Was Jacob right to take Esau’s blessing in disguise? Was he right to deceive his father and to take from his brother the blessing Isaac sought to give him? Was Rivka right in conceiving the plan in ...

Was Jacob right to take Esau’s blessing in disguise? Was he right to deceive his father and to take from his brother the blessing Isaac sought to give him? Was Rivka right in conceiving the plan in ...

Genesis 25:26 “Afterward his brother came out with his hand holding Esau’s heel, so his name was called Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them.” Jacob’s name means “supplanter” or ...

Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of stew. How many Christians sell their spiritual birthright for the world’s equivalent of a bowl of stew? When the young men grew up, Esau became an outdoorsman ...

The earliest midrashic commentaries on the story of Jacob and Esau portray Esau as thoroughly wicked. Since Jacob does not seem to emerge from the deception of his father with much credit, the ...

Jacob and Esau were twin brothers who entered this world struggling to determine who was first. This struggle followed them for all of their lives. Genesis 25: 24-26: When the time came for her to ...

The classic wrestling match in Biblical literature is that between the most dissimilar twins, Jacob and Esau. They began their struggle with each other even before they were born, in their mother ...

Parashat Vayishlach describes Jacob’s return to the Land of Israel after twenty years in Haran and his tense preparations to meet his brother Esau. The plain reading of the opening verses suggests ...

Throughout our history, Jews have had a complex relationship with power and powerlessness. Some ancient paradigms might be helpful in making some sense of the current moment. One such paradigm comes ...