Eden Entered the Tent When Jacob Stole the Blessing

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The Boy in Goat Skins

Jacob came through the tent flap with his brother's clothes on his back and strips of kid hide tied over his arms and the back of his neck.

"My father."

"Here I am. Which of my sons are you?"

"I am Esau your firstborn. I have done what you told me." Then, because he was a polite young man even while he stole his brother's blessing off a blind man, he added, "Get up, please. Sit. Eat what I hunted."

He said please to a blind old man he was in the middle of robbing. That courtesy did not go nowhere. Long afterward, when the ark went out ahead of the camp and the tribes broke camp behind it, the words that went up with it were: arise, LORD, and let Your enemies scatter. A son had asked his father to rise, and the request came back on the whole world.

The Smell of a Field

Isaac could not see him and could not place the voice, so he worked with what he had. Come close. Let me feel you. The hands were wrong for the voice, hairy where they should have been smooth, and he could not resolve it, and he blessed him anyway, and the wicked men who would one day come out of this son stayed as hidden from him as the boy in front of him.

Then he said, come near and kiss me. And when Jacob bent down he told him a thing that was not part of the blessing at all: you will lie beside me when I am buried, and nobody else will.

The kiss put Isaac's face into the goat hide.

There is nothing in a household that smells worse than a fresh kid skin. It is the one thing a blind man would have known instantly, and it was pressed against his mouth. What he said was, the smell of my son is the smell of a field the LORD has blessed.

Because Gan Eden (the Garden of Eden) had entered the tent behind Jacob. The Garden itself had come in through the flap at his back and stood there in the room the whole time the blessing was being said, and that was what the old man had his face in.

Gehenna Came In Behind Esau

Esau got back from the field, cooked, and brought his plate in, and what he said was not please.

"Let my father get up."

It was the tone a man uses on a household idol he is standing upright in its niche, setting it on its base so it faces the room the right way. And Gehenna (the realm of judgment after death) came into the tent behind him the way the Garden had come in behind his brother, and the disgrace arrived with the spite, in the same breath, at the same doorway.

He was not punished for the hunting or the plate or even for the murderous years that came after. He was punished for one sentence. God answered him in the identical words He had used to reward Jacob's please, turned around: may God arise, and His enemies scatter. Some men are swept off without a hearing. That is the one who spoke to his father like that.

The Blessing Given Again in Daylight

Jacob went years with those blessings unsettled in his hands. He had them and he did not know if he had them. They had been taken in the dark off a man who thought he was somebody else, and a thing acquired that way never quite sits still.

Then Isaac sent for him. No disguise, no stew, no skins. He blessed him deliberately, on his own initiative, knowing exactly who was standing in front of him, and he gave him an instruction with it: do not take a wife from the daughters of Canaan, and stay away from the daughters of Aner and Eshkol and Mamre, who were his grandfather's own allies.

A contract holds when the men who signed it confirm it, and that was Isaac putting his hand to what he had already given.

There was a king's son who used to go out at night and dig in a particular spot for a pound of gold that was buried there. The king watched him do it for a while. Then he came out and said, why like this, in the dark? Come and take it in the daylight.

Jacob listened to his father and his mother and went to Padan Aram. Samson, later, looked at a woman and told his father to get her for him because she was fitting in his own eyes. One of them heard counsel. One of them saw what he wanted.

The Traitors Who Still Smelled Good

Two men who sold out their own people came back, at the very end, smelling like that field.

When the enemy wanted the Temple Mount desecrated they decided a Jew should go in first so it would start with his own people. They picked Yosef Meshita and told him whatever he carried out he could keep. He went in and came out with the golden lampstand. They said a common man has no business owning that, go back in, take something else, it is yours. He would not. They offered him three years of tax revenue. He would not. "Is it not enough that I angered my God once," he said, "that I should anger Him twice?" They put him on a carpenter's sawhorse and cut him in half, and the whole time he was shouting one sentence: woe to me that I angered my Creator.

Yakum of Tzerorot rode past his uncle on a Sabbath on a good horse while the beam they were executing Sabbath-keepers on was being dragged along in front of him, and he called out something clever about whose master had given whom the better mount. His uncle answered him and the answer went into him like snake venom. He went home and executed himself by all four court deaths at once, beam and rope and fire and sword arranged so that each one would find him. His uncle dozed off later and saw the man's bier go past him through the air, and understood that Yakum had got into the Garden a little ahead of him.