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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > Spring 1986
The Jacob Cycle in Genesis

Deception for Deception

Who breaks the cycle?

By Richard Elliott Friedman

The biblical story of Jacob is artistically an exquisite creation, psychologically an intriguing portrait, and religiously an interpretive treasurehouse—but it has always been a problem. Even Sunday school children ask why the hero Jacob, the great patriarch, withholds food from his own brother Esau to get his brother’s birthright and then lies to his blind father Isaac on his deathbed to get his father to give him his brother’s blessing. Why did the ancient Israelite author tell the story this way, portraying his own ancestor as manipulative of and deceitful to his family? Moreover, it is not Jacob alone […]

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Footnotes

1.

The Aramaic translation (the Targum), the Greek Translation (the Septuagint), and, recently, the New English Bible and the New Jewish Publication Society translations all make it “the older,” not “the firstborn,” thus unfortunately missing this point and making it unavailable to their readers.

2.

The pun is actually a double one; Esau is described as a “hairy man,” which was the reason for the goatskin deception in the first place, and “hairy” in Hebrew is saµÔir (Genesis 27:11).

Endnotes

1.

Genesis 29:26. Several scholars have discussed this irony in various terms: Ephraim A Speiser, Genesis, Anchor Bible (New York, 1964), p. 227; Nahum Sarna, Understanding Genesis (New York: Schocken, 1966), p. 184; Michael Fishbane, Text and Texture (New York: Schocken, 1979), pp. 55ff.; Robert Alter (citing Umberto Cassuto), “Sacred History and Prose Fiction,” in The Creation of Sacred Literature, Richard E. Friedman, ed., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 23 Fishbane’s discussion of recompense for deception is especially interesting in parallel with what follows here.

2.

Richard Elliott Friedman and Baruch Halpern, “Composition and Paronomasia in the Book of Jonah,” Hebrew Annual Review 4 (1980), pp. 79–92.

3.

Halpern, “The Uneasy Compromise Between the Israelite Source and the Biblical Historian,” in Friedman, ed., The Poet and the Historian: Essays in Literary and Historical Biblical Criticism, Harvard Semitic Studies (Chico, California: Scholars Press, 1983), pp. 46–99.