Rebekah, page 32
“Jacob isn’t. When he tells me a job will be done, he does it. Carefully and well, and takes pride in having done it for me. When will Esau start to grow out of this . . . irresponsibility?”
Isaac’s eyes flashed. Time for the silence now?
No. Though he didn’t look at her, his voice was hard and set—as angry-sounding as Rebekah could remember his ever being with her. “When will you understand that God’s decision in making Esau the firstborn is an irrevocable one? I’m not going to throw my firstborn out of his place and put his younger brother there, even if Jacob is your favorite child.”
“I love both my sons, and I want what’s best for them.”
“And somehow you decided it’s best for Esau to be rejected as firstborn? How much will he love God then?”
“Can you hear your own words, Isaac? Even you realize that if Esau were deprived of the birthright, his love of God would evaporate at once.”
“If he’s hurt that badly by his parents, in anger he might rebel against God in order to hurt us back.”
“But you were hurt by your father, and you didn’t rebel against God.”
“Rebekah. The birthright is Esau’s. And it’s the great sorrow of my life, that my wife despises her own firstborn.”
The words outraged her with their unfairness, and Rebekah answered quickly, in the first heat of her anger. “The great sorrow of my life is that my husband is blind to the son who loves God and obeys his parents.”
Isaac left her then. As usual, the argument quickly receded and they conversed normally again, but the words stayed in Rebekah’s memory and poisoned everything that happened afterward. There were times when she would have rebuked Esau and charged him to do better, but she held her peace because her husband would think she hated her firstborn. And there were times when she would have delighted in Esau and shown her deep love for him, but in her stubbornness she refused to let her husband see her delight in the young hunter, when Isaac still showed no favor to the son who deserved it more.
As for Jacob, what could she do except try to help him move beyond the deep void in his life that only his father’s love and respect could truly fill?
The wall in the family was fully built, and named, and she and Jacob stayed on one side of it, and Isaac and Esau on the other, even as they went through the motions of being one family, unchanged.
The girls felt it, too. Little Deborah, the eldest of the three, doted on Jacob, who always had time for her even when he was hard at work with the sheep or in the fields. Little Sarah, the second, was devoted to Esau, who always brought her snatches of bright cloth from the city, or a soft rabbit skin from his hunting, or a strange butterfly, or a rare fruit. Only the baby, Qira, did not choose sides—but when Rebekah was upset, Qira would fuss at her breast, as if the milk had soured and Qira could not abide the taste of anger.
With Rebekah fussing at him less, and Isaac favoring him all the more no matter what he did, Esau slipped ever further out of control. Jacob came to her once and told her, “I think Esau has taken a wife in the city of Gerar.”
“It’s not a wife you take when your parents haven’t been told,” said Rebekah, but despite her ironic tone, her heart was sinking at the thought of what it would mean for the birthright, to be in a household headed by an idolatrous woman.
“I heard his friends tease him about having a baby coming.”
“In front of you?”
“Esau was quick to deny it, and his friends saw how angry and worried he was and immediately they denied it. But Mother, even if she’s a Canaanite and not a Philistine, how much better is it to have the holy writings in a house where Asherah is worshiped than in a house that serves Molech?”
“Oh, it’s better,” said Rebekah. “Better in the sense that a quick death in battle is better than a death by torture.”
“I know the birthright isn’t mine,” said Jacob. “But can’t I do anything to protect the holy writings?”
“Have you told your father?”
“What’s the point? He’ll accuse me of being envious and then call Esau in to confront me, and Esau will deny everything and afterward he’ll threaten to kill me if I ever tell lies about him again.”
“Kill you? He threatens your life?”
“He doesn’t mean it,” said Jacob. “I mean, he means it, but he won’t do it.”
“You mean he hasn’t done it, because you haven’t cost him anything. But if you told and your father believed you and took away the birthright, then we’d see what Esau might do.”
“He’s not a killer, Mother.”
“How many times has he come home with blood on his hands?”
“The blood of the beasts he kills and brings home to Father.”
“Like a cat showing off the mice it kills.”
“Father loves the taste of wild game. I understand—I’m tired of the taste of mutton and lentils myself. But someone has to stay home and manage the flocks and herds. Esau has no more interest in the work of the camp than he has in . . .”
“In the birthright.”
“Oh, he’s interested in the birthright, Mother!”
“He’s interested in having it, not in studying the holy writings and living by them.”
“I know Father’s eyes are weak, Mother, but why can’t he see how Esau mocks everything that matters to our family?”
“Because Esau is smart enough not to show that side of himself in front of his father.”
“But what if I had proof?”
“What could possibly prove it to your father? He won’t believe what he’s told, and he can’t see it for himself.”
“I’m the most helpless person in all this, Mother,” said Jacob. “Because if I do anything to show Father who Esau really is, Father thinks I’m envious and want the birthright. Sometimes I think the only way I can help to save the birthright is to renounce it myself.”
“And then whom would it go to?”
“One of Keturah’s boys, maybe. Midian’s a good man, Mother. He’d make a worthy guardian.”
“And then your father’s line would be cut off from the birthright, if it went to his half-brother.”
“If the birthright goes to Esau, the way he is right now, then it will be lost to the whole world, because he’ll never care for it.”
“All we can do,” said Rebekah, “is pray to the Lord to help your brother grow up and grow out of his rebelliousness and repent of his sins and become . . .”
“A good servant to the Lord.”
“Like you.”
“I’m not a good servant to the Lord, Mother, because I’m not the one chosen to be his servant. If I take it upon myself, I’ll be a usurper.”
“You don’t have to have the birthright to be a servant of God,” said Rebekah. “There was never a chance for me to have the birthright, but still I spent my childhood trying to serve God. And finally my day came. As yours will, my son.”
“My day? My day for what—to be at war with my brother?”
“To have your father show you that he sees the man you are.”
“Fathers never see their sons for what they are,” said Jacob.
“That’s not so.”
“You’ve told me yourself how Grandfather never valued Father, either.”
“He never really showed Isaac how he valued him.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“No it’s not,” said Rebekah. “And I didn’t mean your father Isaac, anyway. I meant your Father in heaven.”
“He knows me. He knows us all.”
“Sometimes I wonder why he doesn’t just tell your father the way things should be.”
“Because the problem isn’t that Father can’t see, it’s that he won’t see, and the Lord doesn’t make us do things, he only teaches us and hopes we’ll use the things he taught.”
“So what has God taught you? And how are you going to use it?”
“What are you asking me to do, Mother?”
“Just keep being the man you are, and pray that your brother will realize what road he’s headed down and come back.”
“Or that Father will finally get the proof he needs to see what Esau is becoming. Proof that is witnessed by someone other than me.”
Later, Rebekah would realize that Jacob must have started planning then the incident that finally brought things to a head.
But at the time, the only thing Rebekah worried about was that she shouldn’t have spoken so openly to Jacob about her worries concerning Esau. Yet within the family, Jacob was the only one besides Rebekah who understood the danger from Esau’s behavior. And should she let him feel completely isolated in the family? Wasn’t it good for the obedient son to know that his mother understood the man he had become, even if his father didn’t see it and his brother despised him for it?
I didn’t make Esau’s choices for him. Nor is it my fault Isaac refuses to see. Though it’s unbearable that he doesn’t. Jacob is Isaac as he must have been as a child. He even looks more like Isaac—Esau looks like my father, except for the red hair.
Maybe that’s the problem. Isaac can’t love or value any man who even looks like himself.
For a while Rebekah believed that if Esau felt himself truly needed by the family, he might stop the things he was doing and settle down to life as Isaac’s heir and the future head of the family. So when such a time came, she watched for his response.
It was the climate that changed their lives, as it had been in Abraham’s day. Another drought, so severe that many wells went dry, and others simply didn’t have the water to sustain the flocks. They got word that Eliezer and his sons had sold off much of their stock and then traded the rest to Ezbaal’s cousin in exchange for orchards and wheatfields in the plain near the Great Sea, and they moved into one of the growing towns that was trying to compete with the growing Philistine cities. But Isaac knew that wasn’t the right choice for his household. “If we settle on one piece of land, then we’re bound to one city, to one people, generation after generation. Only when we have the ability to leave and carry what we have with us are we truly free, and only if we’re free can we serve God.”
Esau heard this with an outward show of respect—“That’s very wise, Father”—but Jacob told Rebekah later that Esau and his Canaanite friends later mocked what Father had said.
For days, Isaac tried to decide what to do. If he moved from Lahai-roi and started wandering, he’d find himself struggling to find water that wasn’t already defended. Eventually, a wandering life was bound to mean war. Finally he sat down with Rebekah and told her that as he searched the holy writings, he kept coming back to his father’s account of his journey to Egypt during the depths of the last drought. “There’s always grain in Egypt,” he said.
“But Egypt isn’t the same place where your father went. These days the country is dominated by a strong Pharaoh, and he hasn’t forgotten what happened the last time he allowed wanderers like us into the country.”
“How do you know so much about Egypt?” asked Isaac.
“From you! From the stories you’ve told me out of the holy writings. And from the traders who come through here, of course.”
“Then why is it that I’ve talked to the same traders and I read the same scriptures and they seem to be guiding me to Egypt?”
“It’s not enough to read the holy writings and then try to do what they did. Noah built an ark, after all, but I don’t think that would help us.”
“Noah was commanded to build an ark. We aren’t being commanded to do anything.”
“Are we asking?”
“Of course.”
“No, I mean it, Isaac. Egypt is dangerous, and staying here is impossible, and it’s at times like this that the keeper of the birthright has a right, has the duty to consult the Lord and find out what to do.”
“If the Lord wanted to speak to me, Rebekah, he could have done it a thousand times before now. Including this morning when I prayed to him about exactly this matter.”
“In every crisis before now, your father was head of the household and the Lord spoke to him. Now you’re the patriarch. Expect to be answered, clearly. It’s your right to be led by the Lord.”
“As I recall, you’ve had more actual visions than I have,” said Isaac. “Maybe you should pray.”
“I once received a vision about the babies in my womb,” said Rebekah. “And it was in answer to your prayers. You have responsibility for all these people. The Lord answers you all the time when you pray for them.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Then it only means that the choice is up to you, and whatever you choose will please the Lord.”
Isaac grinned at her. “Now you’re sounding like the kind of believer you said your mother was—you’ve set a test for the Lord that the Lord can’t fail.”
“But we’re not testing the Lord,” said Rebekah. “We already know that the Lord is God. We’re seeking to know his will. And he will answer.”
“How do you know?”
“Because we need him, and he won’t fail us.”
“No. But I might fail us.”
“The only way you could fail us, Isaac, is if you heard the Lord’s answer and disobeyed it. Or if you refused to ask him, because you didn’t believe he loved us enough to answer.”
So Isaac, full of self-doubt and clinging to his faith in God, went to pray. In the morning he awoke Rebekah by coming into her tent and whispering in her ear. “I dreamed a dream,” he said.
She came out of the fog of sleep to hear him telling of how he saw himself among dying cattle, and dipping down into a well only to come up with jars full of sand. In his dream he said what he had been saying in his prayers—I see nothing for us to do but to go down into Egypt. “And then there was a voice in my dream telling me not to go to Egypt, but to stay in Canaan. The wells our family used to control near the cities of the coast are no longer used, with Eliezer gone. If I go to Abimelech, the king of Gerar, he’ll let us use the wells as long as we need them.”
“Let us use them? They’re ours by right. Your father dug them!”
“Let him think he rules, let him think the wells are his to share with us,” said Isaac. “I have the Lord’s promise—the same one he gave to Father, only now he has sworn to fulfill the oath with me. My children will multiply as the stars of heaven, he said, and they’ll be given all these countries, and through my seed all nations of the earth will be blessed.”
Then Isaac wept in her embrace, in gratitude that the Lord at last had spoken to him, as he spoke to Abraham, and accepted him as the heir to Abraham’s covenant. “You believed when I did not.”
“You always believed in God,” said Rebekah. “It’s yourself you doubted, and I knew better, because I can see you.”
“And I can’t see anything,” said Isaac ruefully, for his eyes were getting old and he couldn’t see far-off things clearly. Worse, there were white patches in his eyes growing out over the pupils, cutting off part of his field of vision. But for now, he could see what he needed to—that the Lord had not abandoned him, but would lead him to safety.
Only Esau resisted the move. “I can’t hunt there in the plains,” he said. “It’s all farmland, orchards, tame.”
“You can hunt where you’ve always hunted,” said Isaac. “You’ll just have to go farther and work harder to get there.”
“You might try staying with the camp and helping us redig the wells near Gerar,” said Jacob.
“I’m not a well-digger,” said Esau contemptuously.
“We’ll all be well-diggers,” said Isaac, “until our flocks have the water they need.”
“Of course, Father. I was only teasing Jacob. As if he needed to teach me my duty!”
They went to the wells near Gerar and it all happened as the Lord had promised. It wasn’t exactly a miracle—the Lord didn’t force Abimelech to be generous where his father had been haughty back when Isaac first gave up the wells. What Rebekah gathered from the ladies of Gerar whom she visited with while Isaac negotiated with the king was that the crown rested very loosely on the head of this current Abimelech, whose mother had been only a concubine and whose people had actually preferred a different brother who had happened to be away from Gerar when the old king suddenly died. Having Isaac’s large camp and hundreds of servants in the hills overlooking the city changed the balance of power in the city, for Abimelech made a great show of his friendship with Isaac, implying that if anyone attempted to revolt against him, he’d be able to flee to the camp of his friend Isaac and bring down an army of Hebrews to subdue Gerar and restore Abimelech to power.
