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

[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?"

[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"?

[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.

[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.

[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]

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.

[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?

[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.