Esau Got a Blessing Too and He Knew It

Esau sent messengers to his brother Jacob, and the message they carried was not a threat. It was a theological argument.

"Why dost thou envy me in respect to the blessing wherewith my father blessed me?" the messengers asked on Esau's behalf. "Is it that the sun shineth in my land, and not in thine? Or doth the dew and the rain fall only upon my land, and not upon thine?" The logic was clean and strange: if my father blessed me with the dew of heaven, he also blessed you with the fatness of the earth. If he said peoples will serve me, he also said you will live by your sword. We each received something real. The blessings are different. They are not in competition.

The messengers continued. "If my father blessed me with the dew of heaven, he blessed thee with the fatness of the earth, and if he spoke to me, Peoples will serve thee, he hath said unto thee, By thy sword shalt thou live." And then the proposal that makes the exchange genuinely remarkable: "Come, now, let us set up a covenant between us, that we will share equally all the vexations that may occur." Not just the inheritance. The trouble. Esau was proposing that brothers who had been dealt different destinies should at least carry their hardships together.

This exchange comes from Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg's synthesis of the rabbinic tradition compiled in the early twentieth century. And the rabbis who preserved it were not naive about Esau. They knew very well what the tradition said about him. But they also preserved this: the moment when Esau articulated an argument about equity that was coherent, even generous, and was refused.

The rabbinic imagination returned to Esau, and to his descendants, the nation of Edom, repeatedly across centuries of interpretation. Midrash Tehillim, the midrashic commentary on Psalms compiled in the Byzantine period, reads Psalm 121's opening line. "I lift my eyes to the mountains", as a prayer for deliverance from the oppression of Esau's descendants. The mountains are the empires that have crushed Israel. The ascent the psalmist prays for is liberation from Edomite domination. But the Midrash is careful about something: it records the oppression without erasing the blessing. Even in exile, God says: "I cannot forget you." The promise to Jacob persists because the covenant persists, and the covenant is not contingent on Esau's behavior. God cannot forget Israel in the same way God cannot forget what was promised, and what was promised was given to Jacob running alongside a blessing that had also been given to Esau.

Vayikra Rabbah, the fifth-century Midrash on Leviticus compiled in Palestine, uses the Sukkot commandment. "you shall take for you on the first day", as a lens for understanding the structure of redemption. The exegesis that follows is focused entirely on priority. God will take up Israel's cause first. God will deal with the wickedness of Esau's descendants first. God will build the Temple first. God will bring the Messianic king first. The "firstness" is not contempt for Esau. It is the sequence of restoration: the opposition is removed, the sanctuary is rebuilt, the king arrives. The sequence requires Esau to have existed. It requires Esau to yield. Both things are true simultaneously.

At the end of Isaac's life, after the stolen blessing and the twenty-two years of estrangement and whatever truce had or had not held between the brothers, both sons came to Hebron and buried their father together. The Torah records it without comment: "And Esau and Jacob his sons buried him" (Genesis 35:29). Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the eighth-century CE midrashic text, explains that Isaac had divided his possessions equally between his two sons in his final years. Because the inheritance was shared, both sons performed chesed, loving-kindness, at the burial. The man who had given them entirely different destinies ended his life by creating one final moment of shared obligation between them.

There is something the midrash preserves that the plain narrative of Genesis almost loses: Esau was not simply the villain of the story. He was given a blessing, a territory, a people, a role in a long unfolding drama. His argument that the blessings were different rather than unequal was not foolish. It was the argument of a man who wanted to live alongside his brother in the same world without the rivalry consuming both of them. The argument failed. The brothers never occupied the same world for very long. The proposal to share their vexations was never accepted.

But the argument was coherent. And the rabbis, who had good reasons not to be charitable toward Esau, preserved it anyway.

Esau had wept loudly when he learned the blessing was gone (Genesis 27:38). He had cried out with a great and bitter cry. The rabbis did not ignore that sound. They preserved it, alongside his argument, alongside his proposal to share hardships, alongside his faithfulness at the grave. Two sons. Two blessings. One grave.