Grabbing on tight - Jacob part 1

Welcome to the story of Jacob!  How many of you have read his story in the bible?  He is quite the character, called grabber of heals.  I can’t imagine growing up with that as a name.  It would be like calling a baby ‘greedy guts’ or ‘take what he can get’.  What parent would name their kids such bad names. And his brother’s name was a little better, hairy red man.  At least that was descriptive of his physical personality, and not an assumption of personality traits.

I’m sure you’ve heard of self-fulfilling prophecies, how if you tell a kid they are bad or stupid or selfish often enough, they will start to believe it and live it out.  When I was studying to be a teacher, there was a case we studied where a teacher was handed the class list of students names and a number beside each, one was 85, another 92, 110, etc.  The teacher assumed it was the students’ iq scores and sure enough at the end of the year, the students with the higher numbers did better in class than the students with lower numbers.  Except when the teacher commented on the correlation between the students’ iq’s and their marks to the school adminstrator, the administrator corrected the teacher, “that’s not their IQ scores, that’s their locker numbers!”

So is Jacob a heel because he was named that way, or because his personality was such that the parents assumed he would always be grabbing after more than his share?  Is it nature or nurture?

This little tale of two brothers is further complicated by the fact that we don’t know what a ‘birthright’ is or why it’s so important.  Why would someone try to cheat a brother out of that?  Well, birthrights predated the practise of writing wills.  The tradition of the day was that the firstborn child would inherit automatically through their right by being born first, to two thirds of the father’s will. 

Scholars have no idea where this two-thirds rule came from, or what happened when there were more than two male children  - did more children get increasingly smaller amounts or even nothing at all?  It wouldn’t help much if the parents weren’t agreeing either, which sounds like what was happening here, Rebekkah preferred Jacob, the quiet one while Isaac like his red-haired hunter boy.  Such blatant favoritism would not be healthy back then any more than it is healthy today.

Some scholars think that this was an imaginative retelling of the primitive humanity struggling to transition from hunters and gatherers to agrarians and farmers, from nomads to settlers.  Others think it was about a community’s folk hero ancestor, like an early brer Rabbit or trickster figure.  But whatever theory we use, this is a memorable story.   

The good twin vs the evil twin is a common theme.  Even in the world of comics, we have Thor and Loki, one big and brawny, one clever and scheming.  And how many times have soap operas explored the theme of twins?  I have experienced my fair share of hearing stories of children squabbling over estates and wills, arguing over who gets what before the funeral is even over.  I’ll never forget the ugly scene of one of my first funerals, a big family where the last kids in the family were twins.  Back even in the 1940’s and 50’s, twins were seen as challenging.  If it was a big family, one twin might stay at home and the other twin might be raised by a brother or sister or cousin or other member of the family who could afford to take the second one on.  In this particular family, the resultant adoption of one of the twins led her to grow up feeling abandoned, not good enough and even rejected by her family of origin.  The ostracized twin struggled so much with the feelings of betrayal and abandonment that she didn’t know how to relate healthily with her twin.

It was so bad that before the funeral lunch was over, her daughter and aunt raced to the bank to try to clean out her account before the other person could arrive.

How ugly is that? Not much uglier than one brother bargaining for his dad’s wealth with another brother over a simple bean porridge, as Jacob did to Esau.  And Esau, founder of a rival tribe that would often compete with the Hebrew people over land, was not portrayed flatteringly.  Who would give away two thirds of their inheritance simply because they were hungry and didn’t have the self-discipline or patience to make some supper for themselves?  What a silly and impulsive thing to do.  What a human thing to do.

Greed destroys families and couples, communities and friendships.  Grabbing after more than your share can make you look like a heel.  Assuming that one person is bad and another is good is also a problem that can have terrible consequences.  And yet we see it happen often around us.  We may even have it happen to us or think we deserve more than our fair share of something.  We can give all kinds of excuses, like the rich farmer hoping to hoard too much of the crop one year.  It may be money or simple things, like my own personal temptation, more yarn than I can knit in a lifetime.  Or more books than I can ever read and so on.

What are we really needing to grab on to hard?  As the foolish farmer story suggests, we need to grab hard onto God’s vision for us, grab hard onto our faith and trust in God.  When we live lives based in fear of losing out, of not getting our fair share, of assuming we are the good twin and everyone else is bad, we can destroy families, and friendships.  But when we live as if God is real, and as if there is enough to go around, we may be able to live lives of peace with one another in ways that inspire all who know us.