Jacob

He bought the birthright and then stole the blessing. They are two different things taken on two different days. Genesis 25:31-33 is a bargain Esau agrees to and swears to, and the chapter's closing verdict falls on Esau for despising it, which is the verdict Hebrews 12:16 repeats.

Genesis 27 is a separate act years later, and Isaac names it deceit in his own mouth. Adam Clarke sets the birthright out as four things, authority in the family, a double portion, the father's benediction and the priestly office, and treats the blessing as a separate matter with its own content. The common retelling collapses the two into one theft. The text does not.

The Hebrew word occurs once in the whole Old Testament, at Genesis 28:12, which leaves translators with no second occurrence to compare it against. English versions have given it as ladder, staircase and ramp.

Jamieson, Fausset and Brown note that the same term was used of a flight of steps cut into rock. Nothing in the passage turns on the answer, because what the dream shows is traffic between heaven and earth rather than the shape of the thing it moves on.

Genesis calls him a man, and then Jacob names the place Peniel because he had seen God face to face and lived. Hosea 12:3-4 calls the same figure God in one line and the angel in the next.

This site's tradition reads him as the Angel of the LORD, the figure met at the burning bush and in the furnace, and Adam Clarke and John Wesley both state that reading in the site's own quote pool. Other readings take him as a created angel. Both are named here, and neither is disparaged.

Genesis 32:28 gives its own reason inside the verse, "because you have struggled with God and with men, and you have prevailed", which points to the Hebrew verb meaning to prevail. That is the derivation behind the older English rendering, prince with God.

Chrysostom and Augustine both read the name instead as seeing God, from a different derivation, and tie it to Jacob's own words at 32:30. Adam Clarke lays both out at length. This page gives both and does not choose, because the verse supplies the first and the argument for the second is made from the Hebrew.

It calls the fraud of chapter 27 what it is. Isaac says his brother came deceitfully and took the blessing, and Esau says he has been cheated twice. Genesis puts the parents' favoritism on the record before either boy is grown, and then records Jacob doing the same thing to his own sons, with his brothers' hatred following in the very next verse.

Genesis never records him confessing any of it, and it never records God rebuking him for it. What it records instead is Laban handing him the older sister in the dark after he had passed himself off as the older brother in the dark, and his own sons deceiving him with a garment and animal blood, which is what he had used on his father.

What the text credits him with is that he wanted the covenant and would not let go of it. "I will not let you go unless you bless me" is his sentence at the ford, and Hosea says how he held on: he wept and sought God's favor. Hebrews names his faith at one point only, the blessing he gave while he was dying.

In both places it appears the immediate sense is national and covenantal. The oracle to Rebekah speaks of two nations before either twin is born, and Malachi 1:2-3 sets Israel's restoration after exile against Edom's continuing ruin. Paul quotes the line in Romans 9:13 inside an argument about whose call decides the line of promise.

Adam Clarke states flatly that there is not a word here about the eternal state of either man, and John Wesley says the same of Paul's use of it. Whether Paul's argument reaches beyond the two nations to individual election is a real question, and the comparative-national reading and the Reformed individual-election reading are both held at full strength on the study page rather than settled here.

The Hebrew word in Genesis 49:10 is spelled the same as the town's name, and four readings of it are held. The Messianic reading takes it as a title of the coming one, and it is the reading of the Targums, of the Babylonian Talmud at Sanhedrin 98b, of Rashi in the eleventh century, of Justin Martyr and Irenaeus in the second, and of Wesley, of Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, and of Spurgeon, who preached a whole sermon under the title in 1874. The tribute reading repoints the consonants as shai lo, tribute to him, which fits the second half of the verse. The relative reading takes the word as until he comes to whom it belongs, which is how the Septuagint, the Syriac and the Latin fathers understood it. The place-name reading takes it as the town in Ephraim and ties it to the assembly of Joshua 18:1.

Where the readings part from Christ, this page says so at the point of contact. The Targums, the Talmud and Rashi read the verse as pointing to a Messiah still awaited rather than to Jesus of Nazareth, and that difference is stated plainly and without disparagement. This site teaches that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, and it says so without mocking the tradition that reads the verse otherwise.

Because it does, and this page reports it rather than tidying it. The name is given at the ford in Genesis 32:28 and given again by God at Bethel in Genesis 35:10, and Genesis then uses both, sometimes in the same paragraph. At Genesis 46:2 God calls him "Jacob, Jacob" in a sentence that begins with Israel setting out.

Charles Spurgeon read the two names as the weakness and the strength of the same man. Nothing in the text says the old name was withdrawn.

About twenty-two years, though Genesis states no single number for it. Joseph is seventeen when his brothers sell him in Genesis 37:2. He is thirty when Pharaoh raises him up in Genesis 41:46. Genesis 41:53 names seven years of abundance after that, and Genesis 45:6 has Joseph telling his brothers the famine has run two years with five still to come. Thirty minus seventeen is thirteen, and thirteen plus seven plus two comes to twenty-two.

In the cave at Machpelah near Mamre, with Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah and Leah, as he instructed at Genesis 49:29-31 and as Genesis 50:13 records. The funeral procession carried him out of Egypt and back into a land his family did not yet own except for one field and one cave.

Joseph's bones went somewhere else, to the field at Shechem that Jacob had bought. Stephen's summary in Acts 7:16 compresses the two purchases into one sentence, and this page states what each text says rather than harmonising them into a third account.