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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 117. Esau's Character
Subjects in this Topic:
II
Esau's Character
Literature
Cox, S., The Hebrew Twins (1894), 2.
Dawson, W. J., The Threshold of Manhood (1889), 120.
Dods, M., Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph (1880), 43.
Goodwin, H., Parish Sermons, ii. (1861) 1.
Greenhough, J. G., Half-Hours in God's Older Picture Gallery, 23.
Kingsley, C., The Gospel of the Pentateuch (1890), 89.
Lightfoot, J. B., Cambridge Sermons (1890), 3.
Mackay, W. M., Bible Types of Modern Men (1910), 209.
Maclaren, A., Expositions: Genesis (1904).
Milligan, G., in Men of the Old Testament: Cain to David (1904), 57.
Robertson, F. W., Notes on Genesis (1877), 85.
Smith, G. A., The Forgiveness of Sins (1904), 174.
Stosch, G., The Origin of Genesis (1897), 181.
Welldon, J. E. C., The Fire upon the Altar, ii. (1891) 92.
Whyte, A., Bible Characters: Adam to Achan (1896), 162.
Wilson, S., Lenten Shadows and Easter Lights (1910), 17.
Christian World Pulpit, lii. (1897) 323 (F. C. Spurr); lxiv. (1903) 12 (A. Goodrich).
Churchman's Pulpit: Second Sunday in Lent, v. 435 (J. Hamilton), 497 (F. W. Farrar), 507 (E. A. Abbott).
Esau was sinned against from his birth. The problems of heredity and of a stress of temptation, for which he was not to blame, appear in his case from the first. His father and mother were responsible for much of the character of their son. Isaac's and Rebekah's life was the spoiling of one of the most beautiful idylls ever opened on this earth of ours. Their love began in a romance, and ended in vulgarity. It began with the most honourable plighting of troth, and it ended in the most sordid querulousness and falsehood. That can only have been because, from the first, with all its grace and wonder, the fear of God was not present; because there was more romance than religion, and with the giving of the one heart to the other there was little surrender of both to God. We see a divided house; the father and older son on one side, the mother and younger son on the other; the father unable to bless his children till he has enjoyed a favourite dish; the mother taking advantage of her husband's blindness to cheat him and her older son, and training the younger to a selfish and cruel dissimulation. Is this Rebekah? The girl whose pure heart leapt at the stranger's story of love is become the exaggerating, lying woman. It is the result of living on mere feeling. Of such a mother Esau was born. He never showed her falseness, but he had all her impetuous haste, and he proved it with his man's strength. In her it had been an easy sense of the meaning and consequences of sin; a facile unscrupulousness about other people's rights, even when these other people were her husband and her son-in short, a want of the sense of God and His government of life. But although it was his own rights of which Esau was forgetful, the unscrupulousness which he showed was the same: the same forgetfulness of God and His restraint; the same disregard of consequences. And they ruined him.
Making allowance for the rude habits of the patriarchal age, Esau is not essentially different in character from a very large number among ourselves. He has just the same virtues, and just the same faults. He is the father's favourite son. He is born to great hopes. He has brilliant prospects before him. His career is in his own hands. His lot may well be envied by others. But all is thrown away upon him. He is reckless of his opportunities. He is insensible to his blessings. He loses everything by one desperate act of folly. He finds out too late the value of what he has lost. He would give anything to recover it, when recovering it is hopeless. And yet his character is far from utterly vicious. Of such a man we might say that he is no one's enemy but his own. If his bad passions are strong, his impulses for good are strong also. If he is reckless and undisciplined, he is simple and honest and open-hearted. He is, in short, not so very much worse-perhaps not at all worse-than a great number who are admired and loved among ourselves, and whose manifest faults are forgiven for the sake of many rough virtues and generous affections.
Esau, as we all feel, stands out to great advantage beside Jacob. He is brave, generous, open-handed, chivalrous, loved by Isaac-the kind of man that impersonates the popular virtues. And he has the added good fortune of being the eldest son. To him the birthright belonged. Life is peculiarly free to him. He has neither Jacob's physical weakness nor his moral limitations. Instinctively we like him, in spite of his disregard of the great promises that were bound up with his race. But he is as much indebted to his ancestry for the good that lies in him as Jacob for his vices. Abraham's courage and generosity reappear in him, as Laban's deceit in Jacob. He is not to be more praised than Jacob is to be blamed. Both have to some extent made the original stock which came to them their own; and the question as we see them standing at the outset of their careers is, what will they do with that which they have? It is possible for Esau to become a second Abraham, and for Jacob to become a man like the Fagin of Dickens or the Shylock of Shakespeare. It is likely that Esau will become Israel; and Jacob become a Judas, if he retains, indeed, a place in history at all. And yet the very opposite is what we see. Jacob becomes Israel, and Esau the founder of a people long since perished, unless they are that predatory people who to this day are the terror of Palestine. The Edomite all through the centuries maintains his profane secularity, his hostility to God and His plans. The spirit is seen in our Lord's time, in the shifty, cunning Herod who sought His infant life; in the cowardly insincerity of the man who heard the Baptist and yet executed him; in the sensual Herod Agrippa, who was moved by St. Paul and yet went back to his sin.1 [Note: G. H. S. Walpole, Personality and Power, 94.]