Esau wasn’t chosen. He also wasn’t rejected.
It is one of the most emotionally affecting scenes in the Torah. Jacob, dressed in Esau’s clothes, has taken Esau’s blessing. He leaves and, shortly thereafter, Esau enters. What is remarkable is not what happens next but how the Torah describes it:
“Who are you?” asked his father Isaac.
“I am your son, your firstborn, Esau,” he replied.
Isaac was seized with a violent fit of trembling. “Who then was it that hunted game and brought it to me? I ate it all before you came, and I blessed him — and he will be blessed.”
When Esau heard his father’s words, he burst into a loud and bitter cry. He said to his father, “Bless me, me too, my father!” … And Esau wept aloud. (Genesis 27:32-38)
In general, the Torah is sparing in its details, especially about the emotional state of its characters, leaving the reader to supply what the text omits. Emmanuel Levinas was surely correct in seeing this as an invitation to Midrash, summoning the reader to complete the text in dialogue with the written word. The Torah is more like radio than television, actively enlisting the imagination of its hearers. So we are dealing here with a passage unusual in its literary explicitness and psychological depth.
As readers, we feel with — and for — Isaac and Esau.
We enter into Isaac’s dawning realization that he has been deceived. We identify too with Esau, whose first thought is not betrayal or revenge but simple, sharp and shocking disappointment (“Bless me — me too, my father”). Then comes Isaac’s helplessness (“So what can I possibly do for you, my son?”) and Esau’s weeping — all the more poignant because he is a man of the fields, rough and impetuous, not a man given (as Joseph will later be) to tears. Father and son, deceived and disappointed, are robbed of what should have been a moment of great tenderness (son feeding father, father blessing son). We can imagine the painting Rembrandt might have made of it.
• • •
Why this detail? In Torah, form follows function. Nothing is accidental. Our sympathies are drawn throughout the chapter to Esau rather than Jacob. It is not that Esau was the rightful heir of the covenant, or that history has taken a wrong turn.
Manifestly this is not so. Rebecca favors Jacob, and in Bereishit, mothers know their children better than fathers do. Esau — the hunter, the man who “despised his birthright” — was clearly not destined to be the faithful follower of an invisible, transcendent G-d. The Abrahamic covenant must pass through Jacob, “a quiet man, staying among the tents.” Why then does the Torah go out of its way to enlist our sympathies with Esau, to see things from his perspective? First we must take a wider look at what the rest of the Torah tells us about him and his descendants.
The first insight is that Esau does receive a blessing from Isaac:
Of the cream of the land your home shall be, of the dew of heaven above. By your sword you will live, and your brother you will serve; but when you break loose, you will throw off his yoke from your neck. (Genesis 27:39-40)
The “cream of the land” and the “dew of heaven” are not so circumscribed, Isaac implies, that there will not be enough for both sons. As for Jacob’s supremacy, it will last only as long as he does not misuse it. If he acts with unwarranted high-handedness, Esau will simply “throw off his yoke.” There is a basis here for coexistence.
The second insight comes when Esau “marries out,” taking two Hittite women as wives. This was “a source of bitterness” to Isaac and Rebecca. Esau “understood that the Canaanite girls were displeasing to his father Isaac” and tries to ameliorate the situation by taking a third wife, Machlath, daughter of Ishmael. The gesture fails: He does not divorce the other wives, and he has not internalized that Ishmael, too, was rejected as an heir to the Abrahamic covenant. Esau is not overly endowed with intelligence, but he cares for his father and does not wish to cause him distress.
• • •
The third passage comes 20 years later, when the brothers finally meet again. Jacob is full of fear before the encounter — fear that leads him to elaborate preparations involving prayer, diplomacy and war. Yet when the moment comes, Esau runs to meet Jacob, embraces him, weeps and shows none of the hostility he had once harbored. Esau, true to character, is swift to anger, equally swift to forget. When Jacob, pressing on him a gift of cattle and flocks, uses the deeply significant phrase “please accept my blessing,” Esau shows no sign of understanding the hint. He does not harbor a grudge, not because he forgives but because he forgets.
The fourth passage (Bereishit 36) is the list of Esau’s descendants. It contains the statement, “These are the kings who ruled in the land of Edom before any king reigned in Israel.” And it closes with a contrast: Esau’s tribes dwell “eretz achuzatam (in their hereditary lands),” while Jacob lives “be-eretz megurei aviv (in the land where his father had lived as an alien).” Esau’s descendants establish themselves geographically and politically long before Jacob’s. Not for them the twists and turns of covenantal history — exile, slavery, redemption and the wilderness years. Both may eventually inherit the cream of the land and the dew of heaven, but for one the route is straightforward; for the other, anything but.
The fifth insight concerns the later relationship between the Israelites and the Edomites. G-d tells the Israelites, “You are passing by the borders of your brothers, the descendants of Esau … be very careful not to provoke them. I will not give you even one foot of their land” (Deuteronomy 2:4-5). No less emphatic is the command: “Do not abhor an Edomite, since he is your brother” (Deuteronomy 23:8). Whatever the tensions of the biblical era, the Israelites were commanded to respect both the Edomites and their land.
Putting these facts together, what are we to infer? At the simplest level, there is a humanity here that defies all stereotypes. Esau is a child loved by his father, whom he loves in return. So striking is this that, despite the generally negative evaluation of Esau in the midrashic literature, it shines through. Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel said: “No man ever honored his father as I did mine, yet I found that Esau honored his father even more than I did.”
The Midrash tends, for good pedagogic reasons, to cast biblical characters as wholly good or wholly bad. Yet the Torah itself teaches a different and equally important message, one that demands a certain maturity to appreciate: Even heroes have their faults and non-heroes their virtues, and those virtues are important to G-d. “The Holy One, blessed be He, does not withhold the reward of any creature,” said the Sages.
The Esau who emerges from the Torah has none of Abraham’s faith, Isaac’s steadfastness or Jacob’s persistence. He is carved of an altogether coarser grain. But he is not without his humanity, his filial loyalty and a decent if quick-tempered disposition. It was the sectarians of Qumran, not the rabbis, who divided humanity into “children of light” and “children of darkness.”
• • •
There is, however, something far more fundamental at stake in the story of Esau: the very concept of chosenness.
The book of Bereishit is, among other things, a profound meditation on what it means to be chosen and what it means not to be chosen. To be chosen means — as Jacob discovers — a life of high demands and great hardship (“Few and evil have been the days of my life,” he tells Pharaoh). But not to be chosen is also deeply disturbing. We see this when Hagar is sent away, in the relations between Joseph and his brothers, but most explicitly in the case of Leah and Rachel: “[Jacob] loved Rachel more than Leah … [G-d] saw that Leah was senuah (hated).”
I have translated this last phrase literally to give it its full, shocking force. Leah, of course, was not hated. She merely felt rejected. Yet the sense of rejection cuts so deep that the Torah compares it to the feeling of being hated. And one who feels rejected may hate in return. That is why the brothers “hate” Joseph (the verb is used three times in chapter 37).
Love chooses. But choice creates estrangement, which leads to tension, which can sometimes erupt into conflict and even violence. This theme is signaled almost at the beginning of the biblical narrative, where G-d’s choice of Abel’s offering and not Cain’s leads to fratricide.
The choice of one does not mean the rejection of the other. Esau is not chosen, but he is also not rejected. He too will have his blessing, his heritage, his land. He too will have children who become kings. He too will have his virtues recognized, above all his love and respect for his father.
It is no accident that our sympathies are drawn to him, as if to say for all time to all humanity: Not all are chosen for the rigors, spiritual and existential, of the Abrahamic covenant, but each has his or her place in the scheme of things, each has his or her virtues, talents and gifts, and each is precious in the eyes of G-d.
As G-d will later tell Jonah of the people of Nineveh, “Should I not be concerned about that great city?” (Jonah 4:11). Or as the Psalm puts it, “The L-rd is good to all; He has compassion on all He has made” (Psalms 145:9).
To be chosen does not mean that others are rejected. To be secure in one’s relationship with G-d does not depend on negating the possibility that others too may have a (different) relationship with Him. Jacob was loved by his mother, Esau by his father; but what of G-d, who is neither father nor mother, but both and more than both? Am I loved more than my brothers or sisters? Less? Once asked, the question cannot but lead to sibling rivalry (one of the central themes of Bereishit). But it is an invalid question. A good parent loves all their children and never thinks of giving one “less” love. Love is not quantifiable. It rejects comparisons.
Jacob is Jacob, heir to the covenant. Esau is Esau, enjoying his own heritage and blessing. What a simple truth, and how beautifully, subtly, it is conveyed. It is one of the Torah’s most profound messages to humanity — and how deeply the world needs to hear it today.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020) was chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013.
