And I named my shithead little boy Jacob, and he likes to “just kid around”. Great.
He is Loki reincarnated, that one. And he’s all of three.
You are too conservative. “Three jews, five opinions” is more like it. 
I’ll take “Who are Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego for a thousand, Alex”
Sorry I wasn’t clear enough in my first post. I was mostly talking about midrash, the collection of stories that the rabbis say were passed down from Moses, but don’t actually appear in the Bible. The director’s cut version, if you will.
The midrash has a lot of things to say about Esau, very few of them nice. (His only good point, apparently, was his devotion to his parents). Jacob’s taking away the birthright is almost a rescue in this version.
Even looking in the text, though, there are some indications to their characters.
-Esau sold his birthright for a bunch of beans. He was the family heir, supposed to carry on the traditions of Isaac and Abraham. And how seriously did he take this weighty responsibility? “Eh, whatever, you can have my birthright if you make me lunch.” It wasn’t like Jacob was taking advantage of his poor starving brother, either- if you look at the text, the sale is finalized after Esau finishes his meal.
Also, as a kind of hint, Esau is called a hunter. Hunters in the Buble tend to be the bad guys, so much that “hunter” can be taken as shorthand for “homocidal barbarian”.
-Jacob doesn’t seem to be a wily as people think. He is first decribed as an ish taam, a “simple man” who stays in his tent all day. While Esau is out hunting, probably hanging with the locals, seeing the world, Jacob hangs around studying in his parents’ house. Probably book smart, but not street-wise.
It’s Rebecca who comes up with the whole “put on goat skins and pretend to be your brother” thing. Jacob demurs at first. If you look at his objection in the original Hebrew, he is not happy at all. In Biblical Hebrew there are two words for “perhaps”, pen and aylai. Pen can better be translated as “lest”: don’t do X lest Y happen. Aylai has the connotation of “I hope so”: if we buy a lotto ticket, perhaps we will become millionares. When Jacob says, “Perhaps my father will feel me (and find me out)”, he uses aylai instead of pen. “I really don’t want to do this, and some part of me is hoping I’ll be found out before I go through with it”.
Would-be martyrs from the book of Daniel. Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego were Daniel’s pals, actually. If I remember the story correctly, Nebuchadnezer was having everyone bow down to this big idol- a statue of himself, I believe. Those ancient rulers were all ego. Anyway, S M & A refused, and were thrown into a big oven. They came out unharmed, and Nebuchadnezer was impressed and pardoned them and got rid of the statue.
The midrash like to take the morally ambiguous characters of the bible and make them black and white.
Fascinating.
She was his sister. :smack:
She was his wife. :smack:
She was his sister. :smack:
She was his wife. :smack: