Today, I am reading and commenting on  Genesis 26-28.

As I was reading this I was struck by something which does not fit with our usual understanding of Isaac (or even Abraham before him).  That something has several elements.  First, for some length of time Isaac lived in the city of Gerar.  Second, Isaac gained a great amount of wealth from farming.  Third, as part of gaining that wealth, Isaac also become militarily powerful.  We normally think of Isaac as being a nomadic herdsman, but this passage suggests that he spent a significant part of his life as a farmer.  This story also suggests to me that Isaac was contemporary with the early settlement by the Philistines on the Mediterranean coast, which would push the arrival of the Philistines back a couple hundred years from when conventional archeology dates it.

Next we have the story of Jacob stealing the blessing which Isaac intended for Esau.  I always feel bad for Esau in this story, but I also acknowledge that in some ways his loss of this blessing resulted from his lack of foresight in selling his birthright.  While we only have these two accounts of conflict between Esau and Jacob, it seems likely there were more.  Esau was impulsive and did not always think through the consequences of his actions.  In any case, Esau was murderously angry with Jacob, to the degree that Rebekah thought he might actually kill him given the opportunity.  So Rebekah arranged to send Jacob to her brother Laban for a few years.  There are two aspects to Jacob being sent off that we normally gloss over.  First, Rebekah said that she would send word to Jacob when he should return (might word from Rebekah had something to do with the timing of Jacob’s decision to leave Laban?). Second, Isaac makes clear to Jacob that he should return to the Land of Canaan at some point.  I am confident that Isaac was indirectly reminding Jacob of the story about Abraham’s servant obtaining Rebekah to be Isaac’s wife.  Isaac was telling Jacob that it was OK for him to go to Haran to obtain a wife, but he must not stay there.   Finally, there is Jacob’s vision of the stairway to heaven.  I want to focus on Jacob’s oath.  We tend to view this as Jacob making a deal with God: “God keep me safe and bring me safely back to my father’s household and I will server you.”  I think it was more of a fleece: “If God keeps me safe AND brings me back to my father’s household than God is THE God (not just a god) and I will worship Him, and only Him.”  Jacob was going off to a foreign land where he would have opportunities and he was unsure that he was ever going to come back.  He had heard the stories which his father told about God and the history and creation of the world, stories passed down from Abraham, but he was not sure he believed them.  After all, the people among whom they lived had different stories about the history and creation of the world.  Sure, he had just had a vision which seemed to confirm his father’s accounts, but was it really a vision, or just a dream?

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.