The Bible says that Esau was a “skillful hunter, a man of the field.” He was strong, and manly, and impressive in every way. The description makes me think of Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. The scripture even describes Esau as covered with hair, from the day he was born!
Jacob, on the other hand, was quiet. Jacob’s skin was smooth. He was not a hunter. He liked to cook; and, he was a mama’s boy.
Can you picture the two of them, side-by-side? They are twins, but they are nothing alike.
Because he was outside hunting all the time, Esau’s skin was dark and rough from the sun. His beard was full, his muscles were big, and his chest was broad.
Because he spent most of his time inside, Jacob’s skin was paler and softer. His hair was not as wild, his beard barely showed, and his features were soft.
We heard how, one day, Esau returned from a long hunting trip, and arrived to find Jacob cooking some stew. “Great!” He said. “I’m starving!”
“Ah, ah, ah…” said Jacob. “If you want some of my stew, first sell me your birthright.”
Esau was so hungry, that he did just that! He gave up his birthright, for a taste of Jacob’s stew.
Some of you have heard this story before. I remember hearing it, as a kid in Sunday School, and thinking: that wasn’t very nice of Jacob!
But if you’ve heard this story before, you know: that’s not even the half of it!
If we read a bit further in Genesis—two chapters further, to be exact—we find that Jacob not only stole Esau’s birthright; he also stole Esau’s blessing; the blessing that Esau, as the firstborn son, deserved.
It happened when their father Isaac was old, and had lost his sight. Isaac called Esau and said that it was time for him to give his final blessing, and that Esau needed to go out and hunt and bring back an animal to cook, because sacred events like a final blessing often involve food.
So Esau, the strong, manly hunter, went out to the field to hunt.
But while he was out hunting, Rebekah told Jacob what was happening, and she told Jacob he needed to pretend to be Esau so that he could get the blessing instead.
But Jacob said, “Oh, I don’t know… I’m not really a hunter like Esau, and my skin is smooth, not hairy like Esau’s skin…”
But Rebekah said, “Just go get two goats from our flock. I’ll cook them; and I’ll wrap the goat skins around your arms and your neck, so that if your father Isaac touches you, he’ll feel the goat hair, and he’ll think you’re Esau, and he’ll give you the blessing.”
And that’s exactly what Jacob did. He pretended to be Esau, and it worked! Isaac gave Jacob the blessing!
Later, when Esau arrived, and he presented his cooked meal to his father Isaac, Isaac trembled, because he knew that he had been fooled.
He explained to Esau what had happened, and Esau said, “But don’t you have a blessing for me?”
And Isaac said, “I’m sorry, son; your brother Jacob has already taken the blessing that was meant for you.”
And Esau lifted up his voice and wept.
Again, when I first heard this story, I thought: that’s not very nice!
Jacob is a trickster, there’s no doubt about that.
Because of what Jacob did, Esau was devastated. He vowed to kill Jacob because of it, and Jacob had to flee for his own safety. Many, many years passed before they finally reconciled.
Now, what kind of a family is this, to highlight in worship? How is it that we read their story, and say “The word of the Lord; thanks be to God”?
The dysfunction here is through the roof. The sneaking around, the lying, the deceit. Isaac is estranged from his own brother, now Jacob is estranged from Esau, and Jacob’s own children will be filled with such jealousy toward one another that they end up selling one of their own, the brother who happens to be Jacob’s favorite son, into slavery…
It’s hard to see what lesson there is for us to learn from this story, other than, “Don’t be like them…”
But part of the problem, I think, is that we have ignored certain parts of this story. A lot of times, we’ll ignore parts of the Bible that make us uncomfortable, or which go against the biases and prejudices that we may or may not be aware of.
And sometimes our biases and prejudices are so strong that we insist that the Bible doesn’t say what it actually does say, because what it actually does say contradicts the biases and prejudices that we just can’t let go of.
I made a point of describing how different Jacob and Esau were. To say it another way: Esau fit perfectly all our expectations of how a man should express himself; how a man should express his masculinity. He was strong. He liked to hunt. He was a rough, tough, manly man.
But the way Jacob expressed his masculinity was less typical. In some ways, his behavior more closely aligned with what we might consider to be stereotypically female behavior.
He liked to stay inside. His skin was smooth and soft. He didn’t go out to hunt… but he did like to cook.
Jacob was a trickster, but now my attention is focused on these details. Why are they mentioned? What do they mean? Why did the author include them?
Nearly every culture has stories about gender-nonconforming individuals, transgender individuals, sometimes called genderqueer or two-spirit. And in many of these stories, the genderqueer or two-spirit individual is seen as holy, or chosen by God, for a special, perhaps prophetic role.
One example of this can be seen in the short animated movie Kapaemahu, which tells the ancient, sacred story of four visitors who arrived in Hawaii from Tahiti. They were “tall and deep in voice, yet gentle and soft spoken. They were not male, nor female; they were mahu - a mixture of both, in mind, heart, and spirit.” They were healers, who taught the native Hawaiians how to heal.
When they left, they transferred their healing power into four giant boulders, which the native Hawaiians brought down from the mountain and placed in Waikiki. To this day, in Waikiki, you can still see four ancient stones; maybe some of you have been to Waikiki and have seen them. The stones are in a little park with a fence around them.
Some people call them “wizard stones,” but really, they represent the four mahu. It is believed that the healing power of the mahu still resides in these stones.
For many generations, the story of the mahu was all but forgotten in Hawaii, just like so many sacred stories about genderqueer or two-spirit beings. The stories have been forgotten, or they have been altered, or key parts have been left out, either intentionally or unintentionally, by those who only want to tell stories that lift up their own biases and their own ways of seeing the world.
I don’t know exactly how Jacob lived out his gender identity to the world. There really is no way to know for certain. The Bible does not provide enough information for us to make a definitive answer.
But I do know that Jacob was not like his strong, hairy, hunter-of-a-brother. I do know that Jacob was quiet, and liked to stay inside, and cook, and that he had smooth skin. And I do know that he (Jacob) was the one chosen by God to be the start of a new nation, the nation of Israel.
And all of this is right there in the Bible. We’ve just been ignoring it.
But it’s not just religious leaders doing this. The same thing happens in the world of science.
According to Nurith Aizenman in a report she gave on NPR last week, “for decades, scientists have believed that early humans had a division of labor: Men generally did the hunting and women did the gathering.”
Yet the evidence is growing that women were also hunters, and have hunted alongside men, in about 80% of the societies that have existed since the beginnings of humanity; and it wasn’t just little animals like rabbits that they were hunting, but the same big animals that men hunted.
According to Cara Wall-Scheffler, a biological anthropologist and lead researcher, “the majority of cultures for whom hunting is important train their girls and their women to make their tools and go hunting… Women had their own toolkit. They had favorite weapons. Grandmas were the best hunters of the village."
Some of the evidence is new, but much of it has been there all along. It was just overlooked or ignored. And the implications of that are huge.
By ignoring the evidence that women were hunters, scientists helped create the myth that man is the hunter and woman is the gatherer, which, according to history professor Kimberly Hamlin, has fueled the idea that "men are supposed to be violent, they're supposed to be aggressive.” It’s one of the core elements in the soup of toxic masculinity which is used to excuse damaging male behavior, like rape, and also leads to increased efforts to restrict access to abortion and contraception.
So, scientists, anthropologists, and biblical scholars are, or should be, reexamining what they thought they knew about gender roles.
You may have heard the story of Jacob and Esau before, but you might not have ever thought about the different ways they express their gender, and how that might help us understand the story.
And this is not the only story in the Bible where we see this.
Not too long ago I preached about Joseph, the son of Jacob. Jacob had many sons, but Joseph was his favorite.
And Joseph, we know, was a dreamer.
We also know that Jacob gave Joseph what is often referred to as a coat of many colors, but which scholars recognize was actually a dress.
Joseph, it seems, was a lot like his father Jacob, and liked to express his gender identity in his own, unique way.
Flipping over to another part of the Bible, we read that when the prophet Samuel was sent to find a new king, he looked at seven of Jesse’s son, and immediately was attracted to Eliab, but God said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on his impressive stature, because God does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).
The one who God did choose, as many of you know, was David, who the Bible describes as having beautiful eyes, and rosy cheeks. It also mentions, a few verses later, that David was a talented musician.
Could it be that David, and Joseph, and Jacob, were all what some cultures would call two-spirit, or genderqueer? I don’t think we can definitively answer that one way or the other, but we can say that, at the very least, they didn’t express their masculinity in what we would consider to be typical ways…
So maybe one lesson we can learn from this story is that there are many ways to express one’s gender identity.
For a man, there is nothing wrong with being strong and masculine. There is nothing wrong with being gentle and soft.
The only thing wrong is saying that one is better than the other, or that one is acceptable and the other is unacceptable.
And isn’t it true that, in scripture, the one who is different; the one who does not conform to society’s expectations; the one who is willing to express their true identity no matter how unique or queer it is… is often the one chosen and anointed, to heal, to prophesy, and to teach us about God?
May we be humble enough to allow for all the possibilities that scripture offers to us…
And may we be humble enough to be led and inspired by those whom God has chosen, no matter how well they do or do not conform to the expectations of society.
-----------------------------------------------NPR article: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/07/01/1184749528/men-are-hunters-women-are-gatherers-that-was-the-assumption-a-new-study-upends-i
