The Turnabout Twins (Genesis 25:19-34)

     When we last looked in on All My Hebrew Children, Abraham had trudged to the mountain to sacrifice Isaac, his son, his only son—unless you count his other son Ismael—but at the last moment God had provided him a ram for the ritual, which was good for Isaac but for the ram, not so much.  And we talked about the limits of historicity in scripture, and how we need to remember that it is a product of its time, written by folks who didn’t think like you and me, and for whom the notion of child abuse, for instance, would produce foreheads wrinkled in honest confusion.  And we saw that though the scripture doesn’t bring Sarah into it at all, that might not have been the whole truth, and that we could explore those notions using that particularly Jewish form of interpretation called Midrash.  Of which I have no doubt Erica Kane would approve.

And now, as we pick up the story, Isaac is married to Rebekah, and—darn those Abrahamic genes—she is having trouble getting pregnant, and Isaac prays to God to unlock her womb, and though Rebekah undoubtedly prays too, the scripture says that it is Isaac’s prayer that does the trick.  And before you get all “what, God doesn’t hear the prayers of women, this is another example of patriarchal writing,” let me say that it’s probably a valid complaint, but the Talmud has another take: it says that it’s because Rebekah’s parents were foreigners that her prayers aren’t as powerful as Isaac who, after all, is a child of the promise.  You can take your pick of explanations, but my money’s on the patriarchy angle.

What I do know is that this is yet another barren woman, and that means yet another threat to the promise, which God takes care of by opening Rebekah’s womb, and this time the narrator doesn’t make a big deal out of it, he’s all “ho-hum, another womb-opening, another womb with a view” not at all like the angst that accompanied the production of Ishmael and Isaac.  Just “the LORD granted Isaac’s prayer, and his wife Rebekah conceived.”

This time, the focus begins with the pregnancy itself, and what a pregnancy it is.  Twins: two for the price of one, and it’s a hard trip down maternity lane for Rebekah, whose pregnancy isn’t very easy.  In fact, it’s so tough that she begins to wish that the curse of childlessness had not been removed.  Now, you and I might say well, what do you expect?  Times were hard enough for pregnant women in those days: food was often scarce, women worked hard for long hours, and it was hard enough for women carrying a single child, much less twins . . .

But the interpretation our narrator gives is that the children are fighting together  in the womb, and, further, that it’s continuous with the struggles they will have after birth, and even further, that it is a precursor to the struggles that the nations that arise from them—Israel and Edom—will have in the future.  In fact, Midrash tells us, they try to kill each other, even in the womb.

But the basic narrative says none of that, and Rebekah complains to God—"If it is to be this way, why do I live?"—and God responds, in typical God fashion, with an oracle “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.”  And she thinks, ironically, “Two nations?  No wonder it hurts in there,” and maybe she titters just a little bit—like her mother in law did—at that “elder serving the younger” business, because that was almost as likely a notion as a 90-year-old conceiving.  The rules of primogeniture—and every other geniture—were as immovable as bed-rock, and decreed that the elder would inherit 2/3 of the father’s stuff, not to mention the right to rule his father’s household.  Rebekah just couldn’t see it happening.

But this is God we’re talking about here, not some Temple flunky, and everybody knows that God can do anything God wants, and Rebekah—like Sarah before her—would’ve done well to remember that.  And in due season, Rebekah gives birth to twins, and one is ruddy and red and has hair all over his body, already, so they named him Esau, which means “hairy” or “rough.”  The other child looks like . . . well, Genesis doesn’t say what the other one looks like, he’s not described physically at all . . . all it says is that he is grasping—fiercely, we assume—the heel of his hirsuit older brother.  So, in a flash of inspiration, his parents name him Jacob, which means “heel-holder.”

And by now, you can probably sense a trend . . . Jacob and Esau are being set up as opposites, and their differences at birth presage differences as they grew up.  “Esau,” we’re told, “was a skillful hunter, a man of the field,” which is typical Genesis understatement: in actuality, he was a man’s man, an outdoorsman . . . he was Davy Crockett in animal skins, Daniel Boone with a spear.  He could take down a bear in 3 seconds flat, skin a deer with two flicks of his knife, and there wasn’t a furry creature within a hundred miles who didn’t quake in their paws at the mention of his name.

Jacob, on the other hand, wasn’t like that.  Again with characteristic understatement, our narrator says “Jacob was a quiet man, a man of the tents,” which in spite of his brevity, was more than enough, thank you very much: tents were where the women stayed, where they did stuff like cooking and sewing and gossiping, and, and, well . . . women’s stuff.  Esau was a man of the field, a skillful hunter and provider, but Jacob was a quiet man, a soft man, who hung around the tents like a woman.

Is it any wonder that Isaac loves Esau best?  Is it any wonder that he is head-over-heels-crazy about him?  He’s the very model of a major Hebrew gentleman, a perfect heir, not only in Isaac’s eyes, but in the eyes of all society as well. His neighbors were all grooming their daughters, each hoping that little Dorcas or Penelope would be the lucky one, and his coming of age ball was a great success, even though Esau spent more time bragging about his pick-up truck than he did dancing with the young ladies.  He was the perfect heir, and would make the perfect head of a household one of these days . . .  and Isaac thanks his lucky stars every day that Esau had come out first.

By the same token, is it really any wonder that Rebekah loved Jacob best?  He wasn’t a typical overbearing Hebrew male: he paid attention to what women did, he valued what they did, he even learned to do it himself—he cooked that red stew for his field-weary brother and he’d go on to sew a coat of many colors for his favorite son, and these were things that no loutish Hebrew male like Esau would be caught dead doing.

So as the boys grow up, the stage is set for what is to follow, and there’s more than a little patriarchal flavor to the whole thing . . . Jacob is a man of the tents, a woman-like man, in some respects, and look what happens: he tricks his brother out of first his birthright and, second, his father’s blessing, and you know how those women are, they’re tricky, not straightforward at all, they use subterfuge to get what they want . . . just look at Eve, for God’s sake, who started out this whole mess, tempting poor, old Adam to disobey the Lord.

But those who blame Rebekah forget that Isaac played favorites also, and there are hints that the author of Genesis wasn’t too thrilled with him, either.  We’re told that the reason Isaac loved Esau best was that he loved meat, which at the very least, makes Isaac look like a shallow jerk, and at the most, is a not-so-subtle parody of Hebrew manliness..

.But no matter what Genesis thinks about the whole thing—and despite what some would say, the text is ambiguous—the fact remains that Jacob does become Israel, the father of the Jewish people, not Esau.  The quiet man, the man from the tents, the one who knows how to cook dinner for his brother and sew outfits for his children, that is the one God chooses to head up the whole shebang.  God chooses the outsider, the man who doesn’t fit society’s definition of “male” to be the patriarch of God’s people.

And what I find remarkable is that today, it hasn’t changed all that much, at least here in the U.S. of A.  We always choose the “manly” leaders, we always choose those who are tough on crime, who talk loudly and carry a big stick, who shoot first and ask questions later.  It doesn’t do to be seen as waffling, as not taking a decisive stand, of looking weak to foreign powers.  We value progress, thrusting ahead, a very masculine thing.  Of all the Western nations, we’re one of the last who haven’t elected a woman president yet, and the one we may hire next go-round out-machoed the most macho secretaries of state on the foreign policy front. 

Back in the early seventies, when the feminist movement began gather steam, women in business found that they had to dress and behave as much as they could like men if they wanted to get ahead.  They had to suppress the qualities that had been associated with women—emotions, caring, creativity, nurturing—to get ahead in a man’s world.  The thing is, men have traditionally had to suppress those qualities as well.  Psychologist Carl Jung found that all human beings, whether biologically female or male, have significant feminine elements in their psyches.  He believed that a major problem in Western cultures—those that, like ours, evolved from ancient Greece—is the suppression of qualities—nurturing, empathy, caring, creativity—that derive from these elements in our single-minded pursuit of progress.  The pursuit of science and technological innovation requires a cold, analytical approach that eschews emotion and lack of objectivity.  Increasingly, our educational system has made science and engineering the “star” curricula, and demoted the arts to secondary status as “enrichment.” rather than the vital components that they are.  Couple this with historic patriarchal systems of male dominance over women, and what you get is a society that not only suppresses the feminine, but actively denies it and considers it of little worth.

This of course has had a very bad effect upon women, whose contributions have been seen largely within those pursuits labeled feminine, which are causing them to have low self-esteem and little regard for their own worth.  After life-times of being told that the qualities most associated with their gender are tangential to the progress of society, they have internalized the message and come to believe it, causing no end of psychic pain.

But it has had a bad effect on men as well . . . it has left them emotionally stunted, bottled up inside . . . the suppression of all that nourishes a bond—empathy, caring, emotion, vulnerability—has made it difficult to maintain healthy relationships, leading to the over-fifty-percent divorce rate we are blessed with today.  Families are disintegrating, and society in general has lost the healthy, balanced spirituality that characterized earlier times.

This is why the choosing of Jacob is so indicative, so instructive of the nature of God.  In the midst of a terribly patriarchal culture—and the Hebrew society was that, as much as our own Greek precursors, at least—in the midst of the terribly patriarchal culture, which had savagely suppressed women and all the feminine, God chose the man of the tents.  God chose the man with the integrated personality, who was a man—nobody could doubt that, after all he was the father of twelve tribes—but who was one who respected women, who loved women, who integrated the feminine into his person.

To produce Israel—and that is what he came to be called, Israel—God chose a whole human being, and one who was not afraid to show this wholeness in what he said and did.  In our society, which still shies away from any hint of effeminacy in men, which still laughs at and denigrates and calls unfit for public service anybody who shows emotion in public—look what they did to John Boehner when he cried—the fact that God chose a man of the tents should make us think.  Amen.