Genesis33chapter 33

The meeting of the brothers is the chapter where the classical readers part company most visibly, and the place they part is the kiss. Rashi records that the scribal tradition puts dots above that word, and hands on the dispute rather than settling it: "Dots are placed above the letters of this word, and a difference of opinion is expressed in the Baraitha of Sifré" as to what the dots mean, one view being that the kiss was not wholehearted (Rashi on Genesis 33:4:2, the Pentateuch with Rashi's commentary by M. Rosenbaum and A. M. Silbermann, 1929 to 1934, public domain). On the embrace itself he is warmer, "His pity was aroused when he saw him prostrating himself so many times", on Genesis Rabbah 78:8 (Rashi on Genesis 33:4:1). He reads the ordering of the families as a ranking of love, and Jacob going first as a father putting himself in the way: "He thought: if that wicked man comes to fight let him fight me first" (Rashi on Genesis 33:2:1 and 33:3:1). Esau's refusal of the gift he takes as a legal concession, "In these words he admitted his right to the blessings", on Genesis Rabbah 78:11 (Rashi on Genesis 33:9:1). He reads the booths of the seventeenth verse as a stay of eighteen months, a summer, a winter and a summer, on Megillah 17a, and the word for Jacob's arrival at Shechem as three kinds of wholeness, among them "unimpaired in body (health) because he was cured of his lameness" (Rashi on Genesis 33:17:1 and 33:18:1). On the price paid for the field he quotes Rabbi Akiba on a coin he had met in the field: "When I visited the coast-towns I found that they called a Meah a Kesittah", on Rosh Hashanah 26a (Rashi on Genesis 33:19:1). Radak and Sforno read the scene as diplomacy under threat. Radak says Jacob divided the children among their mothers because "Each mother would naturally have stronger concern for her own children", and that Jacob went ahead of them all as a father who has compassion on his children: "He offered himself as the butt of Esau's anger hoping thereby to save the lives of his children" (Radak on Genesis 33:1:1 and 33:3:1, translated by Eliyahu Munk, HaChut Hameshulash, CC-BY). Sforno reads the four hundred men as evidence that the gift had failed, "To tell us that he had not been appeased even by the substantial gift Yaakov had sent him" (Sforno on Genesis 33:1:1, Munk translation, CC-BY). Ibn Ezra comments here at 33:2:1 and Malbim at 33:6:1, and the corpus holds no English of either under a licence permitting quotation, so they stand as citations.