Esau Married Mahalat to Please Isaac and Kept His Other Wives

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He Came In With the Dish After the Blessing Was Gone

Esau had hunted it himself and cooked it himself, the way his father liked it, and he carried it in warm.

"Let my father arise, and eat from his son's game, so that your soul will bless me."

Isaac began to shake. Not a tremor. The whole body, on the bed, in front of his elder son, because the blessing had gone out of the room an hour earlier on a younger man wearing goatskins on his arms.

Esau put the dish down and cried out, and then went quiet, and then did the arithmetic. The old man would not last forever. The days of mourning for his father were coming, and after the mourning there would be a brother to deal with, and no witnesses left who mattered.

He never got the blessing. What those hands earned him was something else. Everything his line would later close its grip on, all the way down to Rome, it held by the merit of that one meal carried in to a blind man, the way a spider holds a wall with nothing but hands. And the words he used at the door came back to him in the end, turned around. He had said, let my father arise. What rose was God, and His enemies scattered.

A Third Wife, and Not One Sent Away

The wives were the other wound, and that one was still open.

Esau had married out of Canaan, twice, and both women were a daily grief to his parents. He could see it. He was not a subtle man but he was not blind either, and he could see what his father's face did when they came into a tent.

So he rode south to Ishmael's camp and asked for Mahalat, the sister of Nevayot, Abraham's own granddaughter. Right family. Right blood. A man turning himself around in front of his father.

Heaven began to let it go. Something was released, and the road back was open for about the length of that ride.

Then he came home with her and put her in the house with the other two, and sent nobody away.

Divorce the first ones and it would have been a return. What he did instead was add. Pain on top of pain, thorn on top of thorn, one more woman into a house that was already full, and the house stayed exactly what it had been with a new wife in it and a father who still could not sit at ease in his own tent.

Jacob Went North Because Staying Was a Snare

Jacob left Beersheba for Haran while all this was going on, and he did not leave because travel improves a man.

Two households in that country had turned against heaven and were angry, and their anger had a name in it, and the name was his. A snare had been set out of other men's mouths. He walked out of it northward with a staff and nothing else, and stayed away twenty years.

Two Fears in One Night

The messengers came back from Seir with a short report. Your brother is on his way to meet you. He has four hundred men.

Jacob was very frightened, and he was distressed, and those are not the same thing.

He was frightened that he would be killed. He was distressed that he would kill. Both roads out of the next morning ended with a brother dead, and he could not find a third road, and he said so to himself in plain words. If he overcomes me, he kills me. If I overcome him, I kill him.

Then he started counting what his brother had, the way a man counts spears on a ridge.

Twenty years Esau had been living in the Land. Twenty years Jacob had not. Twenty years Esau had gotten up every morning within reach of his father and mother and served them face to face, while Jacob had been in Haran arguing over spotted sheep. Say Esau comes at him carrying all of that.

And under that, the worse thought. Esau had said it out loud once, and Jacob had never stopped hearing it. The days of mourning for my father will approach. Say the old man was already dead. Say the clock had already run out and nobody had sent word.

God had told him to go back to the land of his fathers, in those words, and he was terrified anyway, because a promise in this world is not a receipt.

The Children Are Tender

Nobody died. They met, and Esau ran, and the two of them stood in the road holding each other and weeping in front of four hundred armed men who had been brought for something else.

Then Esau made his offer. Let us go together. I will travel in front of you.

Jacob said no, and he said it in the only terms that could not be argued with.

"My lord knows that the children are tender, and the nursing flocks and cattle are upon me. If they drive them hard one day, all the flocks will die."

Lambs born that season. Toddlers. Ewes still feeding. Push that column at a hunter's pace for a single day and there would be nothing left of it by evening, and no army in the world can walk slowly enough for a newborn animal.

Esau took his four hundred and went back to Seir the same day, at the pace of men with nothing fragile to carry. Jacob went the other way at the pace of the youngest thing in his camp, and every living creature that had come out of Haran with him arrived.