Skip the Line

That night the LORD appeared to him and said, “I am the God of your father Abraham.  Fear not, for I am with you, and I will bless you and increase your offspring for the sake of My servant Abraham.  Genesis 26:24  JPS

Your father – It only happens three times.  Genesis 28:13, Genesis 32:9 and here, in Genesis 26:24.  These three times the text says that God is the God of Abraham, the father of Jacob.  But we all know that Abraham is not the father of Jacob.  For some reason, God’s account skips Isaac.  In 32:10 Jacob refers to both Abraham and Isaac as father, but in 28:13 God names Abraham as Jacob’s father and in 26:24 Isaac is simply absent.  This is especially significant when God is the speaker.  What are we to conclude about this “mistaken” genealogy?

The usual linguistic solution is to assert that the Hebrew ʾāb can mean both “father” or “forefather.”  Maybe that helps, but, frankly, I don’t think so.  The references to grandfather in biblical Hebrew are literally “father’s father.”  Saba, meaning “grandfather” in modern Hebrew is really Aramaic, so it obviously wasn’t available during the Genesis account.  These verses don’t use “father’s father.”  They suggest something deeper, that somehow Jacob is next in line after Abraham.  I believe the text is hinting at deep family dynamics.

“ . . . descendants of trauma survivors carry the physical and emotional symptoms of traumas they have not directly experienced.”[1]

Jacob is a descendent of a trauma survivor.  Who experienced the initial trauma?  Isaac, of course.  Never suspecting that his father intended to slaughter him in a religious ritual, Isaac instantly discovers that his father can’t be trusted, his father’s God can’t be trusted, and his father lied to him all his life about how important he was.  As I pointed out in my book Crossing, Isaac flees from his father, joining the other family his father Abraham left to die in the wilderness.  In fact, Isaac’s relationship with God is permanently fractured by the event, so much so that Isaac never really recovers.  Now the trauma is passed on to Isaac’s son, Jacob, and it is Jacob who is directly linked to the trauma event in his biological father’s life.  But Jacob’s real emotional father is not Isaac.  It’s Abraham, the man whose silence about God’s request precipitated the entire trauma sequence.  The connection is not to Isaac, the father whose absence in Jacob’s life created the generational rift.  It’s Abraham.  Abraham is the one that Jacob mimics.  The deception, the manipulation of circumstances, the negotiating, the attempt to forge his own destiny, the spiritual vacuum—these Jacob shares with Abraham, not with Isaac.  God does not make a mistake by identifying Abraham as Jacob’s father, because Jacob is in all the respects that matter the true son of Abraham.

Mark Wolynn adds two comments that clarify the Jacob-Esau-Isaac-Rebecca dynamic:

“According to Lipton, ‘The mother’s emotions, such as fear, anger, love, hope among others, can biochemically alter the genetic expression of her offspring.’”[2]

“In a sense, a child who experienced a stressful in utero environment can become reactive in a similarly stressful situation.”[3]

That fateful verse, “Now Isaac loved Esau because he had a taste for game; but Rebekah loved Jacob” (Genesis 25:28) says a lot more than we imagined.

“The vast reservoir of our unconscious appears to hold not only our traumatic memories, but also the unresolved traumatic experiences of our ancestors.  In this shared unconscious, we seem to reexperience fragments of an ancestor’s memory and declare them as our own.”[4]

Perhaps we need to read the saga again, this time with modern epigenetics in mind.

Topical Index:  Jacob, Isaac, father, Abraham, epigenetics, Genesis 26:24

[1] Mark Wolynn, It Didn’t Start with You, p. 20.

[2] Ibid., p. 27.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., p. 55.