CHAPTER IX.. Isaac's benediction upon Esau. The pronouncing of curses and blessings a practice of the most primitive antiquity. Dread of the paternal malediction. Its influence. The testimony of Michaelis that poetry was familiar to the primitive races. THE paternal benediction pronounced by Isaac upon his eldest son, falls as far short of that addressed to the younger brother in poetical force and beauty, as it does in the civil and political distinctions which it prospectively confers. It, nevertheless, corresponds very happily with the character of the man upon whom it was bestowed. Behold, thy dwelling shall be the fatness of the earth, And of the dew of heaven from above; And by thy sword shalt thou live and shalt serve thy brother; Abundance is here promised to Esau, as it had previously been to Jacob; but this abundance is widely different. There is no mention made of corn and wine; even the territorial prosperity, therefore, of the one, was to be inferior to that of the other, though in this respect prosperity was promised to both. In temporal supremacy, however, there was a vast distinction in the promise. Jacob was to possess absolute dominion in his posterity; Esau was to maintain a precarious security by the sword, which fully accorded with the martial spirit of the Edomites, who were the descendants of this patriarch. They were a fierce but brave people, delighting in hostility, and often obtaining a precarious subsistence in predatory warfare;-" their hand was against every man, and every man's hand was against them," as had been previously predicted of the descendants of Ishmael, whom they in many respects resembled; and the roving tribes of desert Arabs are at this day a living exemplification of that remarkable annunciation of the angel to the mother of Ishmael, before that patriarch was born. Josephus says of the Edomites, that " they were a turbulent and disorderly nation, always ripe for commotions and rejoicing in changes; at the least adulation of those who beseech them, beginning war, and hastening to battle as to a feast." And " And a little before the last siege of Jerusalem, they came, at the entreaty of the zealots, to assist them against the priests and people, and there, together with the zealots, committed unheard-of cruelties, and barbarously murdered Ananus, the high-priest, from whose death Josephus dates the destruction of the city." (Bishop Newton.) Thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck. In the reign of Jehoram, the Edomites revolted, being then under the dominion of Judah, and established an independent sovereignty; nor were they again subjected to the yoke of Judah. It is remarkable, as Bishop Newton justly observes, that "the nation of the Edomites has been several times conquered and made tributary to the Jews, but never the nation of the Jews to the Edomites; and the Jews have been the more considerable people, more known in the world and more famous in history." "In what a most extensive and circumstantial manner," concludes the very able commentator just quoted, "has God fulfilled all these predictions! and what a proof is this of the divine inspiration of the Pentateuch, and the omniscience of God." The third line in this prophecy is obviously not a strict grammatical rendering: And by thy sword shalt thou live and shalt serve thy brother. The patriarch evidently did not mean to say that his elder son, or rather the descendants of that son, should live by the sword and serve those of the younger brother by the sword, but simply that they should live by warfare and plunder; nevertheless, that they should be under the dominion of Jacob's posterity, who would rule over them until they should "break the yoke from off their necks," which they did in the reign of Jehoram, the son of Jehoshaphat, king of Judah; having revolted, as I have already said, from under the dominion of Judah, and made themselves a king. "Jehoram made some attempts to subdue them again, but could not prevail, so the Edomites revolted from under the hand of Judah unto this day' (2 Chron. xxi. 8-10.) and hereby this part of the prophecy was fulfilled, about nine hundred years after it was delivered." (Bishop Newton.) The line above referred to should consequently have been rendered By thy sword shalt thou live, and thou shalt serve thy brother, which would at once obviate the incongruity in the sense and restore the grammatical construction. The repetition of the personal pronoun thou is manifestly indispensable to the true reading. And it shall come to pass, when thou shalt have the dominion. By this we are not to understand that they should really obtain dominion over the seed of Jacob, but merely that they should render themselves independent, and possess a regular government, as they did when they elected a king to reign over them. The Jerusalem Targum gives a very satisfactory paraphrase of the whole passage, exhibiting a clear and intelligible exposition. "And it shall be, when the sons of Jacob attend to the law, and observe the precepts, they shall impose the yoke of servitude upon thy neck; but when they shall turn themselves away from studying the law, and neglect the precepts, behold, then shalt thou shake off the yoke of servitude from thy neck." In the benedictions pronounced by Isaac upon Jacob and Esau, the evident constituents of poetry cannot fail to attract observation. I have shown them to exist in the former, and they will be found no less distinctly marked, though with some diminution of effect, in the latter; still the artificial structure is alike manifest in both. The second and third verses of the blessing referring to the posterity of the patriarch's younger son, correspond very closely with those which refer to the posterity of the elder. There is, however, in the last, an inversion of the parallels, so that those terms which descend into an anticlimax in the one, naturally rise towards a climax in the other, a distinction which weakens the unpleasant monotony of repetition by an agreeable variation of the same expressions, at the same time communicating an effect of novelty; but bringing, nevertheless, to the mind the inferiority of Esau's blessing to Jacob's. Though similar, they are quite distinct, and the particulars in which they differ forcibly arrest the attention. There is no promise of corn and wine to the elder son; so that, although his posterity were to possess a fruitful soil, they, not being addicted to husbandry, were not to look for the fruits of honest industry, but to the acquisitions of rapine and predatory warfare. This trifling variation in the benediction strikingly signalizes the character of the Edomites. They had no taste for those pursuits by which the necessary aliments of life were, under divine favour, produced, and therefore to them abundance was not promised. They were a turbulent, unsettled race, able and disposed to enlarge their territorial possessions, but neither endowed with the capacity nor disposition to render those possessions, though plentifully furnished with the elements |