Three Times Isaac Passed the Covenant Forward

A grandson walks uphill with an offering

Isaac is alive. Abraham is still alive. Jacob is already a man, but he is still young enough to be sent on an errand. Isaac sends him uphill with a thank-offering of meat and wine, a gift from a son to an ancient father.

Abraham eats. He drinks. Then he opens his mouth and starts thanking the God who made the fat things of the earth, who gave them to human hands so those hands could eat and bless in return. He works through the whole thanksgiving slowly, the way old men pray when they know they will not be doing this much longer. Then he stops at a line that sounds like a confession. "I am one hundred three score and fifteen years," he says. "An old man and full of days."

The biblical Abraham dies in a single verse. The Abraham of the Book of Jubilees gets one more meal, one more grandson beside him, one more chance to pass the covenant along in the act of eating.

Isaac arranged the whole visit. That is the first handoff. Quiet. Domestic. A son who knew his father was running out of time chose a grandson to carry the meat, because the covenant needs a body to travel in.

The hands that could not see what they were touching

The second scene is the one everyone knows, though Jubilees tells it more slowly than Genesis does. Rebekah wraps Jacob's arms in goatskins. The smell of Esau fills the tent. Isaac reaches out into the dark he has lived in for years and tries to find his firstborn son by touch.

What he finds is Jacob.

Jubilees does not rush past this. It slows the deception into something almost sacramental. The hands moving over the goatskin. The blind face tilting toward a smell that feels right. The old man trusting what his fingertips say because his eyes have given out. The tradition preserved in Jubilees holds the camera on Isaac in those final seconds before the blessing leaves his mouth, because the blessing is not just words. It is a thing with weight, and once it is spoken it belongs to whoever received it.

Jacob walked out of the tent carrying something he had not come in with.

A deathbed warning about the oldest temptation

The third scene comes years later. Isaac is dying. He calls Esau and Jacob to him, and what he wants to tell them is not about the blessing or the birthright or any of the old wounds between them. He wants to talk about fire.

Do not go to the Gentiles, he tells them. Do not take their daughters. Do not plant your sons in their houses. The path out of the covenant is always the same path: you begin by touching what was not yours to touch, and you end by serving stone gods on a hilltop somewhere with a wife who does not know your fathers' names. Isaac watched Ishmael walk that road. He watched it from inside the same tent where he had just sent Jacob out into the world with a stolen blessing.

He does not blame Jacob for what happened. He does not reconcile the brothers in any dramatic way. He simply lays the warning down between them like a tool they will need later. Serve the God of your fathers, he says. Do not let the nations take you. Do not be afraid of them, because He who chose your father Abraham will also choose you.

Why Jubilees needed all three scenes

A man who only appears in one scene can be a symbol. Isaac as the silent patriarch, bound and passive, is a symbol. But Jubilees gives him three scenes because symbols do not hand covenants forward. People do.

The first scene shows him choosing Jacob as the messenger before there was any contest between the brothers. The second shows him bestowing the blessing, even through deception, because the covenant found the right body. The third shows him spending his last breath trying to make sure neither son would walk away from what had been given them.

Three times. A meal. A touch. A warning. Isaac who never got a new name, who kept the one his parents gave him from birth to grave, passed the covenant along in all three registers that mattered to the priestly author of Jubilees: through food, through the body, and through instruction before death.