Jacob Wept While He Carried the Goats to Blind Isaac

His Mother Pulled Him Into the Tent

Rebekah caught him by the wrist before he reached the doorway and drew him into the shadow at the back of the tent, where the old man could not hear. Her voice dropped. "Go to the flock," she told him. "Fetch me two good kids of the goats, the best two, and I will make the savory meat your father loves" (Genesis 27:9).

Jacob stood very still. Down the slope his father lay in the larger tent, blind, waiting for the elder son to come back from the hunt. Esau was out on the hills with his bow. The smell of the flock came up on the wind, the warm animal stink of the pens, and Jacob's stomach turned, because he understood exactly what his mother was asking him to walk into.

His body bowed under it. He felt the bend come into his shoulders the way it comes into a man carrying a load too heavy to set down. He did not want to do this. He did not want to lie to the old man who could no longer see his face. He did not want to take what belonged to his brother. The tears came before he had said a single word, and they did not stop.

The Argument About the Goats

Rebekah saw the weeping and answered it the only way she knew, with a reason. The two kids were hers to give, she said. Her marriage contract, her ketubah (the written terms of a wife's portion), entitled her to two young goats from the flock every single day. So the animals he carried up the hill would be taken from what was already owed to her. No theft in that. Take them.

He still wept, but he went. Two kids of the goats, one held under each arm, their small hooves kicking against his ribs. One of them, his mother had said, was for the Passover offering and one for the offering of the festival, and Jacob carried them up the slope like a boy carrying his own punishment.

His mother had told him more than that, words meant to soothe a conscience that would not lie quiet. These same two goats, she promised, were not only the meal that would win a blind man's blessing. They were the pattern of two goats that would stand one day before the people on the holiest day of the year, the pair set apart so the sin of a whole nation could be laid on their backs and carried away. The lie he was about to tell would be paid for in advance, she was telling him, by a holiness that did not yet exist. Jacob kept climbing. The tears ran down into the corners of his mouth.

The Old Man Who Could Not See

Isaac lay where the light could not help him. His eyes had failed years before, and the reason was older than his old age. When he was a boy, bound on the wood of the altar under his own father's knife, the angels above had wept to see it, and their tears had fallen into his open eyes and dimmed them. He had carried that dimness ever since. Now it made him helpless before his own kitchen.

Rebekah dressed Jacob for the deception. She took Esau's garments, the fine ones she had kept folded in the house, and she put them on her younger son. These were no ordinary clothes. The oldest tellings say they were the garments of light, the radiant skins first worn by Adam in the garden, passed down hand to hand across the generations until they came to rest on the back of a hunter. Then she bound the goatskins onto Jacob's smooth arms and neck, so that an old blind hand reaching out to touch his son would feel hair, and be fooled.

Jacob carried the dish in. The smell of cooked kid filled the tent. He spoke, and his own voice frightened him, because it was his voice and not his brother's. The old man's hand came up and groped along his arm, slow and trembling, reading the false hair, and Jacob held still and let himself be touched and lied with his whole body while the water stood in his eyes. The blessing came down on his bowed head.

The Curse That Turned Back

Then Esau came home from the hills with his real venison, and the truth tore through the tent. Isaac began to shake. He understood that he had laid the blessing on the wrong head, that the hands had been the hands of one son and the voice of another, and a black anger rose in him. He opened his mouth to curse the son who had cheated him.

The curse never left his lips. He was stopped, reminded of what he himself had already spoken into the blessing: cursed be every one that curses you (Genesis 27:29). Any curse he hurled at Jacob now would swing back through the air and strike his own face. The old man sat with that. He was not yet ready to say that the blessing truly belonged to his younger son, and he asked, in the dark behind his ruined eyes, for some surer sign that the heir before him was the right one. Only when it came did he speak again, heavily, the words dragged out of him. "Yea, he shall be blessed" (Genesis 27:33).

Esau's Bitter Cry

Esau heard it. He lifted up his voice, and what came out was an exceeding great and bitter cry (Genesis 27:34), a sound that went through the tent walls and out across the hills he hunted, the cry of a man who has come home to find that everything owed to him has been carried off by his own brother under cover of cooked goat and borrowed clothes.

And Jacob, who had won, was the one who had wept the whole way through it. He had not climbed the hill grinning. He had climbed it bent and crying, carrying two small goats that were heavier than they looked, knowing exactly what he did, and doing it anyway because his mother stood behind him and the future stood somewhere ahead.