The Sacred Garments Jacob Wore to Steal a Blessing

When Rebekah dressed Jacob in his brother's clothes, she was not simply disguising him. She was handing him the most ancient garments in the world.

The Torah's text is quiet about what those garments actually were: "Rebekah took the goodly garments of her elder son Esau" (Genesis 27:15). Goodly garments. The word chamudot (חֲמֻדֹת) means precious, desirable, coveted. The rabbis wanted to know why Esau's ordinary clothes would merit that word. Aggadat Bereshit 43, compiled in the ninth or tenth century CE, gives the answer: because they were not ordinary clothes at all.

Before the Tabernacle existed, the midrash explains, there was no hereditary priesthood, no tribe of Levi, no Aaronide line. The service of God was performed by the firstborn of each generation. And the firstborn wore the priestly garments. Adam, the firstborn of the world, received the first set from God directly: "And the Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skin and clothed them" (Genesis 3:21). The midrash reads this as priestly vestments, the originals, passed hand to hand across the generations. Adam to Eve, Eve to Methuselah, Methuselah to Noah, Noah to Shem.

Shem, whom the midrash identifies with Melchizedek king of Salem, priest of the Most High (Genesis 14:18), passed them to Abraham. Abraham to Isaac. Isaac to Esau, who was the firstborn and therefore the rightful inheritor of the priestly role.

But Esau disqualified himself. He married women who practiced idolatry. He treated the birthright as worth less than a meal. Isaac, seeing what his elder son had become, quietly transferred the garments to Rebekah for safekeeping. When Jacob took the birthright, Rebekah drew the conclusion: if Jacob holds the birthright, then Jacob should wear the garments. The priestly vestments belong to the priest, and the priest is the firstborn, and the firstborn is now Jacob.

So when Isaac smelled the garments on Jacob and said, "The smell of my son is like the smell of a field that the Lord has blessed" (Genesis 27:27), he was not smelling ordinary wool or linen. He was smelling the accumulated sanctity of every sacrifice offered in those garments from Adam onward. The midrash says he smelled the same fragrance as the incense burning on the altar. Isaac's nose knew something his eyes could not see.

The second reading the midrash offers is darker. The garments smell like those who pretend to repent, who put on the outer appearance of righteousness while their hearts remain unchanged. "All your garments are scented with myrrh and aloes" (Psalm 45:9). Even false fragrance is still fragrance. God receives even imperfect repentance.

Then the midrash examines the blessing itself, line by line. "And God shall give you the dew of heaven" (Genesis 27:28). The word God appears. When Isaac blesses Esau, a few verses later, he says only: "Behold, of the fat of the earth shall be your dwelling" (Genesis 27:39). No mention of God. The midrash notices. The difference is not subtle. Jacob's blessing comes from the living God. Esau's blessing is purely material. Like a merchant who sold two goods, one for ten coins and one for a hundred, the one who walked away with the smaller sum got what he paid for. Jacob's hundred-coin blessing carries God's name in it. Esau's ten-coin blessing contains only earth.

The dew of heaven, the midrash says, is the manna that fell in the wilderness. The fat of the earth produced the miraculous well. Let peoples serve you becomes the nations descended from Noah. Let nations bow down to you becomes Ishmael's descendants. Be master over your brothers becomes the children of Keturah. And the closing lines of the blessing reach all the way forward to Moses: "Blessed be those who bless you" (Genesis 27:29), the midrash says, is Moses himself, who opened Deuteronomy with "And this is the blessing" (Deuteronomy 33:1).

The garments Rebekah chose that afternoon carried the weight of all of human religious history. The tradition preserved in Midrash Aggadah understood that what looked like a deception was actually a restoration: the priestly vestments going back to the person who would use them, passed through the hands of a mother who saw more clearly than a father could.