Isaac Went Blind So Jacob Could Receive the Blessing

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The Smoke in the Tent

Esau married two Canaanite women and brought them home, and they burned incense to their idols inside the house.

Rebekah could sit in that smoke. She had grown up in a house where it was burned every day and her lungs had made their peace with it long before she ever saw Canaan. Isaac had grown up in the tent of Abraham and had never breathed it in his life. It aged him early and it took his eyes.

His sight had been failing since the mountain, when his father laid him on the wood and he looked up past the knife and saw the Throne of Glory, and the angels standing over the altar wept, and their tears went into his open eyes and stayed there.

The rest of it he did to himself at his own table, every time he took the venison his older son brought him and let the taste of it settle the question of who the boy was. A gift blinds the eyes of the wise. Isaac loved Esau, and the love came to him in portions, and he went dark.

A Hundred and Twenty-Three

Sarah had died at a hundred and twenty-seven. When Isaac reached a hundred and twenty-three he started to think a man ought to settle his affairs when he comes near the age his parents died, and he did not know which of the two he had been given.

He sent for Esau.

"My son."

"Here I am."

The Holy Spirit said, over the boy's head, where nobody in the tent could hear it: he sweetens his voice, do not trust him, there are seven abominations in that heart. He will pull down seven holy houses. The Tabernacle. Gilgal. Shiloh. Nob. Gibeon. And the Temple twice.

Isaac heard none of it. He gave his instructions instead, carefully, the way a blind man has to. Sharpen the knives properly. Do not bring me anything that died on its own, or anything a beast tore, or anything taken off another man's land. Then I will bless the one who deserves the blessing.

It was the eve of Passover. Tonight the whole world sings the Hallel, he told his son, and the storehouses of dew stand open. Go and make me something good.

Ha-Satan Went Hunting With Him

God sent Ha-Satan (the Accuser) out into the field with Esau to slow him down.

Esau ran a deer down and tied it and left it lying while he went after the next one. Ha-Satan walked over and untied it. Esau came back to an empty patch of grass with the cord on the ground. He ran down another and tied that one, and the same thing happened, and then again, and again, all morning, a strong man in his own country losing hours to nothing he could see.

Adam's Coat and Two Kids

Rebekah had heard the conversation in the tent through the Holy Spirit. What moved her was not that she preferred her younger son. It was the thought of that old man being walked into an abomination in his own bed.

She told Jacob to bring her two kids from the flock. One for the Passover offering and one for the festival, and no theft in it either, because her marriage contract gave her two kids a day from her husband's herds and she had never once collected.

Jacob would not move. If my father puts his hand on me, he said, I am a smooth man and he is a hairy man, and I will bring a curse down on myself instead of a blessing.

"When Adam was cursed the curse fell on his mother, the ground," Rebekah said. "I am your mother. Let it come on me and on my soul."

She skinned the two kids. Jacob stood a head and shoulders over ordinary men, so the two hides were not enough to cover his arms and hands, and she cut them into strips and sewed the strips together until they were.

Then she went and got Esau's clothes.

They were not ordinary clothes. God had made them for Adam, the first man to serve as priest, and Adam handed them to Noah, and Noah to Shem, and Shem to Abraham, and Abraham to Isaac, and Isaac to his older son. Esau did not keep them in his own house. He knew what his wives were and he left them with his mother, and he put them on whenever he waited on his father at table, because, he said, my father is a king to me, and a man does not serve a king in ordinary clothes.

Rebekah dressed her younger son in them and walked him to the door of the tent.

"From here on, may your Creator help you."

Your Firstborn Son Is Esau

"Father."

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

Jacob went as close to the truth as he could get and still be in the room. "It is I. Your firstborn son is Esau."

The old man remarked that he had come back very fast. Then he ran his hands over the sewn goatskin, heard one son and touched the other, pulled him close and smelled the coat that had come down from Adam, and gave up trying to reconcile it.

He ate. Whatever he wanted the food to be, it was. He thought of bread and it was bread, and of fish and it was fish, and somewhere in the middle of that meal he was tasting the food that is being kept for the righteous in the world to come, and he did not know what he was eating or who was standing at his elbow with the cup.

He blessed him.

The Walls Got Hot

Esau came back four hours late with nothing. He had killed a dog on the way home and cooked it, and he carried it in and set it down.

"Let my father get up and eat his son's game."

Isaac had never heard anything like it in his own tent. He began to shake, and he had not shaken like that on the mountain with the knife over him. The walls of the room were heating up. Gehinnom (the realm of judgment after death) had come in at his son's heels and was standing there in the dark with them.

"Who is going to burn down there," Isaac cried out. "Me, or my son Jacob?"

Neither of you, he was told. The hunter.

He described the meal anyway, the one that tasted of anything a man wished, and at the word flesh Esau began to weep. "He gave me a bowl of lentils and took my birthright. What did he take from you for meat?"

Isaac had been sitting there in agony believing he had handed the blessing to the wrong son. He heard the word birthright and it turned over in him. Jacob had bought it. He had blessed the man who owned it.

"Yes," he said. "And he shall be blessed."

Esau cried out then, one long bitter cry that his descendants would collect on centuries later at a palace gate in Persia.

Then Esau wept three tears. One ran out of the right eye. One ran out of the left. The third hung on his eyelash and did not fall.

"This one is crying for his life," God said. "Am I going to send him away with nothing?"

So Isaac blessed him too, with the fat of the earth and the dew of heaven and a sword to live by, and one condition attached to nothing. Whenever his brother let the yoke of heaven slide off his own neck, Esau would break it off his.

Esau went out and said in his heart what he intended to do to Jacob as soon as his father was buried. He said it to nobody. The Holy Spirit carried it to Rebekah anyway, word for word, and she sent for her younger son before the house was awake.

By dawn Jacob was on the road north. The sewn goatskin strips were still lying in his mother's tent.