As we saw in the last session, Esau’s mantle was a legacy from Isaac and it was for reconciliation between brothers. Isaac is presented in Scripture as relatively passive—at least compared to his father Abraham and his son Jacob. Things—apparently—happen to Isaac; he gets acted upon, rather than initiates action in his own right. Yet that’s to misjudge him. He was a quiet achiever. An extraordinary reconciler.

He patched up breaches with his enemies, he got together with his estranged half-brother and he apparently made up with his abusive father. Yes, I did just call Abraham abusive. (See David’s Mantle 6) And no apologies about it, either. He went from tolerating his wife’s abuse to perpetrating it in his own right. We tend to give him a free pass because we think God sanctioned his actions, but there’s no indication that Yahweh told him to cast out Ishmael or that Yahweh told him to sacrifice Isaac. The word for God is ambiguous in both cases and could also mean a spirit, an angel or a principality.

Now the assignment carried by Esau’s mantle is to reconcile brothers, to turn aside jealousy, confront deception and overcome inter-family conflict. Esau’s father, Isaac, managed three of those four tasks. He was apparently repairing breaches that went back to Cain and Abel as well as to Ham and his brothers. Just as Noah was a new start for humanity, a second Adam as it were, so Abraham was another new start, a second second Adam so to speak. And the children of both Noah and Abraham were second Cains and second Abels—and, each time, the start of the new family was marred by brotherly conflict.

Though Isaac reconciled, his sons did not. And eventually, implacable hostility between their descendants results. Esau’s grandson was Amalek, the ancestor of a tribe against whom God swore eternal war.

Reconciliation is not always possible. Some leaders make an idol of it and ironically punish with exclusion those who forgive but don’t resume a harmful relationship—thereby equating forgiveness with reconciliation when it’s only half of it. The other half is repentance.

Jacob, chosen by God, needed to stop fighting his brother and repent of his deceit. In sparring with Esau, Jacob was fighting with God. In fact, there’s a curious hint in Jacob’s meeting with Esau that the angel he’d fought with the previous evening had worn Esau’s face. Jacob names the place where he’d wrestled with the angel, Peniel, the face of God, and then later that same day says that seeing Esau was like beholding the face of God. In that same conversation, he calls Esau, ‘my lord’, and this particular rare combination, ‘my lord and God’, is not going to occur again for the best part of two millennia.

Jacob’s deceit in telling Esau he’d follow him home but then striking out in an entirely different direction shows that he had not repented. His sons, not unnaturally, become skilled in deceit—convincing him later that Joseph has died.

Now we might think that Joseph is a great reconciler of brothers, like his grandfather Isaac. But that assignment carried by the Joseph mantle is tainted—as we’ve seen in previous sessions—by dispossession. It doesn’t start with Joseph. He simply reproduces the generational legacy of extortion practised by his father Jacob. Extortion is coercing someone in a vulnerable state in order to seize a valuable asset such as money, property or inheritance. And this is precisely what Jacob did when Esau came and, desperate, asked him for food. He extorted Esau’s birthright from him. Joseph follows his father’s example with eerie exactitude. When the Egyptians come to him during the third year of the famine, desperate and asking for food, Joseph extorted their birthright from them—their ancestral land, giving them no way to ever redeem it. Moreover, in handing the prime property to his brothers and reducing the Egyptian population to slavery, Joseph creates the very political mechanism that, in the fullness of time, will be used against his own people.

The generations go by. Hundreds of years pass. And the descendants of Jacob, the Israelites, having escaped the wrath of Pharaoh, are taking Joseph’s bones with them back to the Promised Land. On the way, they are forced to engage in battle with Esau’s descendants, the Amalekites.

At the end of the skirmish, when the unarmed Israelites under Joshua miraculously prevail against the swords of the enemy, God declares eternal war against the Amalekites. That’s a puzzle. What did the Amalekites do that was so different from every other battle between the Israelites and some other nation that warranted such an extreme decree? Without going into all the detail of the recapitulation by Jesus of this story and the clues that provides, the answer appears to be that the Amalekites were targeting the weak and vulnerable, the children, to sacrifice to their godling, the fire-lord Moloch. They wanted to exalt Moloch—whose name means king—to the throne of heaven through a holocaust unparalleled in human history.

God thus declared an unending war against the people who worshipped Moloch. No reprieve. No mercy.

The sacrifice of children in order to enthrone a king in heaven who will make a bloodbath of the entire earth cannot be countenanced. The people who worship such a deity are so defiled that they must be eliminated. They have chosen the protection of the king of the underworld; therefore let Death save them.

Esau’s mantle takes on greater complexity over the centuries. On the one hand, it carries with it instruments of reconciliation; on the other, it is defiled by implacable hostility that has been birthed from distrust resulting from deceit and extortion.

The branches of Esau’s family line—the Edomites and the Amalekites—were to go on to play a pivotal role in the life of Israel’s first king, Saul. In fact, though it is not entirely clear, it appears that Saul inherited Esau’s mantle. And that makes sense. To begin with, he was an extraordinary agent of reconciliation between the fractured clans of Israel. After the civil war that tore the tribal brotherhood asunder, Saul inaugurated a spectacular and surprising unification.

Yes, Saul. Another of the alleged ‘bad boys’ of Scripture. Another so-called villain who, so we’ve been groomed to think, had virtually no redeeming features. But if we read with the text, instead of with the designated hero, we discover complexities of light and dark, good and evil, God-seeking and God-repulsing in everyone.

There’s only one hero who never fails the Father. His name is Yeshua HaMashiach, Jesus of Nazareth, Lord and God.

This is Grace Drops and I’m Anne Hamilton. May Jesus of Nazareth restore and reconcile your family.

Thank you to Lorna Skinner of www.riversofmusic.co.uk for the background music.

John’s gospel is an epic poem in the mirror-reflective style of Hebrew prophetic poetry. Many commentators have noticed this and shown how the matching pairs line up. However, they haven’t looked beyond the loveliness of the design to the clues offered by the clues embedded in the symmetry. John reveals the inheritance given to specific disciples—the mantles of the patriarchs, prophets and kings that were handed on by Jesus as specific legacies: Elijah’s, Joseph’s, Reuben’s, Jacob’s, David’s, Esau’s… and more! The Elijah Tapestry, The Summoning of Time, The Lustral Waters, The Inviolable Kingdom and Bathing in Bronze (coming late 2026) work verse by verse from the front, matching to various verses from the back to unveil the not-so-hidden secrets of the mantles.