Genesis 25:29-34
A bowl of red stew
He comes in from the field faint and says he is about to die, and treats a future he cannot touch as worth less than a meal he can.
People of the Bible
Esau
Sold what he could not see for something he could eat, and forgave his brother anyway.
Also called Edom
Esau is the older twin, red and rough, a hunter and his father’s favourite. He comes in exhausted one day and trades his birthright for a bowl of lentils, and the narrator says plainly that he despised it. Later the blessing goes too, taken by his brother in his clothes, and he cries out and asks whether there is only one. He plans to kill Jacob and does not. Twenty years on he rides out with four hundred men and, when they finally meet, runs and embraces him and weeps.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Esau
- 01
- 02
Genesis 27:30-40
Bless me, even me also
He arrives with the food his father asked for and finds the blessing gone. His cry is one of the rawest lines in Genesis.
- 03
Genesis 27:41-45
The days of mourning
He decides to wait until his father dies and then kill his brother. Rebekah hears, and the household breaks apart before he can.
- 04
Genesis 33:1-16
Four hundred men, and an embrace
Jacob divides his family for the worst and sends gifts ahead. Esau runs to meet him, refuses the gifts at first, and asks who the children are.
- 05
Genesis 36:1-8
Away to Seir
He moves his household out of the land because the two brothers have too much between them to share it, and a nation is listed out of him.
Why it matters
Esau is the warning and the surprise in the same person. The New Testament uses him as the picture of trading something permanent for something immediate, and Genesis gives him the most gracious scene in the book. Both are true. He becomes Edom, a nation that will spend centuries opposing Israel, and he is still the brother who let it go.
9 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
