Genesis27chapter 27

Genesis 27:1-2

The chapter opens on a blind father, and Genesis closes on another: at 48:10 the eyes of Israel were dim for age, so that he could not see, in almost the same words. The son who takes a blessing here from a father who cannot tell his boys apart will one day cross his own hands over two grandsons on purpose and tell the objector that he knows what he is doing. Isaac says he knows not the day of his death, and he lives more than forty years past this scene.

Genesis 27:3-4

Isaac hangs the blessing on a meal, and a meal is how this family already lost its birthright, since Esau sold his for bread and lentils at 25:29-34. The reason the father gives is that he loves the taste, which is the same ground the narrator gave at 25:28, that Isaac loved Esau because he did eat of his venison. Hebrews later calls Esau a profane person who for one morsel of meat sold his birthright.

Genesis 27:5-7

Rebekah overhears and repeats the errand to Jacob with one phrase in it that Isaac never said. Isaac had said, that my soul may bless thee before I die, and she reports it as, and bless thee before the LORD before my death. Whether she heard more than the narrator records or supplied the words herself, the effect is that God's name is on the transaction before the deceiving starts.

Genesis 27:8-10

Obey my voice is the refrain of this chapter, and Rebekah says it three times, here, again at verse 13, and once more at verse 43 when she sends her son out of the country. One chapter earlier God had given Isaac the whole covenant on the ground that Abraham obeyed my voice, at 26:5. The same words now carry a mother's instruction set against a father's, and the two good kids of the goats she sends for are the first half of the disguise.

Genesis 27:11-13

Jacob's objection is practical rather than moral, that his father might feel him and find him out, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown mark that his scruple rests on the risk and not on the evil of the act. Rebekah answers by taking the curse onto herself, upon me be thy curse, my son. Matthew Henry read that line as an unwitting echo of Christ bearing the curse for those who obey his voice, while others have read it as a woman assuming a weight no one should carry. Jerome notes that the Hebrew word behind hairy is Seir, which becomes the name of Esau's country.

Genesis 27:14-17

Goat becomes venison, goatskin becomes Esau, and Esau's own clothes go onto the younger brother's back. Genesis runs the same two properties twice more against Jacob himself: his sons kill a kid, dip Joseph's coat in its blood and carry the garment to their father at 37:31, and Judah is taken in by a change of garments and pays with a kid he promises and never delivers at 38:14-23. The man who deceived his father with a garment and a kid is deceived by his sons with a garment and a kid.

Genesis 27:18-20

Isaac's first question is who art thou, my son, and Jacob answers with a lie in three parts: the name Esau, the firstborn's place, and the claim that he hunted the meat. Pressed on why the hunting went so fast, he brings God into it, because the LORD thy God brought it to me. Older commentators mark that answer as the worst of them, since a lie that borrows God's name for cover is a different order of thing.

Genesis 27:21-23

Isaac's ear is right and his hand is wrong, and he goes with the hand: the voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau. Matthew Henry drew the hypocrite out of that line, a man who speaks like a saint and works like a sinner, and who is judged in the end by his hands. Adam Clarke measures how far the old man's senses had failed if he could not tell a kid's skin from his own son's arm.

Genesis 27:24-25

Asked point blank, Jacob says two words, I am. Gill records an old attempt to soften it, that he does not say I am Esau, and rejects the excuse, since the words answer a question and were meant to be taken as they were heard. Then the father eats the goat, drinks the wine, and the blessing is one verse away.

Genesis 27:26-27

The last test is smell, and the borrowed clothes pass it too. Clarke suggests the goodly raiment had been stored with aromatic herbs, the way wardrobes were kept, so that the field came into the room with the coat. Every sense Isaac has left has now been turned against him, and he blesses the smell of a son who is not in the room.

Genesis 27:28-29

What comes out of Isaac's mouth is the Abrahamic covenant: dew of heaven and fatness of the earth, then nations bowing, then cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee, which is what God had said to Abram at 12:3. Isaac confirms it knowingly at 28:3-4, sending Jacob away with the blessing of Abraham named outright. The clause about brethren bowing sits oddly beside 33:3, where Jacob bows himself to the ground seven times in front of Esau.

Genesis 27:30-31

The text puts the brothers within a minute of each other, Jacob scarce gone out and Esau coming in from the field. Esau's words are nearly his brother's words, let my father arise, and eat of his son's venison, that thy soul may bless me. Genesis lets the near miss stand without comment, and neither the timing nor the oracle of 25:23 is offered as cover for how the thing was arranged.

Genesis 27:32-33

Isaac trembled very exceedingly, which Clarke renders literally as trembled with a great trembling greatly, the heaviest phrase of its kind in Genesis. He could have revoked what was got by fraud, and he does the opposite: yea, and he shall be blessed. Hebrews 11:20 says that by faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau concerning things to come, and Paul takes the elder shall serve the younger from 25:23 into his argument about election at Romans 9:12.

Genesis 27:34-35

Esau's cry is the loudest sound in the chapter, and Hebrews 12:16-17 sends the reader back to it, saying he found no place of repentance though he sought it carefully with tears. Readers divide over what it was he could not find: some take it as Isaac's mind, which would not be turned back, and others as a change of heart in Esau himself. Isaac's answer names the method without defending it, thy brother came with subtilty, and hath taken away thy blessing.

Genesis 27:36-37

Esau turns the name into the charge, since Jacob means supplanter, and Jerome ties it back to the hand on the heel at 25:26. Two times, he says, the birthright and the blessing, though the birthright he had sold himself over a bowl of food. The name Esau throws at him here is the name taken away from him at 32:28, after a night of wrestling, when he is called Israel instead.

Genesis 27:38-40

What is left for Esau is a living outside the covenant, and Wesley's point holds, that nothing in it reaches toward Christ or brings him into the promise. The Hebrew preposition at verse 39 can be read as of the fatness of the earth or away from it, and the country Edom actually got argues for the second, though the King James renders the first. By thy sword shalt thou live comes true in Edom's history, and so does the yoke broken from off thy neck, which Jerome reads as the Edomites throwing off the servitude they owed.

Genesis 27:41

Genesis has been here before, at 4:8, where one brother's offering was preferred and the other killed him in a field. Esau goes as far as the intent and even sets a date, the days of mourning for my father are at hand, and then he does not do it. When they meet again at 33:4 he runs and falls on Jacob's neck and weeps, and at 35:29 the two of them bury their father together.

Genesis 27:42-43

Obey my voice comes a third time, and this time it puts her son on the road out of the land. That road runs to Haran and to Laban her brother, which is the road Abraham's servant travelled to fetch her at 24:10, and it ends the way it ended then, at a well where a woman comes to draw and runs home with the news, at 29:1-12. Her own betrothal and her son's are the same scene told twice.

Genesis 27:44-45

A few days runs out to twenty years, and Jacob counts them himself to Laban's face at 31:41. The house he is being sent to is where the substitution comes back on him, when Laban puts the elder daughter in the younger's place at 29:23-26 and tells him it must not be so done in our country, to give the younger before the firstborn. Rebekah asks why she should be deprived of you both in one day, and Genesis never records her death, only her burial, mentioned in passing by Jacob at 49:31.

Genesis 27:46

Rebekah gives Isaac a real grievance in place of the true one, since 26:35 had already said the Hittite wives were a grief of mind to them both. She never mentions the plot on Jacob's life, and the substitute reason works, because Isaac acts on it at 28:1-2 and sends Jacob to Padan-aram to take a wife there. Abraham had made his servant swear to the same policy at 24:3, so the cover story is family law, which is what makes it usable.