Esau

Genesis gives Esau two losses rather than one, and treats them as different kinds of event. The first is a trade he makes with his eyes open: he comes in from hunting exhausted and asks Jacob for the red stew he is cooking, and Jacob will only give it in exchange for the birthright, the elder son's double share and standing as head of the family after their father. Esau agrees, reasoning to himself that a birthright is worth nothing to a man about to die of hunger, and the text notes flatly that he despised it. The second loss is not a trade at all.

Isaac, old and blind, sends Esau out to hunt game for a final blessing, and while he is gone Rebekah dresses Jacob in Esau's clothes and covers his arms with goatskins so that Isaac's hands will mistake him for his hairy brother. Isaac blesses Jacob believing him to be Esau, and when the real Esau returns with his father's meal there is no blessing left to give him, only a lesser one and the news of what has happened. Esau's grief at this second loss, wordless in the first case and open weeping in the second, is one of the more physically described reactions in the patriarchal narratives, and it sets him against Jacob until their reconciliation years later.

Genesis identifies Esau with Edom, the hill country south and east of the Dead Sea, and traces its ruling clans back to him in a genealogy of its own. He settles in the hill country of Seir, marries Hittite and Ishmaelite women against his parents' preference, and by the time Jacob returns from twenty years abroad Esau has become prosperous enough to ride out with four hundred men, not as a threat but as an escort. Jacob approaches bowing seven times and braced for violence over the stolen blessing; Esau runs to him, embraces him, and weeps on his neck, and the text gives no sign that the old grievance survives the reunion.

The brothers bury their father Isaac together at the end of his life. Because Edom and Israel remain rival, sometimes hostile neighbors for the rest of the biblical period, later prophetic and rabbinic literature reads the twins' relationship as a template for a much longer national history, and Genesis Rabbah in particular develops Esau into a figure standing for the nations that oppose Israel, a reading well beyond anything the patriarchal narrative itself states about him as a person.