1. We are told that Esau was “a cunning hunter, a man of the field.” Esau was full of the manliest interests and occupations and pursuits. He was a very proverb of courage and endurance and success in the chase. He was the ruggedest, the brawniest, and the shaggiest of all the rugged, brawny, and shaggy creatures of the field and of the forest, among whom he lived and died. Esau had an eye like an eagle. His ear never slept. His foot took the firmest hold of the ground. And his hand was always full of skill, and strength, and success. Esau's arrow never missed its mark. He was the pride of all the encampment as he came home at night with his traps, and his snares, and his bows, and his arrows, and laden to the earth with venison for his father's supper. Burned black with the sun, beaten hard and dry with the wind, a prince of men, a prime favourite with men and women and children, and with a good word and a good gift from the field for them all.
2. So far we know nothing wrong of Esau. In those days the chase was no idle amusement, but for those who followed it a serious and necessary employment, full of many perils, and a means of providing for daily food. The impulses indeed of Jacob were nobler and more spiritual impulses, but those of Esau, although animal, were not intrinsically immoral. Strength, and speed, and courage, and endurance, are blessings not lightly to be despised; but he who confines his ideal to them, as Esau did, chooses a low ideal, and one which can bring a man but little peace at the last. Vigour and strength, and other physical gifts may be an innocent, even a glorious, crown round the brows of manhood; but they never can be so if they are sought exclusively, if they are not united to other and better things. In themselves there was nothing wrong in Esau's tastes, but he reaches only half the blessing of a man, and that the meaner and temporal half: “the other half, that he is made in the image of an invisible Being,” that he has the awful gift of immortality, and a life beyond the grave, seems seldom or never to have entered into his thoughts. Narrow life spanned his hopes and expectations; the impure earth yielded him all its joy.
The Hebrews were never lacking in admiration of physical strength, agility, daring; and the sportsman had an undisputed place in a land abounding with the wild creatures of the chase. Ruddy, shaggy, brawny, fearless and impetuous, Esau was an ideal huntsman. But there was a serious flaw in his character. So much did he enjoy the warm, sensuous, earthy side of things that he had no thought of the awakening of the soul. He was a “profane person,” not in the sense of taking God's name in vain,-there is no suggestion of that,-but in the sense of never feeling and recognizing God's claims upon him at all.1 [Note: J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, ii. 17.]
There is a frank animalism, an outspoken earthiness, in the romances of Morris, which is wholly beautiful, because of its frankness and simplicity. The people of Morris-land are naked and not ashamed.2 [Note: A. Compton-Rickett, William Morris (1913), 174.]
