Jacob Left Gaps Between the Herds He Sent to Esau

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Drove by Drove, With Room Between

Jacob did not send the gift in one column.

He put the animals into his servants' hands in separate groups, goats here, ewes there, camels behind them, and he told the men to keep the groups apart on the road. Not jumbled. Not all at once. A gap of empty road between each herd and the next.

There was a cold reason for it. Esau was coming up from Seir with four hundred men, and a man like that has an eye that fills and empties. One herd walks up and the servant says, "Accept it." The dust settles. Esau has almost finished being impressed when the next herd comes over the rise, and another servant says, "Accept it." Then another. Each arrival lands on a man whose anger has just started to cool, and starts the cooling over again. Jacob was not buying affection. He was wearing a grudge down by installments.

His household stood behind him watching the herds walk away, one wave at a time, into the gap where their uncle was.

Thirty Nursing Camels

Rabbi Levi looked at the inventory of that gift centuries later and could not get over it. Comb through every tent in the desert of Kedar, he said, every nomad camp in the whole waste, and you will not turn up thirty nursing camels with their calves. One man owned them and sent them away in an afternoon.

The verse says he took of what came to hand, which the sages read as the precious stones and the pearls. Not the herd he could spare. The sealed bags. Jacob emptied the strongbox onto the back of a caravan and pointed it at a brother who might kill him anyway.

He set the camels in the middle of the procession on purpose, and while he arranged them he was talking past Esau altogether. Picture Yourself, he said, seated on the tribunal, hearing my case, and the mercy filling You while You listen. The livestock were laid out on the road the way a man lays out an argument.

The Space Was for Troubles Not Yet Born

The gaps were not only about Esau.

Put a space between drove and drove, Jacob had said to his servants, and while he said it he was also saying something else, upward, in the same breath.

Master of the world. If troubles have to come on my children, do not send them one behind the other. Leave them room between one and the next.

He did not ask to be spared. He was too far into his own life for that, with a limp coming and a brother on the road and a father he had deceived. He asked for pacing. For gaps. For a generation to be able to stand up and get its breath between blows, the way a herdsman lets the dust settle before the next herd comes over the hill. It is the smallest request a man ever made on behalf of people who would not be born for a thousand years, and it is built into the arrangement of a bribe.

He Lifted His Eyes and Wept

Then the present went on ahead of him and he stayed behind, and the distress got into him.

He raised his eyes and there was Esau, far off, coming. Everything he had sent was already gone up the road and it had bought him nothing he could see. He raised his eyes higher, past the dust and the four hundred, and he wept.

Heaven heard it and promised him rescue. That night is where the line comes from that Israel would carry into every bad century afterward, the one about the LORD answering in the day of trouble and the name of the God of Jacob lifting a frightened man out of reach.

He had engineered everything he could engineer. The weeping was the part he could not.

The Chest by the Ford

He got up in the night and took his two wives and his two handmaids and his eleven children over the Jabbok.

Eleven. He had twelve.

Dinah was in a chest with the lid shut and locked from the outside, and her father was the one who had turned the key. The eye of that man is haughty, he said. He will look up and see her and take her from me.

The rebuke came from above him while he was still standing at the water. Kindness is owed to a man who is failing, and you kept yours back from your own brother. She might have turned him. She might have brought him in under the wings of the Presence. You would not give her to him in a permitted way, and so she went out, and what happened at Shechem happened.

Every herd he sent was calculated to the hour. The one thing he locked away was the one thing he lost.

Generations later Rabbi Judah the Prince and Rabbi Yose bar Yehudah were walking a road when a stranger came toward them, and they guessed his three questions before he opened his mouth. Who are you. What is your trade. Where are you going. Where did you learn to meet a powerful man like that, the stranger wanted to know when they answered him evenly. From our father Jacob, they said, who wrote out for us exactly what to say to Esau.