Tag Archives: Genesis 26-28

Daily Bible Study

January 9, 2024 Bible Study — Jacob Steals Esau’s Blessing

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Genesis 26-28.

Usually I try to write about spiritual lessons from the passage which I read. but today I just have some thoughts.

Why did Rebekah conspire with Jacob to trick Isaac into giving Jacob the blessing intended for Esau?  We were told in yesterday’s passage that Isaac loved Esau because Esau was a hunter of wild game and Isaac loved eating wild game, and we were told that Rebekah loved Jacob.  However,  the passage did not explain Rebekah’s love for Jacob.  It seems likely that Esau’s Hittite wives played a role in Rebekah’s preference for Jacob.  Actually, I suspect that the aspects of Esau’s personality which led him to take not one, but two Hittite wives contributed to Rebekah favoring Jacob over Esau.  Another question this passage raises: why wasn’t Isaac upset that Jacob had tricked him into giving him the blessing he intended for Esau?  Perhaps he was and the account just doesn’t mention it.  However, I think it likely that while Isaac loved Esau he was also disappointed in him.   After all, Abraham, Isaac’s father had arranged his marriage, but the passage suggests that Esau did not even consult his father before marrying two women whom neither of his parents liked.  Even after Isaac sent Jacob to Rebekah’s family to find a wife, Esau did not consult with his father over Isaac’s unhappiness with his wives.  Esau just went and married one of Ishmael’s daughters.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Daily Bible Study

January 9, 2023 Bible Study — Jacob’s Deception Was Part Of God’s Plan

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Genesis 26-28.

Well, my first thought was, “Well, I guess the idea that Jacob was the reason for the Hebrew phrase for “he grasps the heel” meaning “he deceives” was incorrect, because, after discovering that Jacob had stolen his father’s blessing, Esau says that Jacob was rightly named.  I struggle with the fact that, based on things we learn elsewhere in the Bible, God appears to have intended for Jacob to deceive Isaac into giving him the blessing which Isaac intended to give Esau.  Perhaps if Rebekah had not gotten Jacob to deceive his father God would have found another way for Jacob to gain the blessing.  We will never know.  However, this passage shows us that God uses our sinful behavior to accomplish his purposes.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Daily Bible Study

January 9, 2022 Bible Study –Isaac, Esau, and Jacob

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Genesis 26-28.

As I was reading this I was struck by something which does not fit with our usual understanding of Isaac (or even Abraham before him).  That something has several elements.  First, for some length of time Isaac lived in the city of Gerar.  Second, Isaac gained a great amount of wealth from farming.  Third, as part of gaining that wealth, Isaac also become militarily powerful.  We normally think of Isaac as being a nomadic herdsman, but this passage suggests that he spent a significant part of his life as a farmer.  This story also suggests to me that Isaac was contemporary with the early settlement by the Philistines on the Mediterranean coast, which would push the arrival of the Philistines back a couple hundred years from when conventional archeology dates it.

Next we have the story of Jacob stealing the blessing which Isaac intended for Esau.  I always feel bad for Esau in this story, but I also acknowledge that in some ways his loss of this blessing resulted from his lack of foresight in selling his birthright.  While we only have these two accounts of conflict between Esau and Jacob, it seems likely there were more.  Esau was impulsive and did not always think through the consequences of his actions.  In any case, Esau was murderously angry with Jacob, to the degree that Rebekah thought he might actually kill him given the opportunity.  So Rebekah arranged to send Jacob to her brother Laban for a few years.  There are two aspects to Jacob being sent off that we normally gloss over.  First, Rebekah said that she would send word to Jacob when he should return (might word from Rebekah had something to do with the timing of Jacob’s decision to leave Laban?). Second, Isaac makes clear to Jacob that he should return to the Land of Canaan at some point.  I am confident that Isaac was indirectly reminding Jacob of the story about Abraham’s servant obtaining Rebekah to be Isaac’s wife.  Isaac was telling Jacob that it was OK for him to go to Haran to obtain a wife, but he must not stay there.   Finally, there is Jacob’s vision of the stairway to heaven.  I want to focus on Jacob’s oath.  We tend to view this as Jacob making a deal with God: “God keep me safe and bring me safely back to my father’s household and I will server you.”  I think it was more of a fleece: “If God keeps me safe AND brings me back to my father’s household than God is THE God (not just a god) and I will worship Him, and only Him.”  Jacob was going off to a foreign land where he would have opportunities and he was unsure that he was ever going to come back.  He had heard the stories which his father told about God and the history and creation of the world, stories passed down from Abraham, but he was not sure he believed them.  After all, the people among whom they lived had different stories about the history and creation of the world.  Sure, he had just had a vision which seemed to confirm his father’s accounts, but was it really a vision, or just a dream?

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Daily Bible Study

January 9, 2021 Bible Study Have We Transitioned From The Lord Being “Your God” to The Lord Being “My God”?

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 26-28.

When Jacob, pretending to be Esau, brought the dish to Isaac, Isaac asked him how he was able to find it so quickly.  Jacob replied that “The Lord, your God, gave me success.”  Jacob does not at this point consider the Lord to be his own God, merely the God of his father.  Later, when he had a vision of a stairway to Heaven, he vows that if God brings him safely back to his father’s house, then the Lord would be his God.  This is a process that each of us must go through at some point.  We must transition from the Lord being someone else’s God to being our God.  If we are lucky, that someone else is one or both of our parents.  However, if the Lord was our parents’ God, sometimes we think that He just automatically becomes ours, but we must each choose Him, just as Jacob chose Him.

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January 9, 2020 Bible Study

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 26-28.

It struck me today as I compared what happened when Isaac said that Rebekah was his sister rather than his wife to when Abram did the same with Sarai that what happened in Egypt differed from what happened in Philistia.  In Egypt, God sent plagues upon the Pharaoh and his household.  In Philistia, God merely appeared to the first Abimelech when he took Sarai to be his wife.  The second Abimelech realized that Rebekah was Isaac’s wife before anyone did anything.  The thing of interest being that the Philistines recognized the sin of taking another man’s wife to bed, while the Egyptians only responded to the consequences.  The second Abimelech saw value in allying with Isaac.  Initially, he thought that Isaac would assimilate into the population and increase his own wealth.  When Abimelech realized that Isaac would not assimilate and had become powerful enough to be competition, he asked Isaac to move on.  Nevertheless, once Isaac had moved far enough to not be competition to his own power, Abimelech made a treaty with Isaac, just as the previous Abimelech had done with Abraham.

 

Daily Bible Study

January 9, 2019 Bible Study

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 26-28.

There is no reason to believe that the Abimelech who Isaac interacted with was the same as the one whom his father, Abraham, had interacted with.  In fact, there is reason to believe that Abimelech was more of a title than proper name.  One thing we do see is that Isaac had a similar relationship with this Abimelech as Abraham had with the previous one.  First, he tells him and his people that his wife is his sister. Then he gets into repeated disputes over water rights with Abimelech’s servants. Finally, he enters into a treaty with Abimelech.  In both Abraham’s and Isaac’s case these events illustrate the trajectory of their lives.  At the first encounter, Abraham and Isaac were relatively weak compared to Abimelech.  As time went by they became more powerful until Abimelech was frightened that they might raid his lands causing him great problems.  

I have never quite known what to make of the story of Jacob stealing Esau’s blessing from their father Isaac.  We know from yesterday’s passage that Isaac favored Esau and Rebekah favored Jacob, but that does not fully explain Rebekah plotting to have Jacob steal Esau’s blessing.  I think that Rebekah did this more because of Esau’s wives than anything else.  Perhaps she even did it to set up the excuse to send Jacob to her brother to find a wife.  Perhaps the most telling part of all of this is that when Esau learned that Jacob had gone to his Uncle Laban’s to find a wife, he went to his Uncle Ishmael to obtain a third wife.  Esau had married his first two wives without consulting his parents.  When he realized how strongly his father disliked the local women, he went, without consulting either of his parents, to get a third whom he hoped would be more to their liking. 

Daily Bible Study

January 9, 2018 Bible Study — Will We Make God Our God?

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 26-28.

    The first thing which struck me in this passage was the comment about Isaac harvesting 100 times more grain than he planted one year. We think of Isaac as a nomadic shepherd, yet here we have it being recounted that he planted crops…and the harvest he got from those crops played a significant role in him being a wealthy man. Clearly Isaac was starting to put down roots. It was a short time after this that the ruler of the Philistines demanded that he move because he was becoming a threat to them. It took some time before Isaac was able to find a place far enough from the Philistines to settle again without conflict, but once he did they made a treaty with him.

    We get yet another hint about the differences between the Canaanites and the family of Abraham in today’s passage. We are told that Esau married two Hittite women and that they made life miserable for Isaac and Rebekah. We are given no hint as to what they did which made life miserable for them, just that it was bad enough to make a valid excuse for sending Jacob off to Rebekah’s family. Further telling is that when Esau learned that Jacob had been sent to their Uncle Laban to marry one of his daughters Esau married one of Ishmael’s daughters. All of this indicates that there was some significant cultural difference between Abraham’s family and the people living in the land of Canaan. Related to this whole mystery, at least in my mind, is Jacob’s reaction to his vision at Bethel. After seeing the vision, Jacob declares that if God will see him safely on his journey and home again that God will indeed be his god as if there were other gods to choose from.

Daily Bible Study

January 9, 2017 Bible Study — Isaac and Rebekah

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 26-28.

    When Isaac lived among the Philistines he did something which Abraham had done twice. He told the locals that his wife was his sister. However, Isaac’s lie came out when the two of them were seen sharing public displays of affection. Now ordinarily, my comment would be on the lack of faith in God demonstrated by Isaac here. However, it struck me that it actually tells us something about Isaac and Rebekah’s marriage. The fact that Isaac and Rebekah shared public displays of affection, even when they were trying to pass themselves off as brother and sister, tells us a lot about their relationship. Despite having two sons (and only two sons), it is clear that Isaac and Rebekah were deeply in love, and still attracted to each other.

    Usually when we look at the account of Rebekah and Jacob tricking Isaac into giving Jacob the blessing he intended to give Esau (which, it could be argued, Esau had sold to Jacob for a bowl of soup years earlier), we focus on the mechanics of the trickery, or the dynamics of the relationship between Jacob and Esau, or sometimes on Rebekah’s role. However, it struck me today that even after being tricked in a way which must have angered him, Isaac continued to love Rebekah and Jacob. I suspect that Isaac knew that Rebekah’s reason for sending Jacob to Paddan-Aram was as much to protect Jacob from Esau as it was to get him a wife from her people (who were technically Isaac’s people as well). So, despite being tricked by his wife and son in a way which must have angered him, Isaac still loved them.

    Finally, I want to point out that Isaac and Rebekah had a problem with their sons taking wives from among the local people similar to the one Abraham had. Esau married two local women. We are not told what about them made Isaac and Rebekah unhappy. However, whatever caused the dislike was something related to the actions of Esau’s wives, not just because of who their families were.

Daily Bible Study

January 9, 2016 Bible Study — The Great Men of Faith Had Flaws

Starting on New Year’s Day (well, technically, on New Year’s Ever), I switched from using One Year Bible Online for my daily Bible reading to the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net”.

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Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 26-28.

    The passage tells us that Isaac moved into the land controlled by the Philistines during a drought after being told by God not to go to Egypt. While among the Philistines, Isaac followed a strategy which his father, Abraham, had used. He, initially told everyone that Rebekah was his sister. However, Isaac could not help himself and treated Rebekah like a wife in public and Abimelech, the king of the area, saw this. It is interesting that Isaac told the same lie about his wife which Abraham had used twice. Both Abraham and Isaac are held up as men of great faith, yet both of them felt the need to lie about their relationship with their wives out of fear of what men would do to them. Perhaps, my faith is not as weak as I fear.

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    When Isaac was getting old, losing his sight, and beginning to be in poor health, he decided to bestow his blessing upon Esau. However, Rebekah conspired with Jacob to steal that blessing for Jacob. Despite his deceitful behavior, God appeared to Jacob at Bethel as he fled from his brother’s justified anger. The key message in these stories is that even with our flaws God can use us to accomplish His great things.