Lives of Scripture

Esau, Isaac and Rebekah's firstborn twin, emerged from the womb "red, all over like a hairy garment," moments ahead of his brother Jacob, who grasped his heel (Genesis 25:25-26). He grew into a skilled hunter, his father's favorite, while the quieter Jacob was Rebekah's (25:27-28). Esau's defining failure comes early: famished after a hunt, he sold his birthright -- the double inheritance and covenant leadership due the firstborn -- to Jacob for a bowl of red stew, and Scripture's verdict is blunt: "Thus Esau despised his birthright" (25:29-34). Years later, Jacob and Rebekah conspired to deceive the aging, blind Isaac into giving Esau's intended blessing to Jacob instead; when Esau discovered the theft, he "cried with an exceedingly great and bitter cry" and begged for a blessing of his own, receiving only a lesser one and a vow of vengeance against his brother once their father died (27:1-41). Esau married Canaanite and Ishmaelite wives, becoming the ancestor of the Edomites (26:34; 28:6-9; 36:1-43). After twenty years apart, the brothers' reunion is one of Genesis's most striking reversals: Jacob, terrified of Esau's four hundred men, prepared for the worst, but Esau "ran to meet him and embraced him and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept" (33:4) -- forgiveness where vengeance had been vowed. The New Testament remembers Esau more darkly, as one who "sold his own birthright for a single meal" and is held up as a warning against treating a sacred inheritance as worthless (Hebrews 12:16-17), while Paul cites God's choice of Jacob over Esau before either was born to illustrate that God's purposes proceed by His own sovereign call, not human merit (Romans 9:10-13; quoting Malachi 1:2-3).