Every Deer Esau Caught for Isaac Got Untied and Ran Away

Most people read Genesis 27 and picture a neat piece of domestic trickery. Esau goes hunting, Rebekah cooks goat meat and calls it venison, Jacob walks into the tent in a costume, and the blessing slips. The rabbis who wrote Legends of the Jews 6:56 did not buy the neat version. They said Esau was out there in the field the whole time catching deer, and every deer he caught kept disappearing off the rope.

The story comes from Louis Ginzberg's 1909 compilation of centuries of rabbinic lore. Esau is the best hunter in the region. His father Isaac, nearly blind and feeling his own death approaching, has asked for a meal of wild game before the blessing. Esau takes his bow and his knives and goes out into the hills. He moves quickly. He knows the terrain. He bags a deer, ties it to a tree, and walks off to find a second one. The deer is not there when he comes back. The rope is still tied. The ground is disturbed where the animal had been. But the deer is gone.

He catches another one. Ties it tighter. Goes after more game. Comes back. Gone again.

According to Ginzberg, this happened over and over the whole afternoon. The hunter who never missed a shot was watching his kills vanish from knots he had tied himself. He had no idea what was happening. He was a man of the field, not a man of angels, and angels were exactly what was happening. The rabbis said the one undoing his ropes was Ha-Satan, the heavenly Accuser, an angel acting on God's orders to keep Esau in the field just long enough for his younger brother to reach the tent first. Ha-Satan in this tradition is not a rebel. He is a civil servant. His job that afternoon was to stall Esau, and he did it by walking quietly up to each tied deer, loosening the knots, and letting the animal bolt.

Meanwhile, inside the tent, Rebekah was prepping Jacob.

The scene is preserved in Book of Jubilees 26:10, a Jewish apocryphon composed in Hebrew in the second century BCE and preserved in Ethiopic manuscripts. Rebekah took the best garments of Esau, put them on Jacob, tied kid skins on his hands and the exposed parts of his neck, and placed the bread and the cooked goat meat in his palms. The whole operation was a race. If Esau came back from the hunt before Jacob reached Isaac's bedside, the blessing would go to the wrong son forever. The rabbis built the entire scene around a simple fact. The only reason the race was winnable was because Ha-Satan was out in the hills untying ropes.

Isaac's blindness had a backstory of its own, and it matters for how you read the rest.

According to Legends of the Jews 6:52, Isaac did not go blind from old age alone. The rabbis had two explanations, and they liked to stack them. The first was that when Abraham bound Isaac on Mount Moriah and lifted the knife, the angels above the altar wept, and their tears fell into Isaac's open eyes and slowly corroded his vision over the decades. The second explanation is the one that punches harder. Ginzberg says Isaac's blindness was the bribe of Esau's filial love. Isaac could not bring himself to see what Esau actually was. Esau was cruel, Esau married Canaanite women who worshiped idols, Esau shed blood casually. But Esau also took care of his father. Esau asked him what he wanted to eat. Esau kissed him goodnight. Isaac took the gift of that tenderness and paid for it with his eyesight. The rabbis quote the verse, "A gift blinds the eyes of the wise," and say God finished what Isaac's love started.

Even the Holy Spirit had tried to warn him. Legends of the Jews 6:53 preserves a strange moment. When Isaac called out "My son," and Esau answered "Here am I," the Ruach Hakodesh, the holy spirit, cut into the story like a voice-over. "Though he disguises his voice and makes it sound sweet, put no confidence in him. There are seven abominations in his heart. He will destroy seven holy places." The seven holy places the Ruach Hakodesh was naming were the Tabernacle at Shiloh, the altars at Gilgal and Nob and Gibeon, and the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. Esau's descendants, Edom and then Rome, would one day burn every one of them. Isaac heard the warning. He went ahead anyway. Love had already decided the afternoon.

So picture the scene the rabbis want you to picture. Outside, a champion hunter is chasing animals through the brush and cursing rope that keeps coming undone. Inside, a blind old man is reaching out to feel hair on the wrists of a son who is weeping and pretending to be his brother. Above both of them, an angel the midrash calls Ha-Satan is untying a knot on a deer, and the Ruach Hakodesh is whispering into a father's deaf ear, and God is running out the clock so that a blessing meant for a conqueror falls instead on a boy in a costume who will one day be named Israel.

Bereshit Rabbah, compiled in fifth-century Palestine, says the whole scene was already written into the sixth day of creation. Isaac's blindness, Esau's empty rope, the goatskins on Jacob's arms. All of it was sitting on a shelf in heaven from the beginning, waiting for the afternoon it would be needed.

When Esau finally came home with nothing, the blessing was already gone.