Genesis 25

Updated
2001-05-26; 14:31:34utc

The first ten verses of this chapter conclude the story of Abraham's life. It seems strange that at the conclusion of the biography, another wife, Katurah, is introduced. She is called Abraham's concubine in the Book of Chronicles, which would indicate that the marriage took place while Sarah was still alive.[ 1 ] On the other hand, The Pulpit Commentary ponders the following point: "Since the patriarch's body at 100 years was practically dead, it is almost certain that his marriage with Katurah took place after the renewal of his powers; and it is easier to suppose that his physical vigor remained for some years after Sarah's death than that, with his former experience of concubinage, and his parental joy in the birth of Isaac, he should add a second wife while Sarah lived."

But it is impossible to ascertain whether this outburst of fertility, (after all six sons is no mean achievement) took place earlier in Abraham's life or not. It could very well be that the biographer wants to complete the picture, without giving a chronological account at this point. That Abraham would learned from his experience with Hagar, as The Pulpit Commentary suggests is no given factor. He had not learned anything from his experience with Pharaoh! He repeated the same sin later in life at the court of the Philistine king Abimelech.

Many have tried to locate the descendants of the six sons Abraham begot from Katurah, but not much has been established with certainty. Only the children of two of the sons are mentioned: Jokshan, the second boy, and Midianthe fourth. We read in verse 3: "Jokshan was the father of Sheba and Dedan; the descendants of Dedan were the Asshurites, the Letushites and the Leummites." The name Sheba has a familiar ring, if he is the one after whom the country was called from where the queen came to visit Solomon in I Kings 10. Whether the Asshurites can be identified with the Assur that led the ten tribes into captivity, is not certain.

We find Midianites in Ch. 37:28, who buy Joseph from his brothers and sell him in Egypt. It seems doubtful that Abraham's grandson's would have multiplied so fast that they could come in hordes and buy their own cousin, barely one hundred years later. So this phase of Abraham's life leaves us in the dark.

The obvious point of the story is to emphasize that Isaac was Abraham's only legal heir. We read in verse 5 and 6: "Abraham left everything he owned to Isaac. But while he was still living, he gave gifts to the sons of his concubines and sent them away from his son Isaac to the land of the east." This much Abraham had learned from his wife Sarah. He knew that as far as God was concerned he had only one son. He was the one God had called in Ch. 22:2 "Your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love." By the way, this verse may give an indication that Abraham did not have any of Katurah's six sons when Isaac was old enough to be sacrificed.

It was through Isaac that God would reveal Himself further in the world, not through any of Abraham's other sons. The book of Genesis does not give primarily the story of the lives of the patriarchs, but the story of God's revelation.

Abraham dies at the age of one hundred seventy-five. Compared to the ages of the pre-deluvian people Abraham dies rather young. We see that after the flood the life span of people decreases gradually. Noah lived to be 950, but Seth died at the age of 500. Abraham's father, Terah reached 205. I believe that the altered condition of our planet as a result of the flood, is the deciding factor.

Verse 8: "Then Abraham breathed his last and died at a good old age, an old man and full of years;" indicates more the quality of Abraham's life than the length of it. "A good old age" has little to do with the number of years. Some people are worn out by the age of 60. When somebody dies at 95 in a demented state, I do not want to call that a good old age. Old age, yes, but "good," no. It is my prayer that the Lord will let me keep my mental alertness and abilities till He takes me Home.

"Full of years." Adam Clarke says about his expression: "The words years is not in the text; but as our translators saw that some word was necessary to fill up the text, they added this in italics. It is probable that the true word is 'days,' as in Ch. 35:29; and this reading is found in the Samaritan text, Septuagint, Vulgate, Syriac, Arabic, Persic, and Chaldee. On these authorities it might be safely admitted into the text. It was the opinion of Aristotle that a man should depart from life as he should rise from a banquet. Thus Abraham died 'full of days,' and satisfied with life, but in a widely different spirit from that recommended by the above writers- he left life with a hope full of immortality, which they could never boast; for he saw the day of Christ, and was glad; and his hope was crowned, for here it is expressly said, 'He was gathered to his fathers'; surely not to the bodies of his sleeping ancestors, who were buried in Chaldea and not in Canaan, nor with his fathers in any sense, for he was deposited in the cave where his wife alone slept; but he was gathered to the "spirits of just men made perfect, and to the Church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven."[ 2 ]

Isaac and Ishmael meet for the burial of their father. Whether this is their first meeting after the boy Ishmael mocked his step brother some seventy years before, we are not told. It seems unlikely that there would have been frequent meetings between the two, if any. Burials often repair relationships. There must have been some kind of recognition on the side of Ishmael, that Isaac was Abraham's legal son. The burial in the cave where Sarah was buried emphasized this.

There is no mention of embalming or any other kind of preparation or rite. But if Ishmael had to be informed about his father's death and had to travel from where he lived to meet Isaac at Machpelah, several days, if not weeks must have elapsed. Without any kind of embalming the burial could not have been postponed any length of time. Most likely the Egyptian customs were known in Canaan and practiced to some extend in this case.

Abraham's remains were put to rest in the only plot of ground he ever possessed in the land of his pilgrimage. His spirit and soul went to the place where he became the symbol of rest for all who had ever put their trust in God. That is why Jesus could say in Luke: "And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom."[ 3 ] Jesus mentions Abraham first, when He talks about Heaven. We read in Matt.8:11 - "I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven." And that Abraham is alive and that he guarantees our resurrection we learn from Matthew: "But about the resurrection of the dead; have you not read what God said to you, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is not the God of the dead but of the living."[ 4 ] What a testimony!

THE LIFE OF ISAAC, THE SACRIFICED LIFE

Chapters 25:11- 35:29

A few verses are devoted to the condensed history of Ishmael. We read in ch. 25:12-18 that he had twelve sons, whose names are given, and that he lived to the age of one hundred thirty seven. His children are reported to have settled close to the Egyptian border, and we are told that they fought with one another. At least that is what I gather from ch. 25:18 "His descendants settled in the area from Havilah to Shur, near the border of Egypt, as you go toward Asshur. And they lived in hostility toward all their brothers."

Then the Bible turns its attention to Isaac. The account of his life starts with his marriage to Rebekah. He is then forty years old. Life still begins at forty, as the saying goes. But Isaac existed before that time too. His life actually started in chapter 21 amidst the laughter of his mother. We read in Ch. 21:6 "Sarah said, 'God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.' "In a deeper sense Isaac's life started when he jumped off the altar where his father sacrificed him and where another creature died in his place. The account is in Ch. 22:13 - "Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son." Isaac was born again at the place where the Lord provided for him, at Jehovah-jireh.

The mention of Isaac's age being forty shows that he married three years after the death of his mother. We read in Ch. 23:1 that Sarah was 127 when she died. Since she was ninety years old when Isaac was born, he must have been 37 at that time.

We would almost say that Isaac's prayer for his wife was one of the most redundant prayers of the Bible. But we should realize that it took Isaac twenty years before he prayed this prayer. There is a space of twenty years between vs.20 and 21. Verse 26 tells us that Isaac was sixty years old at the birth of the twins. "Isaac prayed to the LORD on behalf of his wife, because she was barren. The LORD answered his prayer, and his wife Rebekah became pregnant." If we pause and ponder, we come to the conclusion that these verses teach us a lot about the relationship between God's promises and our prayers. Of course God wanted Rebekah to become pregnant. She was the key to the fulfillment of all God's promises to a lost world. But evidently Isaac and Rebekah had never surrendered their bodies to the Lord for the fulfillment of this specific promise. God's promises are only realized through our prayers.

Daniel understood this principle. We read in Daniel: "In the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood from the Scriptures, according to the word of the LORD given to Jeremiah the prophet, that the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years. So I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and petition, in fasting, and in sackcloth and ashes."[ 5 ]We understand that without Daniel's prayer, Israel would never have returned to Canaan. Without Isaac's prayer, the Word would not have become flesh; Jesus Christ would never have been born into this world. Although Isaac must have known the outline of God's plan of salvation, he can never have understood the extreme importance of his prayer.

In a different way and on another level, Isaac and Rebekah experienced the same kind of death as Abraham and Sarah had faced. God wanted them to know that the life He gives is life out of death; resurrection life. As James says "You do not have, because you do not ask God."[ 6 ]This does not pertain only to the things we want, but also to the things God wants. One of the lessons we can draw from the above is that prayer is in the first place an expression of a relationship with God even if we ask for things. As Solomon says in Proverbs: "Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight."[ 7 ] Prayer is acknowledging Him in all our ways. That is why we have to pray: "Your kingdom come" and: "Come, Lord Jesus!" Without this prayer neither the kingdom nor the Lord will come. Without prayer we will never be what God wants us to be.

So after twenty years of frustration Isaac finally came to the place where God could give him what He wanted him to have all the time. Isaac became first a priest in praying for his wife and then a father. That should be the way men function in marriages.

We may suppose that Rebekah prayed also with Isaac, or at least that she said "amen" to his prayer. But she really does not start to pray herself until she becomes pregnant. After some months of pregnancy when a child normally start to make his presence known inside the mother's womb, there is a racket going on that is out of proportion. This is not the moving of a child; it is war. And war it turned out to be. Rebekah is upset because she does not understand what is going on. So she seeks the Lord herself. Verse 22 is translated rather simply in the NIV. Rebekah says: "Why is this happening to me?" The KJV stays closer to the original which says: "If ... so, why ... thus?" The RSV makes it more dramatic; probably unnecessarily so: "The children struggled together within her; and she said, 'If it is thus, why do I live?' So she went to inquire of the LORD." (RSV).

God reveals to Rebekah not only that she is going to have twins, but also what the destiny of these twins will be.

Verse 23 says: "The LORD said to her, 'Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger.'"

We understand very little about fetal life. We believe that life and personality exist from the moment of conception. In the debate about abortion rights, if we may call it a "debate," the pro-choice movement maintains that a fetus is a non-person for the first several months and consequently abortion cannot be called murder.

There are two instances in the Bible of a fetus that reacts to spiritual realities. There is John the Baptist, who jumped up in his mother's womb when his mother heard the voice of Mary, who was pregnant with Jesus, greeting her. In Luke's Gospel we read: "When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy."[ 8 ] How an unborn baby can hear and express joy about what he hears is beyond my comprehension. I do not believe the medical science has come far enough to understand this either.

Here we have two babies in the same womb, starting to act out a future history of animosity and war. It was as if the Holy Spirit was getting a hold of baby Jacob and Satan was trying to get Esau and so the two were at loggerheads. Strange and unbelievable as this may sound, that seems to have been the case. There was a pre-natal war going on between light and darkness, between the truth of God's revelation and Satan's attempt to darken it and keep it hidden. It seems a prelude to what we read in John: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."[ 9 ] We understand why Rebekah was upset. This was more than a normal pregnancy.

The 23rd verse indicates that God chose Israel to be the vehicle of His revelation in this world, the nation that would give birth to the Messiah. The thought is expressed in stronger terms in Malachi: " 'I have loved you,' says the LORD. But you ask, 'How have you loved us?' 'Was not Esau Jacob's brother?' The LORD says. 'Yet I have loved Jacob, But Esau I have hated, and I have turned his mountains into a wasteland and left his inheritance to the desert jackals.' "[ 10 ] These verses show the physical and political results of the election. Israel survived, at least in part, the Babylonian captivity; but Edom was wiped off the map. The reason for this was not that Israel had given evidence of godly behavior and Edom had not. They had both sinned equally or maybe Israel worse than Edom. But God had a plan with Israel that could not be discarded.

The Apostle Paul elaborates on the theological aspect of God's election, based on this verse and the one in Malachi, in Romans: "Not only that, but Rebekah's children had one and the same father, our father Isaac. Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad; in order that God's purpose in election might stand: Not by works but by him who calls; she was told, 'The older will serve the younger.' Just as it is written: 'Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.' "

Just as in Ch. 21:12 God had said to Abraham: "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned," so now He said the same thing to Rebekah about Jacob. The promise given to Abraham and embodied in Isaac, was to be continued in Jacob. That is the ground upon which "the older shall serve the younger." It was important that both Rebekah and Isaac understood that in God's eyes Jacob would be the oldest son although Esau was born first.

Rebekah must have been in her late thirties when the twins were born. Verse 24 gives more a confirmation of the prophecy than the discovery of a fact.

The way Scripture describes the birth of the twins is cute. "The first to come out was red, and his whole body was like a hairy garment; so they named him Esau." Esau means "the hairy one" according to The Pulpit Commentary . He must have looked like a little animal, a furry little ball. "After this, his brother came out, with his hand grasping Esau's heel; so he was named Jacob." The second child holding the hand of his brother when he came out of his mother's womb, earned him the name Jacob, meaning "Heel-catcher." This name took on greater significance as Jacob grew up and turned out to have the tendency to trip up other people for his own benefit. That is why Esau exclaims in ch. 27:36 - "Is not he rightly named Jacob? He has deceived me these two times: He took my birthright, and now he's taken my blessing!"

From the birth of the twins, the story hastens to the story of the birthright. We see them both grow up in one verse. Esau the impetuous hunter, Jacob the quiet shepherd, homebound and scheming. From a human viewpoint Esau has our sympathy. He loves nature. He is outgoing in more than one sense of the word. Esau does not have anything to hide. Jacob's quietness is suspicious. The proverb says "Quiet waters are deep," but some quiet waters can be murky.

Parents should be impartial toward their children. And although we understand why Isaac would feel drawn to his son Esau and Rebekah to Jacob, who kept her company at home, yet the attitude of the parents is to be blamed. It turns out that Isaac's love goes through his stomach. We also get the impression that some estrangement has crept in between Isaac and Rebekah. There does not seem to be much communication. We should remember that Isaac is probably around eighty years of age now and Rebekah in her sixties. Their favoritism is objectionable and, as it turns out, disastrous.

Obviously, both boys are familiar with God's prophecy to Rebekah before they were born. In vs.23 we read: "Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger."If the boys would have had any faith in this prophecy, Jacob would not have felt the need to resort to treachery and Esau would not have made the statement that he was going to die. As it stands they both believed that they had to work out their own salvation. The difference in character even expresses itself in the food they deal with. Esau hunts wild animals, Jacob cooks lentil soup. The hunting makes Esau exhausted. He is not just out of breath; he has pushed himself beyond the point of endurance. Jacob has no trouble breathing while cooking the soup.

Esau expresses his desire for food in a very graphic way. Literally he says: "Let me swallow the red, red..." The words show his impatience and his voracious appetite. His words procure him with a nickname that sticks to him throughout eternity: "Edom," which means "red." His descendants must have become proud of the name, probably because it is related to Adam, which refers to the clay from which the first human was formed. It may have acquired the meaning of "real human being," a title several of the primitive tribes of Irian Jaya give to themselves!

Jacob makes clear that "there is no such thing as a free meal!" Obviously, he has been scheming for a long time to obtain what God had promised. Waiting upon the Lord was a foreign concept to him. He may have been a quiet person, but below the surface there must have stirred turmoil. Jacob was a creep. He takes full advantage of the situation. He is also a good psychologist. He reads Esau correctly. His brother is impetuous; he will never take the time to reflect upon the consequences of his actions. It wasn't that Esau did not care about his birthright. He had no time to think about it. You do not think about birthrights when you are hungry. Jesus defines people like these as people who have "no root, he lasts only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, he quickly falls away."[ 11 ]This lack of perseverance is portrayed in the parable of the sower as "rocky places," that is a solid mass of rock, with a thin layer of dirt on top. Esau's heart had not been broken.

Jacob may have presented the deal as a joke, and Esau may have taken it like that, as a flippant talk between brothers. But Jacob was dead serious. The tragedy is that there was no need for deceit. God does not need slyness and human cunning in order to fulfill His prophecies. Jacob could have been quiet and generous. He could have given his brother food without any charge, and he would have been the winner. In the kingdom of heaven nobody wins because of his shrewdness.

Esau's answer is complete nonsense. He is hungry, but he is not in danger of dying. When he says: "Look, I am about to die," Esau said. "What good is the birthright to me?" he actually indicates that he does not care. This could mean two things: He may have been so sure that he would get it anyhow since he knew to have his father on his side, or he completely disregarded the spiritual significance of the blessing. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews seems to indicate the latter: "See that no one is sexually immoral, or is godless like Esau, who for a single meal sold his inheritance rights as the oldest son. Afterward, as you know, when he wanted to inherit this blessing, he was rejected. He could bring about no change of mind, though he sought the blessing with tears."[ 12 ]

We could ask ourselves the question how much Jacob valued the birthright. How much was he willing to pay for it? Would he have given more than a bowl of soup for it? Jacob must have eaten that soup himself for the rest of his life. He must have seen it before his eyes years later, when in the night before he met Esau, he wrestled with the angel in Pniel. In a sense Jacob paid more dearly for this soup than Esau did. When the balance is made up, sharp business deals are more expensive for him who makes them than for the one who is taken in. Esau despised his birthright, but Jacob despised it too.

[ 1 ] See I Chron.1:32

[ 2 ] Heb.12:23

[ 3 ] Luke 16:22(KJV)

[ 4 ] Matt. 22:31,32

[ 5 ] Dan. 9:2,3

[ 6 ] James 4:2

[ 7 ] Prov.3:5,6

[ 8 ] Luke 1:41,44

[ 9 ] John 1:5 (RSV)

[ 10 ]

[ 11 ] Matt.13:21

[ 12 ] Heb.12:16-17