Genesis 27:31 - Exposition

And he also had made savory meat ( vide Genesis 27:4 ), and brought it unto his father, and said unto him, Let my father arise, and eat of his son's venison— compared with Jacob's exhortation to his aged parent ( Genesis 27:19 ), the language of Esau has, if anything, more affection in its tones— that thy soul may bless me . Esau was at this time a man of mature age, being either fifty-seven or seventy-seven years old, and must have been acquainted with the heavenly oracle ( Genesis 25:23 ) that assigned the precedence in the theocratic line to Jacob. Zither, therefore, he must have supposed that his claim to the blessing was not thereby affected, or he was guilty of conniving at Isaac's scheme for resisting the Divine will. Indignation at Jacob's duplicity and baseness, combined with sympathy for Esau in his supposed wrongs, sometimes prevents a just appreciation of the exact position occupied by the latter in this extraordinary transaction. Instead of branding Jacob as a shameless deceiver, and hurling against his fair fame the most opprobrious epithets, may it not be that, remembering the previously-expressed will of Heaven, the real supplanter was Esau, who as an accomplice of his father was seeking secretly, unlawfully, and feloniously to appropriate to himself a blessing which had already been, not obscurely, designated as Jacob's? On this hypothesis the miserable craft of Jacob and Rebekah was a lighter crime than that of Isaac and Esau.