The Boy Sent to Kill Jacob and the Dead Man Who Saved Him

Jacob heard the hoofbeats before he saw the riders. He had been walking north since Beersheba, alone, the dust of Hebron still on his sandals, his mind on his mother's last words at the gate. Now eleven men came up the road from Shechem with their swords already drawn, and at their head rode a boy.

The Boy with the Drawn Sword

The boy was thirteen years old and his name was Eliphaz, firstborn of Esau, dexterous and expert with the bow. His father had called him in secret and put a single command in his hand. "Take thy sword, pursue Jacob, and slay him," Esau had said, "and take everything that is his." So Eliphaz had gathered ten of his mother's brothers and ridden out to catch his uncle before he could vanish into the country of Laban.

Jacob stopped in the road. He looked at the swords, at the boy who carried his brother's hatred in a face still smooth with youth, and he did not understand. "Wherefore have you come hither," he asked, "and why do you pursue with your swords?"

Eliphaz did not flinch. "Thus did my father command me," he said, "and now therefore I will not deviate from the orders which my father gave me."

What a Boy Would Not Do

Jacob understood then. Esau wanted him dead on the road, far from Isaac's tent, where no one would ask questions. He did not draw a weapon. He had told his mother, when she begged him to flee, that he was not afraid, that if Esau wished to kill him he would kill Esau first. But this was a child holding the sword, and a child could be reached.

He offered everything. The silver his parents had pressed on him, the gold, the gifts of his father's house, all of it. "Take unto thee and go from me, and do not slay me," he pleaded, "and may this thing that thou wilt do with me be accounted unto thee as righteousness."

And the Lord caused Jacob to find favor in the sight of Eliphaz and his men. The boy lowered his sword. He had been sent to spill blood and could not. So instead his uncles stripped Jacob of everything he carried, the silver and the gold and the goods, and they rode back toward Seir with their saddlebags heavy. They left him standing in the road with nothing.

Stripped Bare on the Road North

Jacob watched the dust settle behind them. A moment before he had been a rich man's son carrying his inheritance to a foreign land. Now he owned the clothes on his back and the staff in his hand, and Haran was still a long way off. Behind him, somewhere south, Esau would learn that his son had failed and would take the stolen treasure into his own house and still want Jacob dead.

Jacob did not sit down in the dust and weep. He spoke into the empty road, as if answering an argument no one else could hear. "Should I lose hope in my Creator?" He set his eyes on the merits of his fathers, on Abraham and Isaac, and he trusted that for their sake the road would not swallow him. "I set my eyes upon the merits of my fathers," he said. "For the sake of them the Lord will give me His aid."

The Dead Man's Clothes and the Waiting Horse

He walked on, and what he came upon next was so strange he could almost not believe it. A man lay dead beside the road, and near the body stood a horse, saddled and waiting, with the dead man's garments still folded and whole. There was no one to claim them and no one to forbid him. Jacob took the clothes and put them on. He mounted the horse. The thing that looked like a stranger's bad luck was the only reason he would not arrive before Laban naked and shamed, a beggar asking for a daughter's hand.

And as he rode, the answer came that he had been waiting for. "Jacob, thou puttest thy trust in the merits of thy fathers," God said, "therefore I will not suffer thy foot to be moved. He that keepeth thee will not slumber."

The Keeper Who Never Sleeps

The promise did not stop there. A human watchman guards by day and sleeps at night, but the voice on the road claimed both halves of the dark. "While a keeper watcheth only by day as a rule, and sleepeth by night, I will guard thee day and night, for, behold, He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep."

Every danger was named and answered. "The Lord will keep thee from all evil, from Esau as well as Laban. He will keep thy soul, that the Angel of Death do thee no hurt. He will keep thy going out and thy coming in, He will support thee now thou art leaving Canaan, and when thou returnest to Canaan."

So Jacob rode north on a dead man's horse, dressed in a dead man's clothes, robbed of everything his parents had given him and armed instead with a promise that covered the whole length of his exile, from the day he left the land to the day he would come back to it. The boy with the sword had taken his gold. The road had given him a horse. And the keeper of Israel rode the distance with him, awake.