Esau Married Mahalath After Jacob Took the Road North

Click for full size

Two Hittite Wives in Isaac's Camp

Esau was forty when he took Judith and Basemath out of the daughters of Heth and brought them home to his father's tents. They were a bitterness of spirit to Isaac and to Rebekah. That is the whole account of it, and it went on for decades.

Esau hunted. He carried the game home himself and cooked it the way his father liked it, and Isaac loved him for it. Rebekah loved Jacob, who stayed in the tents. The camp had been split along that line since the boys could walk.

Years back Esau had come in from the field starving and sold his birthright to his brother for a bowl of red stew. Then he ate the stew, stood up, and walked out. He had never once gone back to look at what he traded.

Bless Me Also, My Father

Isaac went blind. He called Esau in and asked for venison, one good dish before he gave the blessing, and Esau took his quiver and went out to the field.

He came back with the meat cooked and found his father shaking. Jacob had already been there in goatskins, smelling of the field, and had gone out again with the blessing wrapped around him.

Esau cried out. A great cry, and a bitter one.

"Bless me, even me also, my father."

"Your brother came with cunning and has taken your blessing."

"Is he not rightly named Jacob? Twice now he has supplanted me. He took my birthright, and now look, he has taken my blessing." Then, lower: "Have you not reserved a blessing for me?"

Isaac gave him what was left over. A living off the fat of the earth and the dew of heaven, and a sword to live by, and service to his brother until the day he broke the yoke off his own neck. Esau took it and began counting. The days of mourning for his father were coming. After that he would kill Jacob.

The Charge Esau Was Not Meant to Hear

Rebekah found out, the way mothers find out. She sent for Jacob and told him to run to Haran, to her brother Laban, and stay there until his brother's heat went out of him.

Then she went to Isaac and said nothing at all about murder. She said she was weary of her life because of the daughters of Heth, and that if Jacob took a wife from them there was no point in her living.

So Isaac called Jacob and charged him. Get up, go to Padan of Aram, to the house of Bethuel your mother's father, and take a wife from there, from the daughters of Laban your mother's brother.

Then the rest of it, the part that could not be taken back a second time. God would give him the blessing of Abraham. Him, and his sons with him, so that the gift went out to children who did not exist yet. And God would give him the land he was only camping in, the land already handed over to Abraham, who had owned one burial cave in it and had been carried into that cave himself. Heaven called the whole country given anyway.

Esau was near enough to hear it. He heard the sending. He heard the charge that came with it: you shall not take a wife of the daughters of the Canaanites.

The Road to Ishmael

He had two of them in his own tents, sixty paces away, asleep.

He could not put them out. A man does not unmarry. He could not go north after his brother, because north was the road Jacob had just taken with everything on his back, and Esau was the reason he was on it.

So he went sideways. Out past the settled country to Ishmael, his father's half-brother, the other son of Abraham, the one who had been sent off into the wilderness with a skin of water and had built a nation there anyway. That house had daughters. That house had Abraham's blood in it, which was the whole point.

He took Mahalath, who is also called Basemath, daughter of Ishmael the son of Abraham, full sister of Nebaioth by the same mother. He got the lineage exactly right. He could have recited it to his father without a mistake.

Mahalath Entered a Full Camp

He did not send Judith away. He did not send Basemath the Hittite away. He brought a granddaughter of Abraham into a camp that already held both of them and set her up there in addition to his other wives.

Isaac was still blind. Rebekah was still weary of her life. Nothing in the tents smelled any different in the morning.

Somewhere north of all of it Jacob was sleeping on open ground with a stone under his head, carrying a promise made out to sons he had not fathered yet. Esau stayed where he was, married correctly at last, standing outside a covenant with a granddaughter of Abraham in one tent and two daughters of Heth in the next, holding the sword he had been told he would live by.