GEN1211 Was Jacob right to take Esau’s blessing in disguise? Was he right to deceive his father and to take from his brother the blessing Isaac sought to give him? Was Rebecca right in conceiving the plan in the first place and encouraging Jacob to carry it out? These are fundamental questions. What is at stake is not just biblical interpretation but the moral life itself. How we read a text shapes the kind of people we become. Here is one way of interpreting the narrative: Rebecca was right to propose what she did and Jacob was right to do it. Rebecca knew that it would be Jacob, not Esau, who would continue the covenant and carry the mission of Abraham into the future.   She knew this for two separate reasons. First, she had heard it from God Himself, in the oracle she received before he twins were born: [this verse]. Esau was the elder, Jacob the younger. Therefore it was Jacob who would emerge with greater strength, Jacob who was chosen by God. Second, she had watched the twins grow up. She knew that Esau was a hunter, a man of violence. She had seen that he was impetuous, mercurial, and man of impulse rather than calm reflection. She had seen him sell his birthright for a bowl of soup. She watched while he “ate, drank, rose, and left. So Esau despised birthright” Genesis 25:34  No one who despises his birthright can be the trusted guardian of a covenant intended for eternity. Third, just before the episode of the blessing we read: “When Esau was 40 years old, he married Judith daughter of Berri the Hittite and also Basemath daughter of Elon the Hittite.   They were a source of grief to Isaac and Rebecca” Genesis 26:34 This too was evidence of Esau’s failure to understand what the covenant required. By marrying Hittite women he proved himself indifferent both to the feelings of his parents and to the self-restraint in the choice of marriage partner that was essential to being Abraham’s heir. The blessing had to go to Jacob. If you had two sons, one indifferent to art, the other an art-lover and aesthete, to whom would you leave the Rembrandt that has been part of the family heritage for generations?   And if Isaac did not understand the true nature of his sons, if he was “blind” not only physically but also psychologically, might it not be necessary to deceive him? He was by now old, and if Rebecca had failed in the early years to get him to see the true nature of their children, was it unlikely that she could do so now? This was, not just a matter of relationships within the family, since God had repeatedly told Abraham that he would be the ancestor of a great nation who would be a blessing to humanity as a whole. And if Rebecca was right, then Jacob was right to follow her instructions. This was the woman whom Abraham’s servant had chosen to be the wife of his master’s son, because she was kind, because at the well she had given water to a stranger and to his camels as well. Rebecca was not Lady Macbeth. She was the embodiment of lovingkindness. She was not acting out of favoritism or ambition. And if she had no other way of ensuring that the blessing went to one who would cherish it and live it, then in this case the end justified the means. This is one way of reading the story and it is taken by many of the commentators.   SACKS 33-35