Jacob Was Weeping While He Stole the Blessing From Blind Isaac

Most people read the story of Jacob stealing the blessing from Isaac as a cool act of nerve. Mother and son cook up a plan, dress in goatskins, lie to a blind old man, and walk out with the birthright. The rabbis who wrote midrash refused to let the scene stay that cool. They said Jacob was weeping the entire time.

The detail is preserved in Legends of the Jews 6:59, compiled by Louis Ginzberg in 1909 from centuries of rabbinic sources. When Rebekah pulled Jacob aside and told him to fetch two kids from the flock, Ginzberg says, Jacob's body bowed under the weight of what she was asking. He was in tears before he walked out the tent door. He did not want to do this. He did not want to lie to his father. He did not want to take what belonged to Esau. His mother had to talk him through it twice.

She was persuasive in a strange, half-legal way. According to the same tradition, Rebekah told Jacob her marriage contract entitled her to two kid goats every day, so technically the animals were hers to give. Then she promised him something more. These two kids, she said, would not only become the meal that won his father's blessing. They would become the two goats of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the pair that the high priest would slaughter and release every year as the sin of the nation was laid on their backs. The deception in front of her, she was telling her son, was going to be paid for in advance by a future so holy it had not been invented yet.

Jacob still wept.

He put on Esau's garments, the ones Rebekah had kept in the house, the ones the old Jewish traditions say were actually the garments of light once worn by Adam in Eden. He let his mother tie the goatskins on his arms and the exposed skin of his neck. He picked up the bread and the meat. He walked to his father's bed. And then, with a voice breaking in a way only his father could hear, he said, "I am Esau thy firstborn."

Isaac knew something was wrong.

The Hebrew Bible preserves what he said next. "The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau" (Genesis 27:22). He reached out. He felt the hair. He smelled the garments. And something that could not be reconciled inside his own mind forced him, against every intuition, to bless the son kneeling in front of him. The Book of Jubilees 26:23, a Jewish apocryphon written in the second century BCE and preserved in Ethiopic manuscripts, explains the moment with a sentence that should stop you dead. Isaac "discerned him not, because it was a dispensation from heaven to remove his power of perception."

God reached into Isaac's mind and dimmed it.

Jubilees is not saying Isaac was simply fooled. Jubilees is saying that the fooling was divinely enforced. The hair on Jacob's arms was not going to be enough on its own. The voice had already given him away. The only way the blessing was going to land on the right son was if heaven itself stepped in and closed the part of Isaac that would have recognized his own child. Legends of the Jews adds a second layer. Ginzberg preserves the tradition that Isaac had been going blind for years, ever since Abraham had bound him on Mount Moriah and the angels of heaven wept over him and their tears fell into his eyes. But there was a second blindness, the rabbis say, and it was not from tears. It was from love. Isaac loved Esau despite Esau's cruelty, despite his idolatrous wives, despite the blood on his hands. The Legends of the Jews calls Isaac's affection for his elder son a bribe. "A gift blinds the eyes of the wise." Isaac had accepted the gift of Esau's filial tenderness and paid for it with his sight. God was simply finishing what love had started.

So when Jacob knelt there, weeping silently into the goatskins, he was kneeling before a father who was blind for two reasons. One was a decades-old wound from the binding. The other was a son he could not stop loving. Neither reason had anything to do with Jacob.

Afterward, when Esau came in from the field and cried out, the Torah tells us his cry was "great and exceeding bitter" (Genesis 27:34). Legends of the Jews 6:73 says that cry echoed forward through centuries. It came back one day in the mouth of Mordecai, the descendant of Jacob, when he heard Haman, the descendant of Esau, had signed the decree to wipe out the Jews of Persia. The Book of Esther uses the same Hebrew phrase. A great and bitter cry. The rabbis said Jacob's weeping in the tent did not balance the ledger. Esau's brother-cry did.

There is no easy lesson in any of this. The Torah does not apologize for Jacob and Bereshit Rabbah, compiled in fifth-century Palestine, does not either. What the midrash does, quietly, is refuse to let Jacob become a villain. He was crying. He did not want to do it. His mother insisted. God dimmed his father. History was moving through the room, and one of the boys had to kneel and take it, and the one who took it was the one who could not stop weeping.