Not in God's Name (15 page)

But this makes no sense at all in the context of the wrestling match of the previous night. Jacob had just won a
victory
over his adversary. At the very least he had refused to let him go until he blessed him. The new name implied that henceforth Jacob should have no doubts about his ability to survive any conflict. A man who has ‘wrestled with God and with men and has overcome’ is not one who needs to bow down to anyone or call him ‘my lord’. We would expect Jacob to show a new-found confidence, not this wholly surprising servility.

Nor does it accord with everything else we had been led to believe until now. Rebekah had been told while the twins were still in the womb that ‘the elder will
serve
the younger’. Isaac had blessed Jacob, saying, ‘
Rule
over your brothers, and may your mother’s son
bow down
to you.’ If either the prophecy or the blessing were true, it should have been Esau who bowed down to Jacob, Esau who called him ‘my lord’ and himself ‘your servant’. Yet when the encounter takes place, the roles are reversed.

Nor is this all. Esau at first refuses the massive gifts of cattle Jacob had sent the previous day by his emissaries. ‘I have plenty,’
he says. ‘Let what is yours be yours.’ Jacob replies in the following significant words:

‘No, please, if I have found favour in your eyes, accept this gift [
minchah
] from my hand, for to see your face is like seeing the face of God, now that you have received me favourably. Please accept my blessing [
birkhati
] that was brought to you, for God has been gracious to me and I have everything.’ (Gen. 33:10–11)

There are three puzzling features of this speech. Why does Jacob change his language, speaking first of a ‘gift’, then a ‘blessing’?
⁴
In what conceivable way is seeing the face of Esau like ‘seeing the face of God’? And why, when Esau says, ‘I have plenty’, does Jacob say, ‘I have everything’?
⁵

The most striking feature of the passage is its repeated use of the word ‘face’,
panim
. Jacob’s words to Esau, ‘to see your
face
is like seeing the
face
of God’, echo his statement after the wrestling match: ‘He called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God
face
to
face
, yet my life was spared.” ’ Altogether, chapters 32 and 33 (the preparations for the meeting, the night-time struggle, and the meeting itself) echo time and again with variants of the word
panim
. This is almost entirely missed in translation, because
panim
has many forms in Hebrew not apparent in English. To take one example, verse 32:20:

[Jacob said to his servants], ‘You shall say, Your servant Jacob is coming behind us,’ for he thought, ‘I will pacify him with these gifts I am sending on ahead; later, when I see him, perhaps he will receive me.’ (Gen. 32:20)

The word ‘face’ does not appear once in this translation, yet in the Hebrew it appears
four times
. Literally, it reads:

‘You shall say, Your servant Jacob is coming behind us,’ for he thought, ‘I will wipe [the anger from] his
face
with the gift that
goes ahead of my
face
; afterwards, when I see his
face
perhaps he will lift up my face.’

There is a drama here and it has to do with faces: the face of Esau, of Jacob, and of God himself.
⁶
What is it?

It cannot be coincidence that when Jacob had earlier taken Esau’s blessing, Isaac was blind. The deception was possible only because Isaac could not see. The text at that point is almost an essay on the senses. Deprived of one (sight), Isaac uses the other four. He
tastes
the food,
touches
Jacob’s hands (which Rebekah has covered with goatskins) and
smells
his clothes (‘Ah, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field the Lord has blessed’). He
hears
his voice (‘The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau’). Eventually, Isaac trusts the evidence of taste, touch and smell over sound, and gives Jacob the blessing. He does so only because
he cannot see Jacob’s face
. Somehow, the idea of a face connects the earlier and later scenes.

We have before us an extraordinary literary phenomenon. On the surface, this is a simple tale of sibling rivalry in which the younger supplants the elder. Everything points in this direction, from the prophecy before the twins were born to the deception itself. Esau, the strong, loses to Jacob, the quick-witted. The younger will prevail. Yet the discrepancies mount up. We identify with Esau, not Jacob. Isaac qualifies the blessing: Jacob may not always dominate. Then, after the wrestling match, Jacob unexpectedly reverses the roles. It is he, not Esau, who prostrates himself, calling himself a servant and Esau ‘my lord’. We tend to miss this because everything in the narrative directs our attention to
Esau’s
behaviour. Will he attack Jacob? If so, who will win? So surprising is his conduct – the embrace, the warmth – that we hardly notice that Jacob’s behaviour is stranger still. Only when we have noticed these discords do we go back and read the story again, in the light of all we have discovered subsequently. That is when we make the discovery that changes everything.

There was a second blessing
. That is the detail whose significance we miss on the first reading.
After
the deception, Rebekah realises that Jacob is in danger because Esau is planning to kill him. She arranges for Jacob to escape. Her pretext is the fact that Esau had married two Hittite women. This was ‘a source of grief to Isaac and Rebekah’ (Gen. 26:35). This is her opportunity. She tells Isaac that it is imperative for Jacob to leave and go to her brother Laban, where he will find a non-heathen wife. Isaac agrees, and as Jacob is about to leave, he blesses him in these words:

May God Almighty bless you, make you fruitful and increase your numbers so that you become a community of peoples. May he give you and your descendants the blessing of Abraham, so that you may take possession of the land where you now live as a foreigner, the land God gave to Abraham. (Gen. 28:3–4)

This is a completely different blessing from the one Isaac had given Jacob thinking him to be Esau. The earlier blessing spoke of
wealth
(‘the dew of the heavens and the richness of the earth’) and
power
(‘Rule over your brothers’). The later blessing speaks of
children
(‘make you fruitful and increase your numbers’) and a
land
(‘the land God gave to Abraham’). This is what transforms our entire reading of the story.

Children
and a
land
are the covenantal blessings. They are what God promised Abraham. They dominate the book of Genesis.
⁷
Time and again God blesses the patriarchs – but always and only in terms of children and a land. He never promises them ‘the richness of the earth’, or that they will ‘Rule over their brothers’. Wealth and power have nothing to do with the covenant. They are not part of Israel’s destiny. What Isaac is doing in the second blessing is handing on to Jacob the legacy of Abraham, saying in effect: it will be you who will continue the covenant into the future.

This second blessing was given by Isaac to Jacob knowing that
he was Jacob
. There never was a need for deception. Isaac did not intend to disinherit Jacob, nor did he mean to hand on the covenant to Esau. The blessing he had reserved for his elder son was the one he knew to be right for him. Esau was a man of nature, physical, strong, a hunter – and Isaac loved him. That love is unmistakable and mutual throughout the narrative. The rabbis knew it. ‘No one’, they said, ‘ever honoured his father more than Esau honoured Isaac.’
⁸
Isaac loved Esau even though he knew that the covenant would be continued by Jacob. Why?
Because that is what it is to be a father
. Isaac loved Esau for what he was, not for what he was not. He wanted to give him the blessings appropriate to him: wealth and power. These are natural, not spiritual, goods. Isaac knew that his children were different. Their paths would diverge. They warranted different blessings. The blessing Jacob took was never meant for him. Isaac had reserved for Jacob another benediction, given later: that he would continue the covenant of Abraham. To receive
that
blessing Jacob had no need for disguise.

Recall René Girard’s thesis, set out in
chapter 5
, that the root cause of violence is
mimetic desire
, the wish to have what someone else has, which is ultimately the desire to be what someone else is. Nowhere in all of literature is this more clearly the case than with the biblical Jacob.

One fact stands out about Jacob’s early life.
He longs to be Esau
. He desires to occupy Esau’s place. He struggles with him in the womb. He is born holding on to Esau’s heel (hence the name
Jacob
, ‘heel-grasper’). He buys Esau’s birthright. He dresses in Esau’s clothes. He takes Esau’s blessing. When the blind Isaac asks him who he is, he replies, ‘I am Esau, your firstborn.’

Why? Because Esau was everything Jacob was not. He was the firstborn. He emerged from the womb red and covered in hair (Esau means ‘fully made’
⁹
). He was strong, full of energy, a skilled
hunter, a man of the fields. More importantly,
he was the child his father loved
. Esau was a force of nature. He knew that
homo homini lupus est
, ‘man is wolf to man’. He had the strength and skill to fight and win in the Darwinian struggle to survive. These were his natural battlegrounds and he relished the contest.

Esau is the archetypal hero of a hundred myths and legends. He is not without dignity, nor does he lack human feelings. His love for his father is genuine, as is Isaac’s love for him. Rabbinic Midrash, for educational reasons, turned Esau into a bad man.
¹⁰
But that is not how he is portrayed in the Bible. He is a
natural
man, celebrating the Homeric virtues and the Nietzschean will to power.

It is not surprising that Jacob’s first desire was to be like him.
¹¹
The keywords of the Jacob story –
face, name
and
blessing
– are all about identity. Jacob wanted to be Esau. He experienced, as Freud thought all siblings do, mimetic desire. It was Esau’s face he saw in the mirror of his imagination. It was as Esau he took his blind father’s blessing. But Jacob was not Esau, nor was the blessing he took the one destined for him. The true blessing was the one he received later
when Isaac knew he was blessing Jacob
, not thinking him to be Esau.

Jacob’s blessing had nothing to do with wealth or power. It had to do with the children he would teach to be heirs of the covenant, and the land where his descendants would seek to create a society based on the covenant of law and love. To receive that blessing Jacob did not have to dress in Esau’s clothes. Instead
he had to be himself
, not a man of nature but one whose ears were attuned to a voice beyond nature, the call of God to live for something other than wealth or power, namely, for the human spirit as the breath of God and human dignity as the image of God.

It is now clear exactly what Jacob was doing when he met Esau twenty-two years later.
He was giving back the blessing he had taken all those years before
.
¹²
The herds and flocks he sent to Esau represented
wealth
(‘the dew of the heavens and the richness of the earth’). The sevenfold bowing and calling himself ‘your
servant’ and Esau ‘my lord’ represented
power
(‘Be lord over your brothers, and may the sons of your mother bow down to you’). Jacob no longer wanted or needed these things. His statement ‘I have
everything
’ means ‘I no longer need wealth or power to be complete’. He says explicitly what he is doing. He says, ‘Please take [not just my
gift
but also] my
blessing
.’ He now knows the blessing he took from Esau was never meant for him, and he is giving it back.

It is equally clear what happened in the wrestling match the night before. It was Jacob’s battle with existential truth. Who was he? The man who longed to be Esau? Or the man called to a different destiny, the road less travelled? ‘I will not let you go until you bless me,’ he says to his adversary. The unnamed stranger responds in a way that defies expectation. He does not give Jacob a conventional blessing (you will be rich, or strong, or safe). Nor does he promise Jacob a life free of conflict. The name
Jacob
signified struggle. The name
Israel
also signifies struggle, but in a different way.

In effect, the stranger said to him, ‘In the past you struggled to be Esau. In the future you will struggle not to be Esau but to be yourself. In the past you held on to Esau’s heel. In the future you will hold on to God. You will not let go of him; he will not let go of you. Now let go of Esau so that you can be free to hold on to God.’ The next day, Jacob did so. He let go of Esau by giving him back his blessing. And though Jacob had now renounced wealth and power, and though he still limped from the encounter of the previous night, the passage ends with the words, ‘And Jacob emerged
complete
’ (Gen. 33:18). He no longer wanted Esau’s blessings. In the past, when he had mimetic desire, he was divided within himself and thus prey to anxiety and fear. The truth at which Jacob finally arrived, to which the name
Israel
is testimony, is that to be complete we need no one else’s blessings, only our own. The face that is truly ours is the one we see reflected back at us by God. That is the meaning of the priestly blessing ‘May God
turn his face
towards you and grant you
peace
’ (Num. 6:26).
Peace comes when we see our reflection in the face of God and let go of the desire to be someone else.