Esau Lost Isaac's Blessing by Four Hours

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Four Hours in an Empty Field

Esau went out early, because his father had asked for venison and there was a blessing waiting on the other end of the meat. He knew that country. He knew where the game watered and which way the wind would sit after the sun cleared the ridge, and on any ordinary morning he would have been back before the tent flaps warmed up, since none of this was difficult for him.

The field gave him nothing. He worked it until the shadows turned around, and four hours went by, and four hours is long enough for a confident man to become a frightened one. His father was old and blind and had asked for one thing, but there was somebody else in that camp who wanted what was being handed out.

He Dressed a Dog as Venison

So he stopped hunting and solved the problem the other way. He killed a dog and made it look like game.

That took a minute or two, though it cost him more than the four hours had. He carried the thing back with his hands not clean and his story already assembled, and the whole way down he had to keep telling himself that a blind man cannot tell one carcass from another. The meat in his hand was a confession before he reached the tent. His mood set hard around it, and by the time he lifted the flap he was not a son bringing his father supper. He was a man delivering something he needed accepted.

Arise, Please, Sit

Jacob had used the four hours.

He came in wearing his brother's clothes with his arms made rough, and he did not push. "Arise, please, sit and eat of my game," he said. Please. Sit. He put a chair under the old man before he put a plate in front of him, and the courtesy did the work that the disguise on its own could never have done, because Isaac was blind and not stupid and had already caught the wrong voice once.

Isaac reached out and felt the arms. He pulled the cloth close and got the smell of open country off it, so the hands and the clothes outvoted the voice. He ate, and he drank, and then he blessed him, and a blessing spoken by a father in that hour does not go back into the mouth it came out of.

Isaac Shook Harder Than on Moriah

Then the flap moved again and Esau was standing in the tent with his dog meat. "Let my father arise and eat of his son's venison."

No please. No bending. The sentence came in with its boots on, and the old man heard the difference before he understood what it meant.

Isaac started to shake. He had lain on the wood on Moriah as a boy with his own father over him and the knife already up, and the sky had said nothing for a long moment, and he had been less frightened then than he was now on his own bed with a bowl in front of him. On the mountain the danger had come from a man obeying God. Here it had come through his tent, past his hands, past his nose, in the voice of one son and the arms of another, and he could not find the seam. "Who then is he that hath been the mediator between me and the Lord, to make the blessing reach Jacob?" he cried, and he suspected his wife's hand in it.

Nobody answered him. Jacob was already out of the tent, so the only man left to answer was the one standing there holding the wrong animal.

The Oath He Would Not Keep

Years later Rebekah was carried into the double cave and buried by both her sons together, near Sarah, in the place the family called the eternal house. Isaac called the two of them in not long after and told them he was going the way of his fathers, to the eternal house where his fathers were. An oath was sworn in front of him, and sworn again in front of her, while both of them could still hear it.

When they were both in the ground Jacob put it to Esau directly, because there was nobody left above the earth who could hold either of them to anything. "Is this the oath that thou didst swear to thy father and again to thy mother before they died? Thou hast broken the oath, and on the moment that thou didst swear to thy father wast thou condemned."

Esau did not flinch at the word oath, because he had stopped believing there was anything in it. "Neither the children of men nor the beasts of the earth have any oath of righteousness which in swearing they have sworn valid for ever," he said, "but every day they devise evil one against another, and how each may slay his adversary and foe." Then he finished it. "Thou dost hate me and my children for ever, and there is no observing the tie of brotherhood with thee."

The soft words went the other way. Arise, and sit, the two words a younger brother had laid carefully in front of a blind man, came up again as Israel's cry when the Ark went out ahead of the camp and again when it came to rest. Arise, O Lord, and let your enemies be scattered. Return, O Lord, to the myriads of Israel. The hard sentence is still lying where Esau threw it down, waiting on his sons: let God arise, let his enemies be scattered.