Jacob flees to Harran

Rebekah gives her husband a reason for sending Jacob away and it is not the real one. She has just warned Jacob that his brother intends to kill him. What she puts to Isaac concerns marriage: she is disgusted with living because of the Hittite women, and if Jacob takes a wife from among them her life will not be worth living.

The pretext works because it is a genuine family concern. Esau had already married two Hittite women who were a source of grief to both parents, and Abraham had gone to considerable lengths to prevent Isaac marrying a Canaanite. She is using a real problem to solve a different one, and nothing is said about the manoeuvre either way.

Isaac calls Jacob, forbids a Canaanite marriage, and sends him to Paddan Aram to take a wife from among Laban's daughters. He then blesses him a second time, and this time knowingly. The wording is more explicit than anything in the stolen blessing: may God Almighty make you fruitful and increase your numbers until you become a community of peoples, and may he give you and your descendants the blessing given to Abraham, so that you may take possession of the land where you now live as a foreigner.

That last clause is what the earlier blessing never mentioned. What Jacob obtained by deception spoke of grain, wine and dominance over his brother. This one names the covenant and the land, and it is handed over in daylight, in full knowledge of which son is standing there. Whatever was gained by the goatskins, the thing that actually carries the promise forward is given here without a disguise.

The vocabulary is the covenant's own. Isaac invokes God Almighty, the title used when the covenant of circumcision was given and the name of Abram was changed, and speaks of the land Abraham was promised rather than of prosperity in general.

Esau's response takes three sentences and is characteristically half-measured. He observes that Canaanite women displease his father, so he goes to Ishmael and marries one of his daughters. The instinct is right and the direction is wrong: he marries into the family, but into the branch that had been provided for and set aside, and he does it in addition to the wives he already has rather than instead of them.

Jacob leaves with nothing. No servants, no flocks, no bride price. Abraham's servant went to the same region with ten camels and gold; his grandson walks the eight hundred kilometres to Harran alone, and no account of the journey is given at all. Everything he later owns he acquires in Laban's household, and the twenty years he spends there begin from complete dependence.

Rebekah is never seen again. She told him to stay with Laban for a few days until his brother's anger subsided and she would send for him, and no message ever comes. She is not present when he returns twenty years later, and where or when she died is never stated; the only later mention of her is a note that she was buried in the family cave at Hebron.

Her place in the family is worth stating plainly, because she is easy to reduce to the woman who engineered a deception. She is the one who received the oracle about the two nations, directly and before either child was born. She is the only matriarch whose consent to her own marriage is recorded. And she acts, at the cost of losing her favourite son for the rest of her life, to bring about the outcome she was told about two decades earlier. Whether that justifies the goatskins is exactly what is left unresolved.