Genesis 27

ISAAC BLESSING HIS SONS, Genesis 27:1-40.

Thirty-six years have passed since Esau’s marriage, (Genesis 36:34,) and the twin brothers both remain in their father’s household at Beer-sheba. There seems no probability that the purchased birthright (Genesis 25:33) will be of any avail to Jacob, now seventy-seven years old and unmarried . Isaac has attained his one hundred and thirty-seventh year, the age at which his half-brother Ishmael died, (Genesis 25:17,) and perhaps that fact, together with a sense of old age and failing sight, impressed him with a feeling of approaching death, and a strong desire before his departure to bless his elder son . Unmindful of the prophecy, (Genesis 25:23,) and controlled by his partiality for Esau and love for the savoury game procured by his hunting, (Genesis 25:28,) he wilfully purposes to give the firstborn his dying benediction. But in all this he is strangely overruled by the power of God and the craftiness of Jacob and Rebekah. “There is,” says Kurtz, “something peculiar and mysterious about the blessing and the curse of parents. Each word of blessing and of curse into which the whole strength and fulness of the psyche, the seat of personality and of will, descends, has a kind of magic power. It is the magic attaching to the image of God in man, imparted to him in creation, and which sin has only weakened and darkened, but not wholly effaced, as language is the royal sceptre of man. The blessing or the curse of parents approximates the creative power from which this magic at first originated. For, as generation is a representation of the Divine creative power, so is education and the ruling of children of the Divine governing and judging power, and so long as the world shall continue will this word of the ancient sage prove true: ‘The blessing of the father establisheth the houses of children; but the curse of the mother rooteth out foundations.’ Sir 3:9 . But the blessing of the patriarchs in the chosen family leads us beyond the sphere of nature to that of grace. In virtue of the covenant relation, which in this case pervades and determines every thing, the pneumatic power of the Divine counsel of salvation is here joined with the psychical power of a father’s blessing or curse. Human freedom is here allied with Divine necessity. Here man is not suffered to act arbitrarily, but the capability of the human will, now purified, is endowed with the strength of Divine Omnipotence; and thereby the blessing or the curse becomes irrevocable and unchangeable.”