1. And Abraham took another wife. The actual place of this whole genealogical notice in the chronology of Abraham’s life might be somewhere after the burial of Sarah at the end of chapter 23, or perhaps even considerably earlier. The genealogy is inserted here as a formal marker of the end of the Abraham story. Perhaps a certain tension was felt between the repeated promise that Abraham would father a vast nation and the fact that he had begotten only two sons. This tension would have been mitigated by inserting this document at the end of his story with the catalogue of his sons by Keturah. In this list, Abraham figures as the progenitor of the seminomadic peoples of the trans-Jordan region and the Arabian peninsula. The second genealogical notice (verses 12–18), that of the descendants of Ishmael, covers a related group of tribes—twelve in number, like the Israelite tribes—in the same geographical region, but also extending up to northern Mesopotamia. Thus, as Ishmael definitively leaves the scene of narration, the list provides a “documentary” confirmation of the promise that he, too, will be the father of a great nation.

6. concubines. The plural form may imply that Keturah’s status, like Hagar’s, was that of a concubine.

8. sated with years. The Masoretic Text has only “sated,” but the Syriac, Samaritan, and Septuagint versions as well as some manuscripts read “sated with years,” which the context clearly requires.

16. habitations. The Hebrew term in urban architectural contexts means “court,” but the older meaning is “dwelling place,” or perhaps something like “unfortified village.” The cognate in the Ugaritic texts means “house.”

18. And they ranged. The verb shakhan suggests an activity less fixed than “to settle” or “to dwell,” and this translation follows the lead of E. A. Speiser in using a verb that implies nomadism.

In despite of all his kin he went down. The translation reproduces the enigmatic character of the whole clause in the Hebrew. “In despite of all his kin” repeats exactly the words of Ishmael’s blessing in 16:12, and so the ambiguous “he” here may also be Ishmael, who is mentioned in the previous verse. But some construe the initial preposition of the clause as “alongside” or “in the face of.” The verb is equally opaque: its most common meaning is “to fall”; some have imagined it has a military meaning here (“to attack” or “to raid”); others have construed it as a reference to the “falling” of the inheritance.

19. this is the lineage of Isaac. Modern translations that render “lineage” (or, “begettings”) as “story” are misconceived. The formula is pointedly used to suggest a false symmetry with “this is the lineage of Ishmael.” In this case, the natural chain of procreation is interrupted, and can proceed only through divine intervention, as was true for Abraham.

21–23. In this second instance of the annunciation type-scene, the husband intercedes on behalf of the wife, and the annunciation to the future mother—here given the form of an oracle—is uniquely displaced from the period of barrenness to late pregnancy. The crucial point in this story of the birth of twins is not the fact of birth itself but the future fate of struggle between the siblings, which is the burden of the oracular poem.

22. Then why me? Rebekah’s cry of perplexity and anguish over this difficult pregnancy is terse to the point of being elliptical. Her words might even be construed as a broken-off sentence: Then why am I . . . ?

23. the elder, the younger’s slave. Richard Elliott Friedman has made the interesting suggestion that the Hebrew oracle here has the ambiguity of its Delphic counterpart: the Hebrew syntax leaves unclear which noun is subject and which is object—“the elder shall serve the younger,” or, “the elder, the younger shall serve.”

25. ruddy, like a hairy mantle . . . Esau. There is an odd displacement of etymology in the naming sentence, perhaps because the writer was not sure what “Esau” actually meant. “Ruddy,” ʾadom, refers to another name for Esau, Edom (as in verse 30), and the “hairy” component of the mantle simile, seʿar, refers to Edom’s territory, Seir.

26. they called his name Jacob. The Masoretic Text has a singular verb, but some manuscript versions have the plural, as when the same phrase is used for Esau. In this instance, the etymology is transparent: Yaʿaqob, “Jacob,” and ʿaqeb, “heel.” The grabbing of the heel by the younger twin becomes a kind of emblem of their future relationship, and the birth, like the oracle, again invokes the struggle against primogeniture. The original meaning of the name Jacob was probably something like “God protects” or “God follows after.”

And Isaac was sixty years old. With the most deft economy of delayed exposition, the narrator reveals that Rebekah had been childless for twenty years—an extraordinarily long period for a woman to suffer what in the ancient setting was an acutely painful predicament.

27. a simple man. The Hebrew adjective tam suggests integrity or even innocence. In biblical idiom, the heart can be crooked (ʿaqob, the same root as Jacob’s name—cf. Jeremiah 17:9), and the idiomatic antonym is pureness or innocence—tom—“of heart” (as in Genesis 20:5). There may well be a complicating irony in the use of this epithet for Jacob, since his behavior is very far from simple or innocent in the scene that is about to unfold.

28. for the game that he brought him. The Hebrew says literally, “for the game in his mouth.” It is unclear whether the idiom suggests Esau as a kind of lion bringing home game in its mouth or rather bringing game to put in his father’s mouth. The almost grotesque concreteness of the idiom may be associated with the absurdity of the material reason for Isaac’s paternal favoritism. Pointedly, no reason is assigned for Rebekah’s love of Jacob in the next clause.

29. And Jacob prepared a stew. Oraḥ Ḥaim, an eighteenth-century Hebrew commentary, brilliantly suggests that Jacob, seeing that Esau had won their father’s heart with food, tries to compete by preparing his own (hearty vegetarian) culinary offering.

30. Let me gulp down some of this red red stuff. Although the Hebrew of the dialogues in the Bible reflects the same level of normative literary language as the surrounding narration, here the writer comes close to assigning substandard Hebrew to the rude Esau. The famished brother cannot even come up with the ordinary Hebrew word for “stew” (nazid) and instead points to the bubbling pot impatiently as (literally) “this red red.” The verb he uses for “gulping down” occurs nowhere else in the Bible, but in rabbinic Hebrew it is reserved for the feeding of animals. This may be evidence for Abba ben David’s contention that rabbinic Hebrew developed from a biblical vernacular that was excluded from literary usage: in this instance, the writer would have exceptionally allowed himself to introduce the vernacular term for animal feeding in order to suggest Esau’s coarsely appetitive character. And even if one allows for semantic evolution of this particular verb over the millennium between the first articulation of our text and the Mishnah, it is safe to assume it was always a cruder term for eating than the standard biblical one.

Edom. The pun, which forever associates crude impatient appetite with Israel’s perennial enemy, is on ʾadom-ʾadom, “this red red stuff.”

31. Sell now your birthright to me. Each of Jacob’s words, in striking contrast to Esau’s impetuous speech, is carefully weighed and positioned, with “me” held back until the end of the sentence. If Esau seems too much a creature of the imperious body to deserve the birthright, the dialogue suggests at the same time that Jacob is a man of legalistic calculation. Perhaps this is a quality needed to get and hold onto the birthright, but it hardly makes Jacob sympathetic, and moral ambiguities will pursue him in the story.

32. so why do I need. The words he uses, lamah zeh li, are strongly reminiscent of the words his mother used when she was troubled by the churning in her womb, lamah zehʾanokhi.

34. and he ate and he drank and he rose and he went off. This rapid-fire chain of verbs nicely expresses the precipitous manner in which Esau gulps down his food and, as the verse concludes, casts away his birthright.