Two Angels Held Jacob Up as Isaac Felt the Goat Skins

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As Far as Her Partition

Rebekah brought her son through the tent as far as the curtain and stopped. That was her line. Past it lay the old man's room, and a woman had no business on the other side of the cloth.

She put the dish into his hands. "My son. This far I have come in with you. From here on, let your God come in with you."

Then she stepped back behind the partition, and Jacob was alone with two goat skins tied over his arms and the smell of stewed kid rising into his face.

He Had Already Given the Blessing Up

None of this had been his idea. The blessing had a name on it and the name was Esau's, and Jacob had let go of it the way a man lets go of something he was never going to hold. He was asleep on it. Only his heart was still awake.

His mother woke the rest of him. Go to the flock, she said. Bring me two good kids and I will make the dish your father loves, and you will carry it in to him.

He did not argue that it was dangerous. "Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man. What if my father feels me? Then I will be in his eyes as a mocker."

He said the word and then he told her what the word meant, in case she had missed what he was refusing. A man who makes a fool of his father has done the same thing as a man who bows to an idol. It is the same word in the prophets. Delusion. A work of nothing.

He was not frightened of being caught. He was frightened of what he would be afterward.

Arise, Please

He went in anyway. Isaac asked how the game had come so fast, and Jacob said, "Because the Lord your God brought it before me."

The old man's head came up off the pillow. That was not how Esau talked. Esau did not put God in a sentence about meat.

And there had been the other thing, before the dish was even set down. "Arise, please, and sit, and eat." Please. Later that same day the hunter would come through that same curtain with his own dish and say, "Let my father arise and eat of his son's game," and there was no please anywhere in it. Isaac had spent a lifetime listening to both of them from a dark room. He knew the voice the way a man knows his own child in the dark.

"Come near, my son," he said, "that I may feel you."

Wax in a Blind Man's Hands

Jacob's body went out from under him at the word near. Rabbi Yehoshua said he shook, and then he bent, folding the way wax folds when you hold it too close to a flame, and he was going down in front of his blind father with the skins still tied on his arms.

The Holy One sent two angels into the tent. Michael came in at Jacob's right side and Gabriel at his left, and He stood behind the boy Himself and took the rest of the weight.

"Jacob. Why are you afraid, with your own body bending under you? I am God. My legion is holding you up and bracing you, and you are afraid?"

Isaac's hands went up his arms. Hair where there should have been none. He felt him from wrist to elbow and could not make the two halves of his son agree with each other.

The Hands Are the Hands of Esau

"The voice is the voice of Jacob," he said, "and the hands are the hands of Esau."

Then Isaac said the rest of it, and the rest of it was not about the trick at all. Your strength is the harder of the two, he told the son under his hands. Esau lays hold of a man and the man is in his fist, and if the man runs, Esau is left with nothing. You are the other kind. A man can run to the far end of the world, and you will say one word in the house of prayer, and he will come back on his own legs.

Jacob went out past the curtain. His mother was standing exactly where she had said she would stand.

The Hour Fell Into His Hand

Esau came in with his dish and found the room emptied of everything he wanted, and Jacob did not stay in the country to be told about it. He ran. He never once stood and argued his right to what he had been handed. When the hour turns insolent, the sages say, do not brace yourself against it. Give it room.

Naboth braced. Ahab wanted his vineyard for a vegetable garden, Naboth would not sell his fathers' ground, and men of no character stood up in front of the town and swore against him until the stones came. Whoever plants his feet against the hour falls into its hand.

The others gave way and got the hour back. Abraham ran from Nimrod and returned to cut down sixteen kings in a single night. Isaac moved his tents when the Philistines told him to go, and Abimelech came to his door to admit he had seen that the Lord was with him. Joseph never said "I am your brother" while they were counting the silver, and his brothers fell on their faces in front of him later. Moses ran from Pharaoh and grew great in the eyes of Pharaoh's own servants. David went into a cave to get away from Saul, and Saul came out of the dark saying, "I know that you will surely be king."

Jacob went to the fields of Aram and stayed twenty years. When it was finished, it was Esau who loaded his wives and his cattle and walked away into another country to put distance between himself and his brother.