What Does Genesis 27:5 Mean?

So he went and got them and brought them to his mother, and she prepared some tasty food, just the way his father liked it. Then Rebekah put the best clothes of her older son Esau, which she had in the house, on her younger son Jacob. She also covered his hands and the smooth part of his neck with the goatskins. Then she handed to her son Jacob the tasty food and the bread she had made. Jacob's compliance with his mother's plan is complete and silent. He raises his practical objection, receives her response, and then executes every step of the plan without further comment. The goatskins on his hands and neck, Esau's best clothes on his body, the food in his hands, the disguise is total. He will enter his blind father as Esau in every verifiable particular.

The clothes of Esau that Rebekah dresses Jacob in are the chapter's most concentrated symbol: the older son's identity worn by the younger. The blessing that Isaac will give in response to what he smells and feels will be given to the wrong body in the right clothes. The identity worn rather than owned is the chapter's image of the deception's nature: not a lie spoken but a life borrowed. The covenant blessing will be received by someone inhabiting a borrowed identity.

The disguise of Jacob as Esau in his father's tent anticipates, by contrast, the Jesus's own willingness to take on human nature not as a deception but as a genuine assumption of what he was not. The Incarnation is the opposite of the disguise: not the smooth-skinned one pretending to be hairy but the divine one genuinely becoming human, "made in human likeness" (Philippians 2:7), without deception and without the possibility of detection revealing a fraud. Where Jacob's borrowed identity depended on his father's blindness, Jesus's assumed humanity was visible to all and was exactly what it appeared to be.