Circular Cruises/Jacob

Jacob

13 October 1998

This is about the story of Jacob. Yes, the one from the Bible. But don't run away! I may tell it a little differently from the way you've heard it before. After all, no matter what else the Bible may or may not be, it is undoubtedly folklore - it consists of stories which were originally passed along orally, until someone thought to write the things down. And the nice thing about folklore is that the same tale can be different depending on who's telling it.

Now, first I should help those folks who really don't have even rudimentary biblical orienteering. This is after the big flood, but before Moses. It's exactly halfway through Genesis, around book twenty-five.

If you were a screenwriter, you might assess Genesis like this: The flood is the big showpiece, but it's used much too soon; it ends Act One, so there's no good event to end Act Two, and we just sort of drift from one character to the next, finishing up with the story of Joseph, which is a really good yarn and should probably have been made into a movie on its own, with some catchy title like The Prince of Egypt, or, going for the retro-Sixties camp, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

Anyway. Genesis starts with Eden and ends with Joseph; Moses comes along in Exodus. Moses was the first person with a mandate from God to take this ragged bunch of displaced settlers and make a nation out of them. Before that, all God did was drop a generous hint now and then. Jacob got some of the best hints, but it'll take us a while to get to them.

Jacob wasn't an especially nice guy the way he's presented at the beginning of his story; in fact, he was a real heel. That's a joke for all those biblical scholars out there. "Jacob" is a pun on the Hebrew for "heel." Jacob and Esau were twin brothers; Esau was born first, and Jacob (so the tale goes) was born holding onto Esau's heel.

Jacob also means "supplanter." These biblical stories are fraught with overobvious symbolism: Jacob apparently didn't care much for the fact that he was born one minute too late to inherit his dad Isaac's worldly goods, and gave a lot of thought to changing the situation.

Esau (which means "hairy," and was he ever) was a burly outdoorsy type. His father Isaac, who had some issues of his own (his dad tried to sacrifice him to God when he was little, scaring the snot out of him, and he ended up in an arranged marriage with his cousin Rebekah), liked Esau best. On the other hand, Rebekah favored Jacob. One day Jacob was cooking up a nice batch of bean stew (red lentils) and Esau came in from hunting, ravenous. Now, you know that in the real world, Esau would say, "Give me some of them beans, baby bro, and maybe I won't bust your pretty face," but in morality tales, things don't work like that.

Jacob offered to trade Esau the All-You-Can-Eat Lentil Special in exchange for Esau's birthright - in other words, Jacob would inherit and so forth. (These things were taken very seriously back then.) Esau, not the brightest light in Canaan, agreed.

Jacob's next trick (although you could blame Mom for this one) was when Isaac lay dying. He called Esau to him and asked him to hunt some venison for him. Isaac wanted some "savory meat" (as the King James Version says) before he died, apparently, and if Esau would indulge his dying whim, he would give Esau his blessing.

Rebekah, eavesdropping, told Jacob to go kill a goat from the yard and she would cook it, so that Jacob could pretend to be Esau and get the blessing instead. Jacob, showing a fine grasp of strategy, noted that his skin was smooth and ladylike, whereas Esau was, well, Esau. No problem, said Rebekah, we'll just wrap your arm in the nice hairy goatskin. Waste not, want not, and you know your dad's almost blind anyway.

Now, a really excellent plot point is why, when Isaac and Esau caught on later, Isaac didn't just give Esau a blessing too. Maybe even a better blessing. Isaac's take on it was, I've already promised your brother everything in his blessing. There's nothing left to give you. But he did promise Esau that one day he'd be out from under Jacob's thumb.

And did Esau pitch Jacob through a wall? Well, he might have, except that Rebekah decided it might be better if Jacob went to go stay with her brother Laban until things calmed down at home.

(Don't worry, Jacob's going to get fleeced himself before we're done. Bible stories have nothing if not dramatic irony.)

Now, before proceeding, you have to know that Isaac inherited his dad Abraham's thing about not marrying Canaanites. Given how limited the population was, going away to get wives from another gene pool might have seemed like a wise move, but since they always ended up going back to northern Mesopotamia where all the relatives lived, it might actually have been better if they had just dated the neighborhood girls. Anyway, it was understood that Jacob wasn't just going to see Laban to lie low for a while; he was to marry one of Laban's daughters (whom, if you don't have a flowchart, would be his first cousins. Hey, it worked for Dad ....)

Esau, for his part, ended up marrying a different cousin - the daughter of Abraham's other son Ishmael, the one who generally disappears from the Bible stories completely (apparently he went off to become very important in Muslim tradition). A lot of stuff disappears that way. For example, Jacob and Esau aren't exactly young men at this time: Before Isaac's death, Esau has already taken two wives, Hittite women that Isaac and Rebekah apparently didn't approve of, and the KJV notes he was forty when he married them. It doesn't say how much later he married Ishmael's daughter. Yes, he still had the other two wives. That wasn't taboo then. Nor was marrying a cousin, for that matter.

I generally just cut all the ages in half, given the contrast between the ages claimed in the Bible (Abraham dies at "a good old age" of 175!) and how short lifespans actually were in that period. Esau marrying two young Hittite women at age twenty is more realistic, and fits the story better, and Abraham could have died in his mid-eighties and still easily qualified for patriarch status. It also makes his wife Sarah's late childbirth a little easier to swallow.

But we were talking about Jacob.

On the way to Laban's, Jacob slept outside the town of Luz, with a rock for a pillow. Not the Motel 6, but one must make sacrifices. As he slept, he dreamed he saw a ladder reaching to heaven (that's correct, it's Jacob's Ladder) with angels climbing up and down it endlessly. He saw God above the ladder, and God told him that he would bless the land upon which Jacob was lying, and that his descendants would spread all over the place - or, to be completely graphic about it, that "thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth."

Jacob woke up, realized he had just been dropped a big Hint, and made a pillar out of his pillow, anointed it with oil, and henceforth that place was known as Bethel ("house of God").

But back to the gossip. What do you think this is, a religious story? Nah. This part of the Bible is all about who cheated whom and who lay with whom. Upon arriving at Laban's, Jacob fell hard for Laban's youngest daughter Rachel, who in addition to having one of the better Biblical names, was "beautiful and well-favored." (That the KJV even bothers to note this says volumes.)

Laban offered Jacob a job and asked him to name a price. Jacob said he'd work seven years for Laban if he could marry Rachel at the end of that time. Laban agreed. But - at the end of seven years, Laban pulled a fast one. He married Jacob to his elder daughter Leah instead. (It is useful to note that brides were veiled throughout the ceremony, and that Jacob had probably been drinking during the feasting.)

Jacob went to Laban, enraged, the next morning. Laban explained calmly that it just wasn't done to marry the younger daughter off before the older one, and that if he worked another seven years he could have Rachel too. Jacob, realizing he'd been had, worked another seven years.

This story then degenerates into a minor domestic account of the squabbling between Rachel (who was beautiful but had difficulty conceiving) and Leah (who was plain but fecund), and an accounting of how many children they had (seven from Leah, one - finally - from Rachel, and two each from Rachel and Leah's handmaids, by proxy. Don't ask.) Fortunately even the Bible feels the need to wrap things up neatly, so we end up with Jacob and his brood returning to Canaan.

Jacob sent word to Esau of his approach. Jacob by this point was in a kiss-and-make-up mood, having recently fought and mended with Laban as well, but Esau apparently was not. Jacob's messengers returned with word that Esau was coming with four hundred men. Hmm, this bodes ill, thought Jacob ... so he sent Esau a large bribe of livestock, and then went off to worry by himself for a bit.

An angel appeared and proceeded to wrestle with Jacob all night. Now, the angel caused Jacob some injury, this much is sure; the nature of the injury, though, is in some doubt. The tame version is that the angel dislocated Jacob's hip, and we'll stick with that because this is the sort of thing Bible geeks like to argue about all day.

Despite being injured, Jacob stubbornly refused to release the angel from his grasp, and when dawn broke, the angel begged him for release. Jacob said, nuh-uh, not until I get your blessing. A little like leprechaun stories, isn't it? The angel blessed him and also renamed him, calling him Israel. By now you have realized that all names in the Bible have second meanings, and sure enough it means "he struggles with God."

[Cynics like myself who wonder at the wisdom of carving a rectangle of highly desirable property in 1947 from under the noses of several Arab states hostile to your cause would be advised to ponder the significance of that name.]

Oh, yeah, Jacob. Turns out his little anxiety attack had been needless; Esau was quite well-off too by now, and also in a reconciliatory mood. They do a little Laurel and Hardy ("Oh, do take the livestock. No, my dear boy, I couldn't possibly. Oh, but I insist") and hug and make up.

And that's about it for Jacob. His favorite wife Rachel eventually has another child, Benjamin, dying in childbirth and bringing the kid count to twelve boys (The Twelve Sons of Israel) and one girl. Seed like dust indeed. Isaac finally dies, age 180 (yes, through all that he was still alive, and presumably on his deathbed the whole time), and the story segues directly into the tale of Jacob's son Joseph, who, in writer/cartoonist Larry Gonick's words, "ended up in Egypt with an Egyptian wife and an excellent government job."

Yup, lame ending. Always bear in mind Gonick's description of the Bible in his list of source materials: "Unevenly paced."

Copyright © October 1998. All rights reserved.