What Does Genesis 27:8 Mean?

"Are you really my son Esau?" he asked. "I am," Jacob replied. Then he said, "My son, bring me some of the game to eat, so that I may give you my blessing." Jacob brought it to him and he ate; and he brought some wine and he drank. Then his father Isaac said, "Come here, my son, and kiss me." So he went to him and kissed him. When Isaac smelled the smell of his clothes, he blessed him and said: "Ah, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field that the Lord has blessed." The fourth verification is the smell of Esau's clothes on Jacob's body. Each sense Isaac possesses, hearing, touch, taste, smell, is engaged and satisfied by the prepared disguise. The meal is the food Isaac liked; the wine is brought; the kiss releases the smell of the outdoor clothes; and the old man's longing for his favorite son fills in what the senses almost but not quite confirm.

"The smell of my son is like the smell of a field that the Lord has blessed" is the language of a man who has found what he was looking for. The blessing that follows will be spoken over someone Isaac believes is the outdoor hunter who smells of the field, the son whose lifestyle and temperament he most aligned with. The gap between the blessing's intended recipient and its actual recipient is the field the oracle crosses: what Isaac intends for Esau, the Lord directed at birth to Jacob.

The multisensory deception designed by Rebekah and executed by Jacob is the chapter's most sustained exercise in the exploitation of trust. A blind man who cannot see trusts his ears, his hands, his taste, and his nose, and each of those senses is deliberately deceived by the people closest to him. The damage to family trust that follows from this chapter, Esau's murderous anger, Jacob's twenty-year exile, the sundering of the household, is the proportionate human consequence of the violation of a blind father's trust by the two people he loved most.