What Does Genesis 27:3 Mean?

Rebekah said to Jacob, "My son, listen carefully and do what I tell you: Go out to the flock and bring me two choice young goats, so I can prepare some tasty food for your father, just the way he likes it." The plan Rebekah lays out for Jacob has a domestic precision that reveals its calculation: two goats (not one), prepared exactly the way Isaac likes it, with Jacob taking the food in and receiving the blessing before Esau can return. Every element is planned; nothing is improvised. The woman who organized the covenant's most important domestic event, the reception of the servant in chapter 24, now organizes the covenant's most consequential deception with the same practical intelligence.

The goats chosen from the flock provide both the meal and the material for the deception: their skins will cover Jacob's smooth hands and neck to simulate Esau's hairy arms. The plan is complete before a single step is taken. Rebekah knows her husband's senses and she knows what he will check when the son comes in: the feel of the hands, the smell of the clothes, the sound of the voice. She prepares for each check in advance. The thoroughness of the deception's planning is the chapter's most disturbing element: this is not impulsive but deliberate.

The displacement of a blessing by deception creates a theological problem the New Testament addresses directly. Paul in Romans 3:8 dismisses the argument that "we should do evil that good may come." The good that Rebekah seeks, the fulfillment of the oracle about the younger, does not justify the means she employs. The oracle would have been fulfilled; how and when were not hers to determine. The same God who declared "the older will serve the younger" before either child was born was capable of bringing that outcome about through means other than deception. The chapter's tragedy is not the oracle's failure but the unnecessary damage inflicted on the family in the effort to help it succeed.