Genesis 27:42

“And Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing wherewith his father blessed him.” The deception behind this verse fills the first part of Genesis 27. At Rebekah’s urging, Jacob dressed as his brother and came to their blind father, and Isaac blessed him believing he was Esau (Genesis 27:1–29). The blessing promised plenty from the earth, rule over his brothers and the favour of God (Genesis 27:28–29). Jacob had already taken Esau’s birthright for a bowl of stew (Genesis 25:29–34), and when Esau came in from hunting and learned what had happened, he cried out bitterly and begged his father for a blessing of his own (Genesis 27:30–40).

A father’s blessing was treated as binding, a word spoken before God that shaped a son’s future, his standing and his inheritance. The firstborn usually received the chief blessing along with a double portion of the inheritance, and Esau, the firstborn, had expected it. The word for blessing, Bᵉrâkâh, means a blessing, and it can also mean prosperity, praise or a gift. Esau had been wronged twice, and that makes his pain real. His own contempt for the birthright had come first, though, and his answer to the wrong is murder.

The verb for “hated”, sâṭam, is glossed in Strong’s as “to lurk for” or “to persecute”. It is the hatred of a grudge that waits for its chance to do harm, and Esau’s plan bears that out. “Esau said in his heart” is the Hebrew way of saying he thought it to himself, so this is a private, deliberate resolve. “The days of mourning for my father are at hand” shows that he expected Isaac to die soon. “Then will I slay my brother Jacob” uses hârag, the common verb for killing, used of deliberate killing and murder. The one he means to kill is his own twin.

Scripture traces this road from hatred to murder plainly. Proverbs says that hatred stirs up strife (Proverbs 10:12). Jesus taught that anger against a brother is judged along with murder (Matthew 5:21–22), and John writes that whoever hates his brother is a murderer (1 John 3:15). Esau stands in a long line of brothers in Genesis. Cain killed Abel (Genesis 4:8), and later Joseph’s brothers hated him (Genesis 37:4). Ishmael and Isaac belong to the same line.

“These words of Esau her elder son were told to Rebekah.” Esau had resolved this in his heart, yet his words reached his mother, so he must have spoken them aloud to someone. Scripture leaves unsaid who told her. The word dâbâr means a word or speech, and also a matter or thing, and here it is Esau’s spoken purpose. The verse calls Esau “her elder son” and Jacob “her younger son”, so Rebekah is mother both of the brother who threatens and of the brother in danger.

Her warning to Jacob is that Esau “doth comfort himself, purposing to kill thee”. The verb nâcham is given in Strong’s as to sigh or breathe strongly, and from that to be sorry, to pity or console, to rue, or, in an unfavourable sense, to avenge oneself. Esau eases his grief with the thought of revenge, and the plan gives him a grim kind of comfort. The word “purposing” was supplied by the KJV translators to make that sense plain. The verb for “kill” is hârag again, the same verb as “slay” in verse 41.

Rebekah acts at once: “Now therefore, my son, obey my voice; and arise, flee thou to Laban my brother to Haran.” The word for son is bên, and she speaks to Jacob with a mother’s affection and a mother’s authority. “Obey” is shâmaʻ, to hear, which in “obey my voice” means to hear and do what is said. “Arise” is qûwm, to get up, and “flee” is bârach, to flee, moving in haste to escape danger. Jacob must leave quickly, because his life is at stake.

Haran, in Paddan-aram, was home ground for Abraham’s family. Abraham’s father Terah brought the family there from Ur of the Chaldees, and Terah died there before Abraham went on to Canaan (Genesis 11:31–32). Abraham later sent his servant back to that country to find a wife for Isaac, and that is how Rebekah herself came into the family (Genesis 24). Sending Jacob to her brother gave him the protection of kin far from Esau’s reach, and the chance to find a wife within the family.

Haran became the place where Jacob grew from a lone fugitive into the head of a large household. He married Leah and Rachel, Laban’s daughters (Genesis 29), fathered eleven of his twelve sons, and gained great wealth, as Genesis 29–31 tells. Before he ever arrived, God met him on the road at Bethel (Genesis 28:10–22) and promised, “I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest” (Genesis 28:15).

“And tarry with him a few days, until thy brother’s fury turn away.” The verb for “tarry”, yâshab, means to sit down, to dwell or remain. “A few days” is a Hebrew phrase built from ʼechâd, “one”, and yôwm, “day”, and it means a short while. Rebekah expected a brief stay. Jacob was gone twenty years (Genesis 31:41).

The word for “fury”, chêmâh, means heat, rage or poison, a burning anger. Rebekah hopes it will “turn away”, shûwb, to turn back or return, a verb also used of anger that subsides. In verse 45 she says it again with a different word, “until thy brother’s anger turn away from thee”, where “anger” is ʼaph. That word properly means the nose or nostril, and from the hard breathing of a man in a rage it came to mean anger. The verb “turn away” is shûwb in both verses.

She adds a second hope: “and he forget that which thou hast done to him”. The verb is shâkach, to forget. She hopes that Esau will cease to hold the wrong against Jacob, and then, “I will send, and fetch thee from thence.” Scripture never records that she sent for him or that she saw him again, and she most likely died before he came home. The plan saved Jacob’s life, and it cost her the son she loved.

Rebekah’s hope was fulfilled in God’s time. When Jacob came back, Esau ran to meet him, embraced him, fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept (Genesis 33:4). Esau surely still remembered, but his anger had turned away, and the brothers were reconciled, imperfectly, as the whole of Genesis 33 shows.

Rebekah then goes to Isaac and says nothing of Esau’s threat: “I am weary of my life because of the daughters of Heth: if Jacob take a wife of the daughters of Heth, such as these which are of the daughters of the land, what good shall my life do me?” Her grief is real. Esau had married two Hittite women, Judith and Bashemath, and they were “a grief of mind” to both Isaac and Rebekah (Genesis 26:34–35). The daughters of Heth are Hittite women, one of the peoples of Canaan, the “daughters of the land”.

“Weary” is qûwts, to be disgusted or vexed, to loathe or be grieved. Rebekah is sick at heart, and the thought of a Hittite daughter-in-law makes her life itself, chay, a burden. Her closing question says that life would no longer be worth living. “Daughters” is bath, which Strong’s derives from the verb “to build”, as the feminine of bên, son.

The concern was for faith. The peoples of Canaan worshipped idols, including Baal, and were known for practices such as child sacrifice and cult prostitution. Through Abraham’s family God meant to bless all the families of the earth (Genesis 12:3), and marriage into the idolatrous peoples around them threatened to draw that family away from him. The law later warned Israel against such marriages for this very reason, because they would turn sons after other gods (Exodus 34:16, Deuteronomy 7:3–4, Joshua 23:12–13).

Rebekah’s words are true, and they also cover the urgent reason she keeps to herself. They give Isaac his own reason to send Jacob away for a wife from Rebekah’s people, so Jacob leaves with his father’s consent and well out of Esau’s reach. The family’s habit of steering one another by hidden means, which runs through the whole rivalry of Genesis 25–27, shows itself even here.

God had said before the twins were born that the elder would serve the younger (Genesis 25:23), and his word was sure. Jacob and Rebekah sinned when they reached for that promise by cunning, when they could have trusted God to keep it in his own way and time. Scripture consistently treats deceit as sin, and these verses show the cost: a brother bent on murder, a mother parted from her son, and Jacob sent into twenty years of hardship, where he would be deceived in his turn by Laban. “The way of transgressors is hard” (Proverbs 13:15).

God was at work through all of it. He directs the steps of those who make their own plans (Proverbs 16:9), and he works all things together for good for those who love him (Romans 8:28). Joseph would later tell his brothers the same about their sin against him (Genesis 50:20). God brings his purpose about through human sin, and he still holds people answerable for it.

The quarrel over a stolen blessing points us to the true heir of every promise made to Abraham. Paul says that the seed to whom the promises were made is Christ (Galatians 3:16). Jacob took the blessing by deceit and fled from his brother’s wrath. Christ received it by perfect obedience, “obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:8), and he bore the wrath of God for us as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). Through him we are saved from wrath (Romans 5:9).

Where Esau and Jacob were divided by hatred, Christ makes peace. He has broken down “the middle wall of partition” (Ephesians 2:14–16), and in him God has reconciled us to himself and given us the ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18–19, Romans 5:10–11), making peace through the blood of his cross (Colossians 1:20). The inheritance he gives comes by grace (Ephesians 1:11), with the Spirit of adoption (Romans 8:15), so no one can steal it from us.

Jacob became a sojourner far from home, and believers too live as strangers and pilgrims in this world (1 Peter 2:11). Rebekah was weary of her life, and Christ calls all who labour and are heavy laden to come to him for rest (Matthew 11:28–30). The family God was guarding in Rebekah’s day comes to its fullness in a people gathered by faith in Christ from every nation, the Israel of God (Galatians 6:16).

These verses show a family at its worst: a brother nursing murder, a mother steering events in secret, and a son running for his life from the consequences of his own lie. God’s promise to Jacob stands through all of it, and the God who met him at Bethel kept him in every place he went. Even Esau’s fury, which looked set to end in a killing, turned away in time, and the brothers met again with tears.

Scripture gives us the other side of this story as well. A hot temper stirs up strife (Proverbs 15:18), and when a man’s ways please the LORD, he makes even his enemies to be at peace with him (Proverbs 16:7). Paul asks that, as far as it lies with us, we live peaceably with all men (Romans 12:18). The reconciliation of Jacob and Esau was long in coming and far from complete, yet it came, and it is a small picture of the peace God makes in Christ.