What Does Genesis 27:1 Mean?

When Isaac was old and his eyes were so weak that he could no longer see, he called for his older son Esau and said to him, "My son." "Here I am," he answered. Then Isaac said, "I am now old and do not know the day of my death. Now then, get your weapons, your quiver and bow, and go out to the open country to hunt some wild game for me. Prepare me the kind of tasty food I like and bring it to me to eat, so that I may give you my blessing before I die." Isaac's blindness is the chapter's governing physical condition. It is the narrative's theological setup: the man who cannot see will give the covenant blessing, and the question the chapter raises is whether the blind patriarch's intention or God's oracle (the older will serve the younger) will determine who actually receives it. The inability to see is the condition through which the divine will presses through human intention.

Isaac's commission to Esau for a blessing meal is a scene of deep patriarchal warmth: a dying father, his favorite son, a last meal of the game he loved, and the formal transmission of the blessing he has held across sixty years. Everything in the commission is humanly understandable and personally tender. The problem is not Isaac's love for Esau but the conflict between his intention and the divine oracle given before either son was born. Isaac loves Esau and intends to bless him; God declared the older would serve the younger before either child had done anything good or bad.

The blindness that makes Isaac dependent on touch and smell rather than sight creates the conditions for Rebekah's intervention and Jacob's deception. What Isaac cannot see, he cannot verify. The oracle given at the twins' birth, the older will serve the younger, now finds its human instrument in a blind patriarch, a scheming mother, and a disguised younger son. Paul in Romans 9:10-12 uses the oracle as proof that divine election operates before human action; the chapter's narrative shows that it also operates through human action, however morally complex that action is.