Rabbah — the great midrash on Genesis redacted in Roman Palestine toward the end of the fourth century and the start of the fifth, in the generations after the empire turned Christian — Esau as Edom became the standing cipher for Rome, the wicked kingdom, malkhut ha-rishʿah. The twins wrestling in the womb were read as Israel and Rome already contending before history began; the prophecy spoken over Esau was tied to the emperor Hadrian, under whom the Bar Kokhba revolt was crushed; the blessing of dominion that Isaac could not unsay was made to underwrite Rome’s long rule over the world. Two facts of history gave the identification its grip. The Edomites themselves had been absorbed into Judea — the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus, late in the second century before the common era, conquering Idumea and bringing the Edomites under the covenant — so that Herod the Great, the king Rome set over the Jews, was an Idumean, an Edomite ruling Israel in Rome’s name. And then the empire that destroyed the Temple and exiled the people became, in the fourth century, a Christian empire claiming the patriarchs’ inheritance for itself. The brother who took the blessing by the wrong hand had, in this reading, come back as the empire that ruled the world by the wrong claim. The cipher outlasted Rome itself, carried forward in medieval Jewish thought to stand for Christendom at large — the long study of which Gerson Cohen made the subject of his essay on Esau as a symbol in the early Middle Ages.

The line that fixed the antagonism in scripture is a single half-verse. The prophet Malachi, in the post-exilic disappointment of Persian-period Judah, opens his book with God’s love declared to Israel and challenged by a people no longer sure of it; the proof offered is the fate of the brother-nation — Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated — with Esau’s mountains laid waste and his heritage given to the jackals (see the Book of Malachi). In Malachi the contrast is national and historical: Edom devastated, Israel spared, the love and the hatred measured in the standing of two kingdoms. Paul, writing to the church at Rome, took the half-verse somewhere else. In the ninth chapter of his letter to the Romans he set Malachi’s words beside the womb-oracle of Genesis and read the pair as a statement about individuals and divine choice — the twins not yet born, having done neither good nor evil, the elder already named to serve the younger, so that God’s purpose might stand by the one who calls and not by works. It is in that Pauline use, not in Genesis and not in Malachi, that Esau becomes the type of the one passed over before he could act — the proof-text of an election made in advance, which later Christian theology would build into its accounts of grace and which the rabbis, reading the same verse the other way, answered by making Esau into Rome. The doctrine that Paul draws from the line belongs to his tradition and his argument; the figure the doctrine is hung on is a man Genesis had already weighted with grief.

The kingdom southeast of Judah

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 kingdom of the Iron Age, set in the rugged country southeast of the Dead Sea and south of Judah, and the narrative’s interest in it is historically intelligible whether or not any individual ancestor lies behind the name.

The standard scholarly account of that kingdom is John Bartlett’s Edom and the Edomites, which traces it from the late second millennium through the Persian period — its land and settlement, its kings and its end, its religion and its handful of inscriptions. The lowland heart of early Edom lay in the copper district of the Wadi Faynan, where excavation at the site of Khirbat en-Nahas has uncovered industrial-scale smelting in monumental phases reaching back into the twelfth, eleventh, and tenth centuries before the common era — earlier than some reconstructions had allowed for any organized Edomite polity, and the occasion of a sharp dating debate between the excavators and their critics over when, exactly, a kingdom can be said to have formed. The highland capital, Busayra, the Bozrah of the Hebrew prophets, sat on the plateau above, the core of the kingdom as it is best attested in the eighth to sixth centuries. The kingdom whose center shifted between the copper of the lowlands and the fortresses of the highlands is the historical thing the genealogy of Esau stands over: a kindred people, close in language and worship, often at war with Judah, explained in the only idiom an ancestral narrative had — by making the two peoples brothers, and the older brother the one who let his inheritance go.

The figure inside the narrative is not the figure the reception made of him. The portrait Genesis draws 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.

Texts and scholarship

The primary witness is the Esau material of Genesis: the womb-oracle and the births in chapter 25, the sale of the birthright in the same chapter, the stolen blessing and the bitter cry in chapter 27, the night at the Jabbok and the weeping reunion in chapters 32 and 33, and the genealogy that turns the man into the nation of Edom in chapter 36. These belong to the Torah, the first division of the Tanakh and the five books of the Pentateuch, and the source-critical reading of those books sees the cycle as woven from more than one strand, the patriarchal narratives shaped and written down long after any events they might preserve.

For the historical kingdom, the indispensable study is John R. Bartlett, Edom and the Edomites (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989), the monograph that organizes the biblical, Egyptian, and archaeological evidence into a single account, and whose scholarly reception established it as the reference work on the subject. The archaeology of lowland Edom that has reopened the question of when the kingdom formed is set out in the excavation volume on the Faynan copper district, New Insights into the Iron Age Archaeology of Edom, reporting the radiocarbon-dated phases at Khirbat en-Nahas; the dissenting chronology that reads the kingdom as a later formation is argued in Israel Finkelstein’s response on Khirbat en-Nahas, Edom and biblical history. On the reception, Gerson D. Cohen’s Esau as Symbol in Early Medieval Thought (in Alexander Altmann, ed., Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Harvard University Press, 1967) remains the classic study of how the brother became the empire; the rabbinic identification itself is laid out in the resource on Genesis Rabbah and the image of Rome, where the twins in the womb are read as Israel and the wicked kingdom. The Pauline use of Malachi’s line is fixed in the ninth chapter of Romans, the Edomite oracle in the opening verses of Malachi, and the contest between the two readings — Esau the passed-over individual, Esau the oppressing empire — runs the whole length of the figure’s afterlife.

→ Related: Isaac · Cain · Book Of Malachi · Epistle To The Romans · Paul The Apostle · Abraham · Iron Age · Roman Empire · Torah · Tanakh · Pentateuch · Circumcision