the lentil-stew incident

[cellio]

Some of us were discussing this week's parsha yesterday morning, specifically the incident where Esav sells Yaakov his birthright in exchange for some stew. The question is: was Yaakov behaving evilly, or was this ok (if un-brotherly)?

The plain reading (p'shat) provides the following facts: Esav the hunter came in from the field famished, found Yaakov cooking stew, and said "give me some of that stuff please". Yaakov said "sell me your birthright". Esav said "I'm about to die here; what good is it to me anyway?". They completed the transaction, Esav ate, and he went away.

Ok, let's dissect that a bit. Esav seems prone to drama -- he's about to die from hunger when he just came in from the field? Really? It's impossible to determine tone from this; I read the text as "gimme" from a bullying older brother, possibly influenced by the rabbis who see Esav in a negative light (equating him with Rome), while a fellow congregant saw him as asking nicely and being taken advantage of by the scheming brother who started trying to displace him at birth. Both possibilities are valid, I think. The plain text just doesn't tell us whether the request is sincere or a demand dressed up in a "please", or what anyone's motivations really are. To my surprise, the only midrash on this point in Sefer Ha-Aggadah is one that has Esav opening his mouth and saying "shovel it in" and eating like a camel. Nothing about events preceding that point.

Regardless of whether it was a request or a demand, Yaakov named a ridiculous price. After Esav took the deal the text tells us he "despised" his birthright, presumably because he sold it for a mere bowl of stew (and some bread that Yaakov added in). Surely Esav had options; he could have gone elsewhere for food or cooked his own stew. Yaakov is not his servant or his mother; it is not his job to cook for his brother. On the other hand, we learn from Kayin and Hevel that the answer to "am I my brother's keeper?" is "yes, actually, sometimes". I think if Esav were really about to die then it would be absolutely incumbent upon Yaakov to take care of him, but I don't think mere discomfort (possibly due to Esav's own bad planning) counts. So we're back to whether he was really at death's door, or just catastrophizing.

We also don't know whether Yaakov had cooked for just himself and giving food to his brother meant he wouldn't eat (or eat as much). In that case he might name a ridiculous price that he didn't expect his brother to actually pay. One is not generally compelled to give (or sell) one's property just because someone else wants it, though in Esav's defense, the rabbis do settle on a requirement for fair pricing if you do sell. So under halacha (which post-dates this incident, but still), Yaakov could have said "no" or sold at a fair price but couldn't do what he did.

To my mind, Yaakov took advantage but wasn't evil. The situation was not entirely under his control -- Esav could have walked out easily enough. This is different from, say, predatory lending where the only loan the guy with lousy credit can get is usurous. Contrast the stew incident with the later blessing incident, where I do think Yaakov was being unambiguously evil in tricking his father to steal his brother's blessing. (While I don't understand the apparent value of the blessing, that's a separate matter. It was valuable to all involved and Yaakov stole it through treachery.) Perhaps the later incident causes some to see the earlier incident in the same bad light, but that feels like a questionable reading to me, saying that, essentially, once a thief always a thief (projecting back in time). I find the Yaakov story more interesting as an arc, descending from sibling rivalry to theft to running for his life to then getting some of what he dished out at the hands of Laban to finally reconciling with his brother. But an interesting reading isn't automatically a correct one.

What say you?

Comments

[ticklethepear.livejournal.com]

I saw the title and thought, "Oh goody, a recipe." (We are a lentil-heavy household.)

[cellio]

Sorry!

(Psst: tags. :-) )

[ticklethepear.livejournal.com]

Heh! Still, a good story and analysis. This one has always puzzled me too - how can a birthright and a meal be equal in value? I'm an only so underlying sibling dynamics escape me!

[richardf8]

Check Ellen Frankel's "The Five Books of Miriam;" it has a recipe for red lentil stew for this Parsha.

[richardf8]

I had an interesting experience hearing it leined last year. I notice that the phrase "And there was a famine in the land" follows this accounting immediately. If this was the case, then the stakes are high. If Esau was hunting and there was no game - because there was a drought and the wadi was dry, say - Then Esau could indeed be in dire straits. This also explains the high price tag Jacob puts on it - a birthright in exchange for the last of the food? Not so unreasonable. High stakes on both sides can explain the high price . . . and make it seem less unreasonable.

I also think of this as the moment that Jacob acquires Leah for a wife.

[geekosaur]

One drash I've heard is that Esav describes the stew as "adom adom", which is understood as emphasizing its redness; and supposedly (also true in my experience :) fully cooked lentils lose most of their color, so the emphasis must mean that he's begging to be fed incompletely cooked lentils. (Which are tasteless and hard, in my experience.) This is why the story is taken to indicate desperation.

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

I will try to find exact sources for this (I think Rashi goes into it in some depth), but here are a few points:

This incident happened immediately after the death of Avraham. Yaakov was cooking the lentils (for the family, BTW, not just for himself) because they are traditional mourning food. Esav, meanwhile, wasn't just out hunting -- he killed Nimrod while out in the field, an act that amounted to claiming the title of the biggest villain of the era. Yaakov was not just asking what his brother would give for the food; he was asking him, in effect, whether he was ready, as Yitzchak's firstborn, to take up his grandfather's cause. Esav responds, "Why should I care since I'm going to die in the end? Just give me the food. None of this matters." There are other facets to the conversation, but IMHO what it boils down to is Yaakov asking Esav whether he's ready to take in the spiritual meaning of Avraham's death and Esav responding that all he cares about are his immediate bodily needs.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

There is another factor here.

You will sell your birthright for WHAT?

I'm sorry. Esav is a hunter, yes? He can bloody *make* his own dinner if he is that hungry. My reading is that Esav regarded this as a joke. He considered this "birthright" business so much nonsense. "Yeah, sure,I'll sell you my birthright. Why do I care about it anyway. We're all going to die someday and all this 'God' stuff will be so much huey." Thus we are told after the fact that Esav "despised his birthright." It was not until Yaakov took the blessing (which Esav sees as different and distinct) that Esav suddenly gets all upset. "Twice has Yaakov cheated me!" he cries. "I never get a break. Sure, I despised the birthright and thought is was just a joke. But now that Yaakov has genuinely outmaneuvered me I retroactively hate him and feel cheated."

So I don't think Yaakov took advantage at all. I think he was snide to his brother who was always lording it over him and who was his father's clear favorite and his brother, who didn't give a lentil about his 'birthright,' took him up on it. But I may be prejudiced, having an older brother.

Update: I note the famine comment above as a possible response to this line of reasoning. But we see no indication that Esau gave it a moment's thought or hesitation. He did not try to bargain, or ask Yaakov "WHAT! Are you out of your tent-dwelling mind?" No, he says "I'm gonna die (someday), so who cares?"

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

Or animal lust, depending on whether it is a sympathetic or unsympathetic view.

[cellio]

Where do you get that timing? Avraham dies and is buried by his sons, and then we're told of Yitzchak marrying Rivka when he was 40 and praying for fertility, and when he's 60 she has the twins, and enough time passes for them to grow up enough to hunt and cook. Now that's not necessarily the order it happened in; maybe Esav and Yaakov went to Avraham's funeral. But I don't see enough detail to work it out one way or the other. What am I missing?

(I've seen the Nimrod midrash, yes, though the telling I know has days passing from start to end.)

Yaakov was not just asking what his brother would give for the food; he was asking him, in effect, whether he was ready, as Yitzchak's firstborn, to take up his grandfather's cause.

I hadn't heard that before. Interesting!

[cellio]

Esav is a hunter, yes? He can bloody *make* his own dinner if he is that hungry.

Yeah, that's why I think he was exaggerating for dramatic purposes.

I hadn't made the leap from "birthright doesn't matter" to "joke", but that makes a lot of sense to me, at least for the spiritual aspects of the birthright. On the matter of raw greed, though (which should appeal to Esav), isn't he also giving up a double share of his father's lands and possessions when the time comes?

I lean toward the "being snide to a bullying older brother" interpretation (and I have no older siblings :-) ), but the text doesn't actually tell us anything about how Esav treated Yaakov before now, which made me wonder enough to raise the question. Do you know of rabbinic sources that flesh out their pre-stew-incident relationship? Or are we left to project backwards from "he's stupid/arrogant/dismissive enough to sell his birthright so obviously something's wrong"?

Thoughts From The Goyim Gallery, Looking In:

[talvinamarich.livejournal.com]

I have trouble taking this story literally. Rather, I see it as an allegory.

Who is Israel? Israel is the name that G-d gave to Yaakov. Yaakov is the ancestor of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

The birthright is more than inheritance. It is the mantle of the leader of the family, the eldest son. It is a position of power, responsibility, and respect. It is also identity. Had Esav kept his birthright, wouldn't he have become the leader of his people? Yaakov was a descendant of Abraham, but not the eldest son of the eldest son, which is implied by the situation to be the usual way of things in succession. (In other words, I see nothing to indicate other than that Esav would have been his father's successor in all things.)

This is, I think, a story of Hebrew/Jewish identity--that is the birthright that is spoken of! There are many times when it would be convenient for a Jew to "sell his birthright": to eat that which is not kosher, to conform to the ways of the people around him, to act as other than a Jew. Keep to your birthright, no matter the inconvenience.

It is better to have your birthright and be hungry, for if you sell all that has been passed down to you for a bowl of stew, when the stew is gone, you will have nothing left. Why a bowl of stew? Why not? It may as well be, for none have anything to offer that is equal in value to that birthright. If you would sell it at all, you may as well sell it for a good meal as anything else!

The story of Esav and Yaakov, taken in context, is that if you sell your birthright for convenience, you are not a child of Israel. That's my opinion, for whatever it is worth. :)

[geekosaur]

That's from Rashi. The "hook" for the drash is the custom of eating "round foods" — specifically including lentils — as mourning foods; therefore if Ya`aqov is mentioned as specifically cooking lentils, it must be for mourning, therefore it must have been triggered by the death of Avraham.

[geekosaur]

Generally it's taken as foreshadowed by their "struggling in the womb" and by Ya`aqov's hand being on Esav's heel. The usual drash is "he was trying to hold Esav back so he would be the firstborn"; a related drash is that Ya`aqov's hand came out first and a red thread was tied around the wrist to mark the firstborn, then it was pulled back in and then Esav emerged with Ya`aqov holding his heel with the tied hand.

[sethg]

Some of the darshanim on Noah, "righteous in his generation", say that Noah compares unfavorably to Abraham because Noah didn't proselytize to his unrighteous contemporaries, and Abraham did. One might make the same accusation against Jacob: Jacob should have tried to convince his brother to take his birthright-hood more seriously rather than just said "OK, you don't want it, I'll buy it off you."

Then again, how often do people respond to moral suasion from their siblings?

In general, come to think of it, Jacob is a pretty conflict-averse kind of guy, and IIRC the one time he tries to be really confrontational--his rant to Laban in which he says "the one who stole your idols will not live"--it doesn't work out so well for him, does it?

[cellio]

Interesting. I think of the blessing incident as when he acquire Leah.

I hadn't considered the famine angle. I wish I had a better sense of when proximity of text means proximity of event and when it doesn't. I don't think it's consistent.

[cellio]

Thanks. She said she thought Rashi and I should have looked it up.

[cellio]

The struggling could have been initiated by either of them, though, and the heel thing seems to suggest that Yaakov is the trouble-maker.

Re: Thoughts From The Goyim Gallery, Looking In:

[cellio]

These are very good thoughts. Thank you.

[geekosaur]

That has certainly been suggested, but it's not the usual interpretation; I'm sticking strictly to Rashi's drashes on the topic, following osewalrus's lead. (BTW the red thread thing also came from Rashi.)

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

Now we get into the rather interesting issue of how much to read into the text without textual support, or re-interpreting back based on future events in the narrative. Midrash is generally not for the purpose of filling in narrative, but of creating frame and moral reference. This is why midrash can be contradictory. It isn't about literal interpretation (what does it mean that Jacob's neck turned to stone? How did he breathe?) but about using the archetypes of the narrative.

At the same time, as a religious Jew, I believe in a literal interpretation of the narrative. I believe that Esau and Jacob were real people who actually existed.

But I find the modern effort to treat them as literary characters to miss the point. These are complex people, or complex archetypes and symbols.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

a related drash is that Ya`aqov's hand came out first and a red thread was tied around the wrist to mark the firstborn, then it was pulled back in and then Esav emerged with Ya`aqov holding his heel with the tied hand.

Actually, that was a later incident with the sons of Tamar. Gen. 39:27-30.

Re: Thoughts From The Goyim Gallery, Looking In:

[talvinamarich.livejournal.com]

Cain and Abel. Esau and Jacob. What other stories follow the theme of "Brother against brother, leading to one group of people parting ways with the main group"?

Re: Thoughts From The Goyim Gallery, Looking In:

[kmelion.livejournal.com]

Well for a while it's Joseph against his 9 older siblings.

Then later, IIRC, when the kingship splits the tribe of Judah stands alone against the other tribes...

[ticklethepear.livejournal.com]

Thanks!