Gen. xxvii. 35. And he said, Thy brother came with subtilty, and hath taken away thy blessing.
IT is not within the reach of our limited capacity to conceive how many and how great events depend upon causes apparently unimportant. We can have
no doubt but that parents so pious as Isaac and Rebekah, and who excelled all the patriarchs in the conjugal relation, endeavoured to discharge their duty towards their children in a becoming manner. But each of them felt a partiality for one of their children in preference to the other. Esau, the first- born, who was " a cunning huntsman," and supplied his father with venison, was Isaac's favourite : Jacob, on the other hand, who was of a more domestic turn, and had from the womb been designated by God him- self as the inheritor of the birthright, was the favourite of Rebekah. To this circumstance, as it should seem, we must refer all the most important events of Jacob's life. Isaac, in his partiality for Esau, had either mis- construed the intimations which God had given him respecting the birthright, or perhaps had forgotten them. He therefore, when he apprehended himself to be near death, told Esau to go out and bring him some venison, and to receive from his hands the blessings of primogeniture. Rebekah, alive to the interests of Jacob, and afraid that her wishes, as well as the counsels of the Deity, would be thwarted, sug- gested an expedient to Jacob, which, though adopted with reluctance, was conducted with art, and crowned with the desired success. She bade him fetch her two kids, which she dressed so that they might appear like venison. She moreover clothed him in an odo- riferous garment belonging to his elder brother, and put the skins of the kids upon his hands and neck, in order that he might as nearly as possible resemble Esau. And then she sent him in to deceive his aged father, and, by personating Esau, to obtain the blessing. Jacob acted his part with more skill and confidence than could have been expected from a person unaccustomed to deceit : he hesitated not to accumulate falsehoods in support of his claim, and even to represent God himself as having interposed to expedite his wishes. His greatest difficulty was to imitate the voice of Esau. Isaac was blind ; and therefore no discovery was dreaded from the differ- ence which there must have been in their appearance.