1And Abraham took another wife, and her name was Keturah. 2And she bore him Zimran and Jokshan and Medan and Midian and Ishbak and Shuah. 3And Jokshan begot Sheba and Dedan. And the sons of Dedan were the Ashurim and the Letushim and the Leummim. 4And the sons of Midian were Ephah and Epher and Enoch and Abida and Eldaah. All these were the sons of Keturah. 5And Abraham gave everything he had to Isaac. 6And to the sons of Abraham’s concubines Abraham gave gifts while he was still alive and sent them away from Isaac his son eastward, to the land of the east. 7And these are the days of the years of the life of Abraham which he lived: a hundred and seventy-five years. 8And Abraham breathed his last and died at a ripe old age, old and sated with years, and he was gathered to his kinfolk. 9And Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the Machpelah cave in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite which faces Mamre, 10the field that Abraham had bought from the Hittites, there was Abraham buried, and Sarah his wife. 11And it happened after Abraham’s death that God blessed Isaac his son, and Isaac settled near Beer-Lahai-Roi.
12And this is the lineage of Ishmael son of Abraham whom Hagar the Egyptian, Sarah’s slavegirl, bore to Abraham. 13And these are the names of the sons of Ishmael, according to their lineage: Nebaioth, the firstborn of Ishmael, and Kedar and Adbeel and Mibsam, 14and Mishma and Duma and Massa, 15Hadad and Tema, Jetur, Naphish, and Kedmah. 16These are the sons of Ishmael and these are their names in their habitations and their encampments, twelve chieftains according to their tribes. 17And these are the years of the life of Ishmael: a hundred and thirty-seven years. And he breathed his last and died and he was gathered to his kinfolk. 18And they ranged from Havilah to Shur, which faces Egypt, and till you come to Asshur. In despite of all his kin he went down.
19And this is the lineage of Isaac son of Abraham. Abraham begot Isaac. 20And Isaac was forty years old when he took as wife Rebekah daughter of Bethuel the Aramean from Paddan-Aram, sister of Laban the Aramean. 21And Isaac pleaded with the LORD on behalf of his wife, for she was barren, and the LORD granted his plea, and Rebekah his wife conceived. 22And the children clashed together within her, and she said, “Then why me?” and she went to inquire of the LORD. 23And the LORD said to her:
“Two nations—in your womb,
two peoples from your loins shall issue.
People over people shall prevail,
the elder, the younger’s slave.”
24And when her time was come to give birth, look, there were twins in her womb. 25And the first one came out ruddy, like a hairy mantle all over, and they called his name Esau. 26Then his brother came out, his hand grasping Esau’s heel, and they called his name Jacob. And Isaac was sixty years old when they were born.
27And the lads grew up, and Esau was a man skilled in hunting, a man of the field, and Jacob was a simple man, a dweller in tents. 28And Isaac loved Esau for the game that he brought him, but Rebekah loved Jacob. 29And Jacob prepared a stew and Esau came from the field, and he was famished. 30And Esau said to Jacob, “Let me gulp down some of this red red stuff, for I am famished.” Therefore is his name called Edom. 31And Jacob said, “Sell now your birthright to me.” 32And Esau said, “Look, I am at the point of death, so why do I need a birthright?” 33And Jacob said, “Swear to me now,” and he swore to him, and he sold his birthright to Jacob. 34Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and he drank and he rose and he went off, and Esau spurned the birthright.
CHAPTER 25 NOTES
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1. And Abraham took another wife. The actual place of this whole genealogical notice in the chronology of Abraham’s life might be somewhere after the burial of Sarah at the end of chapter 23, or perhaps even considerably earlier. The genealogy is inserted here as a formal marker of the end of the Abraham story. Perhaps a certain tension was felt between the repeated promise that Abraham would father a vast nation and the fact that he had begotten only two sons. This tension would have been mitigated by inserting this document at the end of his story with the catalogue of his sons by Keturah. In this list, Abraham figures as the progenitor of the seminomadic peoples of the trans-Jordan region and the Arabian peninsula. The second genealogical notice (verses 12–18), that of the descendants of Ishmael, covers a related group of tribes—twelve in number, like the Israelite tribes—in the same geographical region, but also extending up to northern Mesopotamia. Thus, as Ishmael definitively leaves the scene of narration, the list provides a “documentary” confirmation of the promise that he, too, will be the father of a great nation.
6. concubines. The plural form may imply that Keturah’s status, like Hagar’s, was that of a concubine.
8. sated with years. The Masoretic Text has only “sated,” but the Syriac, Samaritan, and Septuagint versions as well as some manuscripts read “sated with years,” which the context clearly requires.
16. habitations. The Hebrew term in urban architectural contexts means “court,” but the older meaning is “dwelling place,” or perhaps something like “unfortified village.” The cognate in the Ugaritic texts means “house.”
18. And they ranged. The verb shakhan suggests an activity less fixed than “to settle” or “to dwell,” and this translation follows the lead of E. A. Speiser in using a verb that implies nomadism.
In despite of all his kin he went down. The translation reproduces the enigmatic character of the whole clause in the Hebrew. “In despite of all his kin” repeats exactly the words of Ishmael’s blessing in 16:12, and so the ambiguous “he” here may also be Ishmael, who is mentioned in the previous verse. But some construe the initial preposition of the clause as “alongside” or “in the face of.” The verb is equally opaque: its most common meaning is “to fall”; some have imagined it has a military meaning here (“to attack” or “to raid”); others have construed it as a reference to the “falling” of the inheritance.
19. this is the lineage of Isaac. Modern translations that render “lineage” (or, “begettings”) as “story” are misconceived. The formula is pointedly used to suggest a false symmetry with “this is the lineage of Ishmael.” In this case, the natural chain of procreation is interrupted, and can proceed only through divine intervention, as was true for Abraham.
21–23. In this second instance of the annunciation type-scene, the husband intercedes on behalf of the wife, and the annunciation to the future mother—here given the form of an oracle—is uniquely displaced from the period of barrenness to late pregnancy. The crucial point in this story of the birth of twins is not the fact of birth itself but the future fate of struggle between the siblings, which is the burden of the oracular poem.
22. Then why me? Rebekah’s cry of perplexity and anguish over this difficult pregnancy is terse to the point of being elliptical. Her words might even be construed as a broken-off sentence: Then why am I . . . ?
23. the elder, the younger’s slave. Richard Elliott Friedman has made the interesting suggestion that the Hebrew oracle here has the ambiguity of its Delphic counterpart: the Hebrew syntax leaves unclear which noun is subject and which is object—“the elder shall serve the younger,” or, “the elder, the younger shall serve.”
25. ruddy, like a hairy mantle . . . Esau. There is an odd displacement of etymology in the naming sentence, perhaps because the writer was not sure what “Esau” actually meant. “Ruddy,” ʾadom, refers to another name for Esau, Edom (as in verse 30), and the “hairy” component of the mantle simile, seʿar, refers to Edom’s territory, Seir.
26. they called his name Jacob. The Masoretic Text has a singular verb, but some manuscript versions have the plural, as when the same phrase is used for Esau. In this instance, the etymology is transparent: Yaʿaqob, “Jacob,” and ʿaqeb, “heel.” The grabbing of the heel by the younger twin becomes a kind of emblem of their future relationship, and the birth, like the oracle, again invokes the struggle against primogeniture. The original meaning of the name Jacob was probably something like “God protects” or “God follows after.”
And Isaac was sixty years old. With the most deft economy of delayed exposition, the narrator reveals that Rebekah had been childless for twenty years—an extraordinarily long period for a woman to suffer what in the ancient setting was an acutely painful predicament.
27. a simple man. The Hebrew adjective tam suggests integrity or even innocence. In biblical idiom, the heart can be crooked (ʿaqob, the same root as Jacob’s name—cf. Jeremiah 17:9), and the idiomatic antonym is pureness or innocence—tom—“of heart” (as in Genesis 20:5). There may well be a complicating irony in the use of this epithet for Jacob, since his behavior is very far from simple or innocent in the scene that is about to unfold.
28. for the game that he brought him. The Hebrew says literally, “for the game in his mouth.” It is unclear whether the idiom suggests Esau as a kind of lion bringing home game in its mouth or rather bringing game to put in his father’s mouth. The almost grotesque concreteness of the idiom may be associated with the absurdity of the material reason for Isaac’s paternal favoritism. Pointedly, no reason is assigned for Rebekah’s love of Jacob in the next clause.
29. And Jacob prepared a stew. Oraḥ Ḥaim, an eighteenth-century Hebrew commentary, brilliantly suggests that Jacob, seeing that Esau had won their father’s heart with food, tries to compete by preparing his own (hearty vegetarian) culinary offering.
30. Let me gulp down some of this red red stuff. Although the Hebrew of the dialogues in the Bible reflects the same level of normative literary language as the surrounding narration, here the writer comes close to assigning substandard Hebrew to the rude Esau. The famished brother cannot even come up with the ordinary Hebrew word for “stew” (nazid) and instead points to the bubbling pot impatiently as (literally) “this red red.” The verb he uses for “gulping down” occurs nowhere else in the Bible, but in rabbinic Hebrew it is reserved for the feeding of animals. This may be evidence for Abba ben David’s contention that rabbinic Hebrew developed from a biblical vernacular that was excluded from literary usage: in this instance, the writer would have exceptionally allowed himself to introduce the vernacular term for animal feeding in order to suggest Esau’s coarsely appetitive character. And even if one allows for semantic evolution of this particular verb over the millennium between the first articulation of our text and the Mishnah, it is safe to assume it was always a cruder term for eating than the standard biblical one.
Edom. The pun, which forever associates crude impatient appetite with Israel’s perennial enemy, is on ʾadom-ʾadom, “this red red stuff.”
31. Sell now your birthright to me. Each of Jacob’s words, in striking contrast to Esau’s impetuous speech, is carefully weighed and positioned, with “me” held back until the end of the sentence. If Esau seems too much a creature of the imperious body to deserve the birthright, the dialogue suggests at the same time that Jacob is a man of legalistic calculation. Perhaps this is a quality needed to get and hold onto the birthright, but it hardly makes Jacob sympathetic, and moral ambiguities will pursue him in the story.
32. so why do I need. The words he uses, lamah zeh li, are strongly reminiscent of the words his mother used when she was troubled by the churning in her womb, lamah zehʾanokhi.
34. and he ate and he drank and he rose and he went off. This rapid-fire chain of verbs nicely expresses the precipitous manner in which Esau gulps down his food and, as the verse concludes, casts away his birthright.