A father's love. The boys grew up. Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the outdoors,

Ishhhhah. But Jacob was an Ishtam, a mild man, who stayed at home among the tents.

Isaac, who had a taste for wild game, loved Issao. But Rebecca loved Jacob. We have no difficulty

understanding why Rebecca loved Jacob. She'd received an oracle from God in which he was told,

There are two nations in your womb and two peoples from within you will be separated. One will be

stronger than the other and the older will serve the younger. Well, Jacob was the younger.

Rebecca seems to have inferred correctly as it turned out that it would be he who would

continue the covenant, who would stay true to Abraham's heritage, and who would teach

it to his children carrying the story forward into the future.

So the real question is, why did Isaac love Esau?

Couldn't he see that he was a man of the outdoors, a hunter, not a contemplative or a man of God?

Is it conceivable that he loved Esau merely

because he had a taste for wild game? Did his appetite rule his mind and heart? Did Isaac not know

how Esau had sold his birthright for a bowl of soup and how how he subsequently vaivés at Abu Ghura,

how he subsequently despised the birthright itself, was this someone with whom to entrust the

spiritual patrimony of Abraham? Isaac surely knew that his elder son was a man of mercurial temperament

who lived in the emotions

of the moment. Even if this didn't trouble him, the next episode involving Esau clearly did.

We read when Esau was 40 years old, he married Judith's daughter of Barry the Hittite and also

Bosmutt, daughter of Elon the Hittite. They were a source of grief to Isaac and Rebecca.

Esau had made himself at home among the Hittites. He'd married two of their women.

This wasn't a man to carry forward the Abrahamic covenant which involved a measure of distance from the Hittites and Keneonites,

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