Sunday, October 20, 2013: Genesis 32:22-31; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5

I have been thinking about Jacob a lot recently. I was commissioned to write a short story about genetic modification and chose to write about Jacob’s spotted-sheep breeding program (Gen. 30:37–43)—perhaps the oldest example of deliberate gene manipulation for profit.

The main thing I learned about Jacob is that he was not at all virtuous. He was what in the U.K. we would call a “wide boy.” In the U.S. you would say a “smooth operator,” which is particularly pleasing because Jacob was a smooth man in contrast to his hairy twin brother Esau. I even did some research to see if the pejorative use of smooth to describe cunningly executed financial or sexual shenanigans might have its origins in Jacob, but my dictionary was not helpful. Jacob robbed his brother of his inheritance; he exploited his own father’s disability by means of a dishonest and carefully planned trick to gain a blessing he was not entitled to; he spent 21 years stripping his father-in-law of his wealth and then abandoned him; he had 12 sons and an unspecified number of daughters by four different women, and he brought them all up together in a fractious, quarrelsome household. He smarmed his way back into the affections of his poor brother and came home rich, honored and powerful to begin the task of brutal conquest. Of course, all this was fairly mild compared to his grandfather Abraham, who would probably find himself in a locked ward nowadays.

And yet El Shaddai, the God of his fathers, loved Jacob. God constantly not only rewarded him and favored him over his gentler well-meaning brother but also appeared to him directly, sent him visions of angels, gave him a new name, made him lavish promises and kept them, and wrestled with him through a long desert night—an intimacy unique in the Hebrew scriptures. Jacob was one of the very few characters who “saw God and lived” as opposed to hearing God’s voice or receiving God’s messengers.