82 P BOYS OF TRE BIBLE.

Who could wonder if Esau felt badly! Jacob had well
earned Esau’s contempt. And Esau said:

“Is he not rightly called Jacob? For he hath supplanted
me these two times: he took away my birthright; and behold
now he hath taken away my blessing.”

And then, with rare tenderness, he pleads with his father
for some farewell, tender benediction.

“Hast thou not reserved a blessing for me?

Hast thou but one blessing, my father? Bless me, bless me,
O my Father! And Esau lifted up his voice and wept.”

Esau was not given to tears, or to tender moods generally,
and this exhibition of his deep sense of the wrong he had
suffered touched the heart of the dying patriarch.

“And Isaac his father answered and said unto him:
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 sever thy brother: and it shall come to
pass when thou shall have the dominion, that thou shalt break
his yoke from off thy neck.”

Then Esau went forth from his father’s tent with the
solemn determination that as soon as his father was dead he
would kill his cunning brother. Jacob.

Happily that vow was not kept. Esau became the chief-
tain of the Edomites, the wandering, unstable dynasty that
came forth from Idumea. Esau’s career suggests some grave
lessons well worth our careful thought.

It was Esau’s own fault that his name was not insepar-
ably linked with that of Abraham and Abraham’s God through
all the generations of men. The true order would have been
to have spoken of God as “the God of Abraham, and of
Isaac, and of Esau.” But Esau sold his birthright—the
dearest heritage of the Hebrew youth—for a mess of pot-