* Hugh Bkok.
GKN.-WUM. — 14
2IO THE BARTERED BIRTHRIGHT
businesse is to breake such a Commandement, and the breaking of the Commandement shall tempt him to it. His words are but so many vomitings cast vp to the lothsomnesse of the hearers, onely those of his company loath it not. He will take vpon him with oathes to pelt some tenderer man out of his company, and makes good sport at his conquest o're the Puritan foole. The Scripture supplies him for iests, and bee reades it of purpose to be thus merry. He will prooue you his sin out of the Bible, and then aske if you will not take that Authority. He neuer sees the Church but of purpose to sleepe in it : or when some silly man preaches with whom he means to make sport, and is most iocund in the Church. One that nick-names Clergymen with all the termes of reproach, as Bat, Black-coate, and the like which he will be sure to keepe vp, and neuer calls them by other. That singes] Psalmes when he is drunks, and cryes God mercy in mockerie ; for hee must doe it. Hee is one seemes to dare God in all his actions, but indeed would out-dare the opinion of him, which would else tume him desperate: for Atheisme is the refuge of such sinners, whose repentance would bee onely to hang themselues.**
3. What did Jacob gain by this offence ? Not the fulfilment of the Divine promise ; for that would have been fulfilled, had he never sinned. What he gained by his sin was — misery, shame, fear, remorse. As the direct and immediate consequence of his sin, he had to leave his father's tent. Without Esau's courage, he had to face perils before which even Esau might have quailed. He, who was destined to rule, had to serve. The cheat was cheated year after year — by Laban, by his wives, by his children. He had to present himself, a suppliant for life, before the brother he had wronged. He had to witness his daughter's irremediable shame. He was made " to stink " in the nostrils of his neighbours by the craft and ferocity of his sons. His own children repaid on Joseph, his darling, the very wrongs which he himself had inflicted on Esau. As we recall all that he suffered in the course of his long pilgrimage, we no longer wonder to hear him say at the close of it, " Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life."
H Wellhausen says : " The stories about Jacob do not pretend to be moral. The feeling they betray is indeed that of undis- sembled joy in all the successful tricks of the patriarchal rogue." Now, if ever there was a false statement, that is false. If you
GENESIS XXV. 34 211
wish to test the matter, read a book written about the time this Book of Genesis was committed to writing, the Odyssey of Homer. There we have in Ulysses, a Jacob, an arch-dissembler and accomplished trickster. Like Jacob, he too is a good husband, and his meeting with his son Telemachus after the separation of many years recalls vividly the reunion of Jacob and Joseph. But there the likeness ends. For the story of the lies and tricks of Ulysses is told with gusto. The note of retribution is wholly lacking. Homer's Jacob is a comic figure ; but the note of tragedy goes sounding through the Hebrew story. Jacob's tricks and deceits serve him like faithful minions, for the moment, but the moment after, they mutiny. Their numbers swell. They become a troop. They lie in wait for him. They chase him from home. They follow him to his new home. They appear at his marriage. They change the wine into wormwood. As the pages of the story follow each other, we hear the gallop of the avengers, we catch the whoop of their war-cry, " God is not mocked. . . . The soul that sinneth it shall die."
1 " It is strange," says Miss Wedgwood, " that the judgment on Jacob's perfidy is so constantly forgotten. No professedly moral tale could delineate a more exact requital than that meted out to him." A cup of cold water given to a brother in a brother's name shall not lose its reward ; nor shall a mess of pottage, sold to a brother at a price he cannot choose but pay, evade the payment of that tax which law levies on selfishness. " Dust shall be the serpent's meat."
If That person who does an atom of good will see it and find its reward ; and that person who does an atom of evil will see it and find its reward.^
4. Yet when we take the two brothers from first to last, how entirely is the judgment of the Book of Genesis and the judg- ment of posterity confirmed by the result of the whole. The impulsive hunter vanishes away, light as air : " he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way : thus Esau despised his birthright." The substance, the strength of the Chosen Family, the true inheritance of the promise of Abraham, was interwoven with the very essence of the character of " the upright man dwelling in tents " (Gen. xxv. 27). The word translated " plain " implies a stronger approbation, which the English version has softened, probably from a sense of the difficulty — steady, per-