Surpassing the GOAT: When Jacob, the trickster, got tricked.
Don’t dish what you cannot swallow.
What’s that saying again? “Karma’s a ….” Even the Bible tends to take pleasure in poetic justice every once in a while.
Getting Esau’s goat
When Isaac was ready to bestow a singular blessing on his favourite son, his wife, Rebekah overheard his instructions to Esau. She devised an alternative plan, asking her favourite twin boy to bring her two young goats instead.
Jacob did as he was told and his mother cooked Isaac’s meal just the way he liked it. They used the goat hair to create the illusion that boyish Jacob was his burly brute of a brother Esau.
The deception left a betrayed Esau filled with murderous hatred for his younger brother, forcing Jacob to flee to his uncle Laban’s home for two decades.
But wait
Years later, Jacob’s son Joseph flaunted his prophetic gifts before his kin. When Joseph’s brothers had enough of his arrogance, they stripped him of his favourite coat and threw him into an empty pit. After selling him to slavery, they caught and killed a goat and doused the colourful coat in its blood to deceive their father. Jacob bought the story; his sons used a goat to trick their father.
Jacob’s own medicine
Jacob’s reaction suggests that this news was devastating. He apparently mourned for days, unable to be comforted by his many sons and daughters who were still around him.
The story wraps us the debacle in a few verses and continues onto the next scandal. Very little empathy is spared for the trickster who stole his own brother’s birthright and blessing.
The GOAT?
The story of Jacob is a long and complicated one. He is, in many episodes, both victim and perpetrator. But let us spare a moment for this old man whose life of scheming brought him his greatest pain: the loss of his favourite son.
While ignominy is not the central point of the narrative of the family of faith, the narrative does not spare our protagonists the embarrassment that comes with the dire consequences of their actions.
Sometimes, in trying to draw moral lessons from these ancient stories, it’s hard to separate the sheep from the goats.
