Nimrod Died Because Esau Wanted the Coat of Adam

The Garment That Began With Adam

When Adam and Eve left Eden, God made them garments of skin. The plain text of Genesis says this. It does not say what those garments were made of or what they could do. The midrashic tradition has an extensive answer to both questions.

The garments were not ordinary clothes. They were sewn from the light of the primordial world, or from the skin of the Leviathan, depending on the tradition, and they carried within them a dominion over the animal kingdom. The creature who wore them was recognized by every animal as the master of the created order. They bowed. They submitted. They did not flee.

The coat passed from Adam to his son Seth, from Seth through generations to Noah, and from Noah's son Ham the garment passed, by theft or inheritance, to Ham's descendant Nimrod. This is why Genesis 10:9 calls Nimrod a mighty hunter before the Lord. He was not extraordinary as a hunter by skill. He was extraordinary because of what he was wearing. The animals came to him. They did not run.

What the Coat Made Nimrod

With the coat Nimrod made himself a king. He gathered the animals to him, fed the people from the hunt, and leveraged his apparent supernatural authority over wildlife into political authority over humans. The tradition preserved in Otzar Midrashim describes him as a king who declared himself a god. He had the oracle of the stars, which told him that a child would be born who would oppose him and defeat him. He built a palace and posted guards at the entrance and ordered that every pregnant woman who came through the gates be registered, and every male child of the dangerous generation be killed.

He was thinking of Abraham, who was born in that generation and hid in a cave for years. He was not thinking of Esau, who would not be born for another several centuries. But the coat connected them across the generations.

The Day Esau Came in From the Field

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the early medieval narrative midrash from Palestine, reads the day Esau sold his birthright as the day he had just committed murder. The Torah says he was exhausted from the field. The midrash says the field was a battlefield and the body on it was Nimrod's. Rabbi Tanchuma describes the divergence between Jacob and Esau in stark terms: the one went by the way of life, the other went by the way of death. The day of the birthright was a specific death, with a specific victim and a specific motive.

Esau wanted the coat. Nimrod had it. Nimrod was the most powerful hunter in the world because of what he was wearing, and Esau was also a hunter, a man who lived by the field, a man who understood what dominion over animals was worth. He killed Nimrod and took the garment.

Then he ran home because people were coming to avenge the killing, and he threw himself at Jacob's lentil soup and traded away everything he had been born into for a bowl of food.

The Coat That Changed Hands Again

The garment of Adam reappears later in the patriarchal story. Rebekah, who understood what was at stake with the blessing and the birthright, dressed Jacob in Esau's garments when she sent him to receive Isaac's blessing. Some traditions identify those garments with the original coat: it had come from Eden to Nimrod to Esau, and it sat in Esau's house, and Rebekah knew where it was.

Isaac, whose eyes were dim, smelled the garment and said the smell was like the smell of the field which the Lord had blessed. The field that smelled of blessing was not a specific location. It was the original dominion, the one that had belonged to Adam before any field had a name. The garment carried that smell across the centuries, from the garden to the cave to the hunter to the murderer to the younger son standing at his father's deathbed.