What Does Genesis 27:11 Mean?

When Esau heard his father's words, he burst out with a loud and bitter cry and said to his father, "Bless me, me too, my father!" But he said, "Your brother came deceitfully and took your blessing." Esau said, "Isn't he rightly named Jacob? This is the second time he has deceived me: He took my birthright, and now he's taken my blessing!" Then he asked, "Haven't you reserved any blessing for me?" Esau's loud and bitter cry at the loss of the blessing is the chapter's most emotionally exposed moment. The man who treated the birthright with contempt discovers, in the moment of its loss, that the blessing attached to it was the thing he actually wanted. The same impulsiveness that gave away the birthright for soup now expresses itself in the cry of someone who has arrived too late.

The naming of Jacob's character in the crisis, "isn't he rightly named Jacob? he has deceived me twice", is Esau's clear-eyed recognition of his brother's governing trait. The heel-grasper who took the birthright at the stew pot has now taken the blessing at the deathbed. The pattern the name predicted at birth has expressed itself twice; Esau sees it clearly now, when it is too late. Recognition without the capacity to respond usefully is one of the narrative's recurring forms of tragedy.

Hebrews 12:17 says about Esau that "afterward, when he wanted to inherit this blessing, he was rejected. Even though he sought the blessing with tears, he could not change what he had done." The tears of Genesis 27 are real; the irrevocability of the blessing is equally real. Jesus's warning "do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where Moth and rust destroy" (Matthew 6:19) addresses the same character pattern: the person who does not value the covenant's inheritance until after it is gone discovers that desire in the moment of loss cannot reverse the consequences of contempt in the moment of opportunity.