Study Desk

Jacob said, “Swear to me first.” So he swore to Jacob and sold his birthright to him.

Then Jacob gave bread and lentil stew to Esau; he ate, drank, got up, and went away. So Esau despised his birthright.

When the men of the place asked about his wife, he said, “She is my sister,” for he was afraid to say “my wife,” thinking, “The men of the place will kill me on account of Rebekah, for she is a beautiful woman.”

When Isaac had been there for some time, Abimelech king of the Philistines looked down from the window and was surprised to see Isaac caressing his wife Rebekah.

So Abimelech warned all the people, “Whoever harms this man or his wife will certainly be put to death.”

Philistines stopped up all the wells that his father’s servants had dug in the days of his father Abraham, filling them with dirt.

Isaac reopened the wells that had been dug in the days of his father Abraham and that the Philistines had stopped up after Abraham died. He gave them the same names his father had given them.

So he built an altar there, called on the name of the Lord, and pitched his tent there. Isaac’s servants also dug a well there.

Now Abimelech came to him from Gerar with Ahuzzath his adviser and Phicol the commander of his army.

When Esau was forty years old, he took as his wives Judith daughter of Beeri the Hethite, and Basemath daughter of Elon the Hethite.

When Isaac was old and his eyes were so weak that he could not see, he called his older son Esau and said to him, “My son.”

Now Rebekah was listening to what Isaac said to his son Esau. So while Esau went to the field to hunt some game to bring in,

Jacob answered Rebekah his mother, “Look, my brother Esau is a hairy man, but I am a man with smooth skin.

His mother said to him, “Your curse be on me, my son. Just obey me and go get them for me.”

So he went and got the goats and brought them to his mother, and his mother made the delicious food his father loved.

She put the skins of the young goats on his hands and the smooth part of his neck.

When he came to his father, he said, “My father.”

Jacob replied to his father, “I am Esau, your firstborn. I have done as you told me. Please sit up and eat some of my game so that you may bless me.”

But Isaac said to his son, “How did you ever find it so quickly, my son?”

So Jacob came closer to his father Isaac. When he touched him, he said, “The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.”