Back to Esau and Jacob.
ISIS IS ESAU?
Recently, famed Johns Hopkins neuro-surgeon Dr. Ben Carson has come out with the risible statement that the rationale for Isis is to be found in Genesis, in the tale of Esau and Jacob.
Indeed it is, only not in the way Dr. Carson intends it.
Anyone who has studied the matter with any integrity will immediately identify Esau in today’s world, because no less than the Jewish Encyclopedia has made the identification explicitly.
EDOM IS IN JEWRY
It admits that Esau (under the name of Edom, which means Red) is in Jewry.
That is to say, by the time of Jesus, the descendants of Esau were living as Judeans and Judahites, even though they were neither Jews nor Israelites by birth.
JEWS VERSUS JUDEANS VERSUS JUDAHITES
The word Jew when used to refer to a single ethno-religious community is a coinage from the nineteenth century.
There were no Jews, as we know them, before that time.
When the word Jew is inserted into the Bible, it is an anachronism.
At the time of Jesus, there were only Judahites (those who belonged to the tribes of Judah, one of the twelve tribes descended from Jacob’s twelve sons) and Judeans, people who lived in the kingdom of Judea.
Judea was the southern Israelite kingdom, which had split from its northern half and had gone into and captivity and returned, like its northern sister.
The word Judean does not identify a race any more than the word New Yorker identifies a race.
A New Yorker may be Chinese or African or Italian in ethnic origin. He gets his name from where he lives, not from his racial identity.
So also, the term Judean included people of all kinds of racial make-up, including many who had nothing to do with the original Israelites or Judahites and who were often sworn enemies of them.
ESAU’S HEIRS – THE IDUMEANS (EDOMITES)
One such enemy was Idumea, which is the Greek rendering of the word Edom.
Edom/Idumea is the region where the descendants of Esau lived and dominated – a strong-hold in the mountains that includes the great city of Petra in Jordan.
As a nation, the Idumeans of Biblical times were the vicious and unrepentant enemies of the sons of Jacob, sacking, looting and attacking them at every turn.
ESAU VERSUS JACOB
God had given foreknowledge of this generational enmity to Rebecca, when Esau and Jacob were still twins in her womb.
He had let her know that the two would engender nations that would struggle with each other and that her second-born would eventually rule over her first-born.
This was prophetic knowledge, however, not predetermination, as Calvinists teach. God in no way forced Esau to play this unfortunate role.
EDOM – THE RED HUNTER
From birth, Esau was marked for his carnal role.
He was covered with hair all over and reddish (Edom).
He was a hunter, fond of venison, fleshly in appetite, and careless of family tradition and piety.
From the New Testament, we learn that he was also sexually immoral and idolatrous.
From the Book of Jasher, an apocryphal text quoted by Jewish authorities, we learn that Esau was so great a hunter that he killed King Nimrod of Babylon and seized from him the garments that God wove for Adam and Eve when they found themselves naked.
These magical vestments had been passed down from the first family, through Seth, to Noah, to Ham, Cush and then to Nimrod and they bestowed the power of conquest on their possessor.
ESAU, NIMROD, AND ANTI-CHRIST
In Genesis, Nimrod is the legendary warrior-king of Babylon who seeks to challenge the heavens with his mighty tower of Babel.
He is a type of anti-Christ and thus of Satan.
[I will explain in another post why I think the equation with Esau and Satan/Serpent is misleading and dangerous and is one often made by people who have a racist agenda – either against Gentiles (if they are Jews) or against Jews/non-whites (if they are Aryan supremacist) or against whites (if they are black supremacists).
Each of the groups I’ve mentioned likes to equate Esau with whichever group they want to claim is genetically Satanic.
But Esau is not descended from Satan (however he is conceived and with whatever validity).
All of mankind today is descended from Noah, who was considered perfect by God, drunkenness and all.
Esau is DELUDED by Satan, which is quite a different thing.]
Thus, by association and by the possession of the magic garments, Esau becomes an anti-Christ type (repeat, TYPE) as well.
[Note: The notion that there is a single “anti-Christ” who will oppose God at the end is not even in the Bible, which mentions the anti-Christ spirit, and also, Satan, a red dragon, a beast (two, actually) and a whore (of Babylon), but really doesn’t posit a figure called Anti-Christ, in the modern sense.]
HITTITES, CANAANITES, AND ISHMAELITES
According to the Book of Jasher – which, keep in mind, is apocryphal and part of Rabbinical lore and not canonic – it is after the slaying of Nimrod that Esau sells his birthright for the red pottage (lentils), because, believing absolute power to be in his grasp, he has no use for the mere birth-right.
Not knowing (or caring) that the birth-right includes the honor of siring the Messiah, he chooses instead worldly power and his belly, proving himself unworthy, as God had predicted to Rebecca.
Genesis tells us that Esau disobeyed God’s covenant with his forefathers and intermarried with Hittite women. [The Hittites were the descendants of Heth.]
Esau also intermarried with the family of Ishmael and with the Canaanites, who practiced such vile customs as child sacrifice and ritual prostitution.
Genesis mentions how much sorrow Esau’s disobedience and his foreign wives caused Isaac and Rebecca. They did not want all they had striven for to be dissipated and lost in the houses of inimical in-laws.
This is no doubt the reason the anxious mother used such wiles to deprive her unworthy first-born of the primogeniture.
JACOB TO ISRA-EL
Jacob, her second-born, was no saint, of course.
He allowed his mother to manipulate him into cheating his father and then engaged in trickery himself against her brother, Laban, also a wily man.
But Jacob, who is described as a “mild” man, was true to his father’s traditions and to the Abrahamic covenant.
He didn’t practice idolatry or intermarry with the vicious Canaanites. So God was able to shape him to his destiny and eventually make him Isra-el – a prince (Isra) of God (El), or by virtue of God.
JACOB AND TRUE ISRAEL
The story of Jacob and Esau is used by St Paul to reprimand Jews who did not want to admit Gentiles into the company of believers in Jesus.
Jacob, he said, was a type of the Gentile believer. Esau was a type of the Jewish unbeliever.
Just as the Jews had the law and racial descent on their side, Esau had the law of primogeniture on his. Yet, Esau was indifferent to his privilege, just as unbelieving Jews were indifferent to the privilege of birthing the Messiah.
Thus, God had given salvation to the “second-born” – the Gentiles, as he had given the birth-right to the second-born, Jacob.
THE CONVERSION OF THE IDUMEANS
But, in a more literal way too, Esau is in Jewry.
By the first and second century before Christ, the Edomites/Idumeans had been forcibly converted to Judaism from their Canaanitish ways.
Many had been circumcised and were indistinguishable from Jews by external appearance.
However, they were not true Israel, either by tribal descent, nor in their hybrid customs.
They worshiped “they know not what,” as Jesus put it, preferring their own customs and “traditions of men” over the true teachings of Torah.
Many of the Pharisees and Sadducees who attacked Jesus were not Jews by birth, as he himself noted.
JESUS: LEVITE AND JUDAHITE
Remarkably, Jesus was not a Judahite either.
[I have corrected this statement below]
Jesus was a Levite (a descendant of Jacob’s son Levi) on his mother’s side (since Mary was the cousin of Elizabeth, wife of Zacharaiah, the Levitical priest).
And he was grafted onto the house of Judah (the most famous of Jacob’s twelve sons) on his father’s side.
Thus, he was an Israelite by descent on both accounts.
[Added: Researching this a bit more, I find that the two genealogies – in Mark and in Luke – are taken to be genealogies of Mary, not Joseph, even though Joseph’s name is inserted into them.
This is because Joseph was adopted by Mary’s father, Heli, since he had no sons to inherit his property.
This makes Jesus descend from BOTH the Levitical line (the priestly line) and the Judahite (the kingly line).]
On the other hand, was Jesus NOT a Judean. He lived in Galilee, not Judea.
[Added: However, the Gospels note that he was born in Bethlehem of Judea, which is connected to David and the messianic prophecy.]
IMPORTANT CORRECTION (added 10/8/2015): The House of Judah (as opposed to the tribe of Judah) included Judah, Levi, and Benjamin, so that Jesus DOES belong to both the priestly and the ruling line of Israel, through his mother, which is the descent that makes him a Jew legally.]
THE END OF THE OLD COVENANT
Jesus’s unclear parentage and his residence in Nazareth and Galilee were the reasons why many Judeans did not see Jesus as the Jewish messiah.
Ironically, these skeptics were often not Judahites or Israelites themselves.
They were often Samaritans, Idumeans, and Canaanites.
For instance, the Herodians and Zealots were Idumeans with Idumea’s violent, revolutionary spirit.
It was these Edomite-Jewish rebels who, in the century after Jesus’ crucifixion, provoked Rome into crushing the Jews and destroying the Temple of Jerusalem (Herod’s temple) in 70 AD.
With the end of Temple worship, the Old Testament Jewish world was destroyed once and for all.
This was the judgment of the last days (of the Old Covenant) that Jesus predicted so accurately.
PSEUDO-ISRAEL
The descendants of these pseudo-Jewish Edomites are arguably a major (or substantial) part of the modern Talmudic/Rabbinal tradition that is now regarded, erroneously, as the rebirth of Biblical Israel.
This being the case, since the Idumeans do not descend from Jacob, contemporary Ashkenazy Jews at least cannot be direct genetic descendants of ancient Israel.
Of course, genetics is beside the point.
BIBLICAL ISRAEL
Biblical Israel was always a nation of “promise” and “faith,” first and foremost.
In so far as modern Zionists are either Kabbalists/Talmudists who reject Jesus as a blasphemer and reprobate or communists who consider religion a fraud they cannot by definition be true “Israel,” even if they were descended directly from Abraham.
CHILDREN OF THE SERPENT
Jesus made that very point to his enemies when he called them children of the Serpent.
[This term has had its own malign legacy.
Christian Identity and some other groups have taken this to mean that contemporary Jews – a mixed-race of Euro-Turco-Mongolic people with genetic affinity to the Idumeans – are descended from Satan/the Serpent, which is surely a thoroughly racist and dangerous notion.
But, as I will show in other posts, the imprecations Jesus pronounced on his critics had NOTHING to do with racial/genetic descent.
They had to do with the absence of faith in the unseen/spiritual kingdom to which he was trying to lead them.
By accusing them of descent from “their father, the devil,” he was accusing them of moral affinity/moral descent, not a blood-line connection.
It was a moral pronouncement, not a thesis on DNA.
Esau, after all was a child of Abraham. What did that get him?]
In short, contemporary “Israel” with its blood-line claim is a religious imposter, credible only to people who choose to ignore the very texts from which “Israel” claims authority.
ZIONISM IS ESAU
Zionist Anglo-Israel and the Sanhedrin that has orchestrated her rise to world dominion are Esau incarnate.
They are his spiritual (and likely, genetic) descendants.
They are heirs only in name and not in truth to the religion whose mantle they ostentatiously wear.
Nonetheless, because Isaac did in the end give Esau one blessing, their charade has been allowed its moment in history.
It will collapse soon.
Just as that ancient blessing that Esau cadged was an empty one because its substance had already been taken by the one who knew its worth, Jacob, so also political Zion is an empty spectacle.
The kingdom it seeks today has already met its true ruler…. two thousand years ago.
