Genesis 28:7

These verses come straight after Isaac’s blessing of Jacob (Genesis 28:1–5). Jacob had taken the blessing by deceit, Esau meant to kill him, and Rebekah had urged Jacob to flee to her brother Laban in Haran until Esau’s fury cooled (Genesis 27:41–45). Rebekah also told Isaac that she was weary of her life because of Esau’s Hittite wives (Genesis 27:46). So Isaac sends Jacob away with a blessing and a command together.

Verse 6 says that “as he blessed him he gave him a charge”. The verb to bless, bârak, means at root “to kneel”, and by implication to bless God in worship or to bless a person with good. Here Isaac speaks God’s favour over Jacob and confirms the promises made to Abraham. The charge, tsâvâh, is a command with authority behind it, and Isaac gives it as part of the blessing: “Thou shalt not take a wife of the daughters of Canaan.”

The verb for take, lâqach, is the everyday word for taking, accepting or receiving, and it is the usual way of speaking of taking a wife. The word for daughters, bath, is the feminine of bên, “son”, and Strong’s derives it from a verb meaning “to build”. “The daughters of Canaan” are the women of the peoples who lived in the land.

The reason for the charge is the faith of the family. The Canaanites worshipped many gods, and the practices God later condemns in the law of Moses were theirs (Leviticus 18). God had called Abraham to make of him a great nation and to bless all the families of the earth through him (Genesis 12:1–3), and a family married into the peoples around it would soon be drawn after their gods. Abraham had made his servant swear to find Isaac a wife from his own kindred and from none of the daughters of the Canaanites (Genesis 24:3–4), and Isaac now holds Jacob to the same rule. Marrying within the wider family was common among the patriarchs and kept a family’s identity and inheritance together, and in Abraham’s family it also kept a people set apart for the LORD.

The law later made this a command for all Israel, warning that such marriages would turn Israel’s sons away from following the LORD to serve other gods (Deuteronomy 7:3–4, Exodus 34:15–16). That is what happened once Israel lived among the Canaanites, took their daughters as wives and served their gods (Judges 3:5–6), and after the exile Ezra grieved to find that the people had again taken wives from the peoples of the land (Ezra 9:1–2).

Verse 7 says simply that Jacob “obeyed his father and his mother, and was gone to Padanaram”. The verb shâmaʻ means to hear with understanding, and where someone’s words are its object it means to listen and do what they say. Jacob heeded both his father, ʼâb, who gave the charge about marriage, and his mother, ʼêm, who had urged him to escape from Esau. Proverbs joins the two in the same way: “My son, keep thy father’s commandment, and forsake not the law of thy mother” (Proverbs 6:20).

Padanaram, “the field of Aram”, was the land around Haran in Mesopotamia. Abraham’s family had lived there before they came to Canaan (Genesis 11:31), and Rebekah’s family, Bethuel and Laban, still lived there. “Was gone” translates yâlak, to walk or go, literally or figuratively. By the time Esau takes notice, Jacob is already on the road.

Esau’s part of the passage is a matter of seeing. In verse 6 he sees Jacob blessed, charged and sent, in verse 7 he sees that Jacob has obeyed, and in verse 8 he sees what his own marriages mean to his father. The verb in verse 8, râʼâh, is the usual word for seeing, and it also means to perceive or understand. Esau now grasps what Isaac’s charge to Jacob has made plain. He comes to it late, after his younger brother has already received the blessing and the charge.

Esau had married two Hittite women, Judith and Bashemath, and they “were a grief of mind unto Isaac and to Rebekah” (Genesis 26:34–35). Verse 8 counts them among “the daughters of Canaan”, the very women Jacob has just been forbidden to marry. The KJV says they “pleased not Isaac his father”. The Hebrew idiom uses ʻayin, “eye”, and raʻ, “evil”: the daughters of Canaan were evil in Isaac’s eyes. It is a strong way of saying they grieved and displeased him.

The name Esau, ʻÊsâv, is explained by Strong’s as “rough”, in the sense of rough to the touch. The verse names him with “Isaac his father”, and it is his father’s displeasure, and his father’s favour, that Esau now has in view.

So Esau “went ... unto Ishmael”. The verb is yâlak, the same verb used of Jacob in verse 7. Jacob went to Padanaram as his parents told him, and Esau went to Ishmael’s family by his own choosing. There he “took” Mahalath, Machălath, and the verb is lâqach, the same verb as in Isaac’s charge “Thou shalt not take”.

Genesis places her carefully: “the daughter of Ishmael Abraham’s son, the sister of Nebajoth”. Ishmael, Yishmâʻêʼl, is a name meaning “God will hear”. He was the son of ʼAbrâhâm by Hagar, and the word bên, “son”, ties Mahalath straight back to Abraham himself. The word for sister, ʼâchôwth, is simply the feminine of the word for brother, and it sets her beside Nebajoth, Nᵉbâyôwth, one of Ishmael’s twelve sons. Her descent from Abraham is the point of the marriage. Esau chose a woman of Abraham’s own family, one he expected his parents to find better than the women of Canaan.

The verse also says that he took her “unto the wives which he had”. She became one more wife, ʼishshâh, beside the Canaanite wives he kept.

God guarded this particular line because he had promised to bless all the families of the earth through Abraham’s seed, and Paul says that the seed is Christ (Galatians 3:16). Jacob’s marriage within his mother’s family carried that line forward, and the genealogies of Jesus trace it through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Matthew 1:1–17, Luke 3:23–38). Esau’s marriages run alongside it, and God’s plan moves on through the son he chose toward the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29).

The passage sets two sons before a father. Esau’s wives “pleased not Isaac his father”, and Esau tried by his own means to put it right. Jesus is the Son of whom the Father said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17), and he “became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:8). Jacob’s obedience was mixed with fear for his life, and Christ went willingly to the Father’s will and made the new covenant in his blood (Luke 22:20).

Jacob was sent to find a wife among his own kin. Christ gave himself for the church, his bride, to make her holy and without blemish (Ephesians 5:25–27), and he gathers her out of every kindred, tongue, people and nation (Revelation 5:9). In him all who believe are one, and all who belong to Christ are Abraham’s seed and heirs of the promise (Galatians 3:28–29). The ladder Jacob is about to see at Bethel finds its meaning in Jesus, the Son of man on whom the angels of God ascend and descend (John 1:51).

Isaac’s charge carries a lasting truth about marriage. A marriage shapes a person’s faith, the life of the home and the children who come after, which is why Isaac and Rebekah grieved over Esau’s wives and why the law guarded Israel’s marriages. Paul gives the same truth to the church: “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers” (2 Corinthians 6:14). Amos asks, “Can two walk together, except they be agreed?” (Amos 3:3). Esau saw his parents’ grief only after his marriages were made, and his story shows the worth of godly counsel heard before a lifelong choice.

These verses give us a family with real faults: a son who had deceived his father, a father and mother grieved by their other son’s marriages, and a brother whose best effort falls short. God’s promise goes on through all of it. He sent Jacob away under a blessing and met him on the road, and he kept his word to Abraham in a household that had wounded itself. Esau shows how near a person can come to what a father wants by outward steps while holding on to what grieves him. Jacob shows that God takes up a halting obedience and uses it. The faithfulness in this passage is God’s, and it runs all the way to Christ.