By Grunion Guy

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 CHAPTER FORTY THREE
Jacob Prepares to Meet Esau, Genesis 32:1 - 32:21.


THE FACTS!

Jacob leaves Gilead and meets up with God's angels.

Jacob sees them and calls the place where he sees them Mahanaim, or Two Hosts.

Jacob sends some messengers to Esau in the land of Edom.

They deliver this message: "Your thervant Jacob hath been thojourning with Laban. I have oxtheth, atheth, manthervantth, womanthervantths and flockth. I hope you won't kill me when you thee me."

Esau's answer comes in the form of Esau leading 400 soldiers to meet Jacob.

Jacob craps his pants and splits up his servants and stuff into two groups so that if Esau smites one group, Jacob will still have plenty of servants left.

Jacob prays to God, "Hey, remember how you thaid you'd take care of me and make my children number the thand of the beach? Well, if Ethau killth me, then thothe thingth won't be true. Tho, you know, I trutht you to do the right thing."

Jacob decides to put together a gift basket for Esau composed of two hundred she-goats, twenty he-goats, two hundred ewe, twenty rams, thirty camels for milking, forty cows, ten bulls, twenty female asses and ten foals.

Jacob sends a servant with each separate flock to be given to Esau, one group after the other.

Jacob commands each servant to tell Esau, "Thethe be a gift to you from your thervant Jacob who cometh behind uth."

As the present marches all night to Esau, Jacob sleeps.

 

STUDY QUESTIONS!
Question God and Religion!

Why are the first two verses in this chapter? What do they have to do with the story? Have there just not been enough visits from God in the last five pages or so and The Bible needed to remind everyone that God likes to take part in the proceedings? Don't you think meeting up with a host of angels deserves a little more detail? What did they look like? What did they do? Did Jacob converse with them? All that happens is he meets God's posse and then names the place where he met them, Two Hosts or Two Camps! So when more would finally be better, The Bible opts for nearly nothing at all. But when goats or cattle are involved, The Bible gives us verse upon verse of their speckles and spots and rods and conceptions.

Did you like how Jacob tells his messengers to tell Esau that he had 'sojourned' with Laban during all this time? I guess if you knew you'd stolen your brother's inheritance and birth right and then fled for years, you'd probably hope that he'd forgotten all of that and believe you when you came back with a tan and lots of goats, saying, "Boy, what a great vacation I just had! Great to see you brother!" (Jacob says that, not the goats!)

Would you have liked to have seen Jacob's face when his messengers came back and said, "Oh yeah, your brother wants to see you too! By the way, he's bringing 400 men with him"? I guess Esau has a long memory! Time for Plan B, Jacob!

What do you think Jacob's servants were thinking when he split them into two groups? I'm sure he only said the part about Esau possibly smiting one group as an aside to himself. Where was Jacob's family? Did he separate them in the groups too so he'd still have five children and one wife even if Esau slaughtered a whole group? Where did Jacob go? Was he planning on hanging back in the middle to beat it with whichever group lived?

Isn't Jacob's prayer to God at this point a fairly typical Christian prayer? Maybe it's a little more pushy than the normal prayer which, in humble earnestness, might begin, "If it be Your will, please do blah blah blah." But being one of the founding Jews, they were all a little bit more than pushy. So Jacob says, "Please protect me since, if you remember correctly, that was your will which you told me and I believed you and now look at the mess I'm in because I believed you and you wouldn't want to be caught in a lie now, would you?" And then he even reminds God how He had told Jacob that Jacob's seeds would be as the sand in their multitude and how could that happen since Esau will surely kill the children with their mothers!

The Bible seems to be portraying God as a Powerful and Vengeful Being when he's dealing with sinners and non-followers but he's a Door Mat when he's dealing with his top Jews. Is this why people enjoy The Bible? It tells them if they're Holy and Righteous Followers, they can boss around a God?

What do you think of Jacob's faith? He prays to God to save and deliver him. Shouldn't that be enough if you're faithful in God and what God has promised you? Or if your motives aren't totally selfish and you can just allow yourself to let God do what He will? Although, I guess doing for yourself can't hurt either! And a nice big fat bribe of hundreds of cattle should change Esau's mind from killing if God doesn't want to do it. And, of course, if the bribe works, Jacob can still thank God and proclaim it was all God's doing.

Do you think Jacob sent enough presents to assuage Esau of his anger? How much is a birthright and a blessing actually worth? I can't imagine they're really worth much of anything anyway! Does God only interact closely with Followers who are the first son of a previous follower and received the father's blessing? Is God interacting with other people at this point as much as He's interacting wit Abraham and Abraham's offspring? Why were they so special? Why was Noah so special that he was able to live? And why was Shem so special that he received Noah's blessing and, subsequently, his ancestors became special people? Although, not all of his ancestors, apparently! Just the ones who were blessed by their father in the way Noah blessed Shem, I guess!

 

FAITH vs SCIENCE
Fear

Science
Because we're human and we've developed overly large brains that are bigger than they need to be, we use our brain to think less about survival and more about accessories and dinner options and ways to impress the opposite sex (which I guess is important to survival so forget that one). We have plenty of time to think philosophically about fear and how people react to fear and what it means and why it happens and all sorts of other stuff that animals don't have time to think about because they're busy trying to not be eaten by other animals. So we tend to see fear as more complex than it really is. All creatures have an instinct for survival that causes them to fight or run away like a little girl. They may not be able to express that they're trying to remain alive but they react in a way that their genes tell them is the best action to keep living. Most of the time, these reactions are instinctual and resultant of stimulus happening in the immediate present. But because humans have evolved to think about everything, humans can ruin their whole lives by living in reaction to future possibilities of death or harm. In many ways, living within a community, it is a good thing to plan long term for your survival. But the possibilities for harm are exponential being that planning for the possible is not planning for the eventual. Planning for the possible means reacting out of fear of everything. This can lead to stupid laws, over-protective parents, a litigious society and unjust wars. And all because of the fear of death. But guess what? Everyone dies and much of the time death will come to a person unexpectedly and without that person having any time to prepare or having had any notion that they needed to prepare for the possibility of protecting themselves against the way they just died. They might know it's a possibility, even a high probability, like a soldier at war. But when the soldier is killed in combat, it'll come so unexpectedly that the soldier won't even know it happened. His light will just wink out.		 Faith
Fear is such a powerful motivator that we see in The Bible it can even lead to a God-fearing man's faith taking a back seat to the instinct to live. Jacob fears dying at Esau's hands and so prays to God to protect him. But he still acts as any non-religious man would in the same situation. He does whatever he can to protect himself. This is no different than most people claiming to be religious. Why do even righteous people who believe in Heaven and God fear dying? Shouldn't our fears be weakened by the knowledge of an eternal afterlife? And yet most people continue to cling to life, scraping and clawing to keep from the grave, no matter how miserable their lives have become. So far in The Bible, God hasn't really told anybody anything about an afterlife, so Jacob doesn't realize he gets to live in God's glory after Esau beats the breath from his body. So, in that context, I guess Jacob's reaction is appropriate.
The Winner: WHO CARES?
Will it matter when you're lying in the grave? Life is like a stupid rambling story told to you over a campfire by some drunk redneck, full of bluster and bravado and hooked killers and belches, but after he shuts up, you just think, "What?"

 

 

HISTORICAL FACTS

Fear is such a strong emotion that normal, reasonable people who are afraid of being killed in a random, terrorist attack while just trying to live their lives will support the military killing of brown people who are just as afraid of being killed in a random, military invasion while just trying to live their lives.

Immortality cannot be gained by controlling every action of other people through laws, force or money.

People who might otherwise take lots of care to remain alive will also stride across the street in the rain or dark or against the setting sun and still expect cars to stop for them. Because that's the law! And the right thing to do! Except sometimes the person driving forgets to stop because they couldn't see the person walking in front of them and then that person is dead because of a stupid expectation and a want of a little caution.

When you die, your brain continues to experience everything that happens to your body until your brain is destroyed. That's why Egyptians chose to be turned into Mummies because it was better than feeling your body eaten by worms and bacteria or being cremated. It also explains zombies somehow.

Oh, I know! Zombies eat people's brains because zombies know how miserable it is to feel your body ravaged by decomposition and they're just trying to keep living people from experiencing torture.

 

ESSAY ASSIGNMENT.
Choose one.

A. A major part of the Old Testament is really just early Jewish History. What do you think Christians think they should learn from these Chapters? Do they search for laws and ways to act according to God? Does every Chapter in The Bible have to have a message concerning how God expects people to behave? Sometimes, isn't it just telling a story?
B. Make a list of offenses and the appropriate compensation that would allow the Offendee to forgive the Offender.
C. For a Holy Book that is also supposed to be some sort of History, The Bible sure has left out a lot of details. How were these early Jews supposed to worship God? Did they just live their lives however they wanted until He spoke to them and told them what He wanted them to do? Or when they wanted something they couldn't get for themselves, would they just build a pile of stones and ask Him for it? How come Noah was so special? Was he the only man on the planet at the time that was still worshiping God? Or does none of it matter because whatever they did, it all changed when God and Moses sat down and worked most of it out? Write twenty three pages on your thoughts concerning this matter or whatever you want that might fill twenty three pages.

 

DRAWING TIME!

Draw Esau's gift. If you're not very good at drawing hundreds of animals, you can imagine the meeting between Jacob and Esau and then see how close you came to what actually occurs in the next Chapter. Remember, too much blood might scare your teachers!

 

WHAT DID CHRISTIAN LITERALISTS LEARN?

Don't trust that God's Will will necessarily provide for you. Always remind him exactly what He is supposed to do for you to keep you safe and happy and how inappropriate it would be for him to not do what you'd like done.