and lie by your actions, you sin against the eighth Commandment quite as much as if you told a lie in so many words.
Sharing the guilt of another's sin. The fact that his mother induced him to deceive his father, was a partial excuse for Jacob. Jacob, indeed, carried out the deception, but Rebecca instigated him, so that she shared in his sin. But Jacob was not compelled to obey his mother when she told him to act thus deceitfully.
The end does not justify the means. Rebecca and Jacob’s intention in deceiving Isaac was good. They knew that Almighty God had chosen Jacob to be the heir of the promises, and they feared that His will would not be accomplished if Esau succeeded in obtaining the blessing of the first-born. True; but ought they to have committed a sin to attain this end? No! sin remains sin even if you have the best of intentions in committing it, and the noblest of ends to attain. Rebecca and Jacob ought, like Abraham, to have had confidence in God, and said: “The Almighty and All-wise God will carry out His own will even if we cannot see how.” Instead of this, they took divine providence into their own hands and committed a sin. Thus, want of faith and confidence in God was the real cause of their sin. [1]
Temporal punishment. Esau’s indifference was punished by the loss of the rights of the first-born, not only to himself, but to all his descendants, the Edomites. Rebecca and Jacob were also punished in this world. Jacob confessed and repented of his sin, therefore God forgave him, but he did penance for it during many a long year. As you will read in the following chapters, he had to flee from his brother, and serve for twenty years in a strange land. Later in his life he was caused much grief by his own sons, who deceived him even more cruelly than he deceived Isaac, making out that a wild beast had devoured his dear son Joseph. Thus severely had he to expiate his one sin! Rebecca, who had sinned through love of Jacob, was punished by having to part with him, and she never saw him again in this life. In all this the divine justice is most clearly seen.
The Wisdom of God, which makes good come out of evil, can be learnt from this story. Almighty God had from the beginning, or rather from all eternity, chosen Jacob to be the heir of His promises. The faults of men (such as Isaac's preference for Esau, Jacob’s deceit, and Esau’s hatred) could not alter what He had ordained; on the contrary, they served, under the divine guidance, for the accomplishment
- ↑ It is but fair to mention that so great an interpreter of Scripture as St Augustine hesitated to condemn the conduct of Rebecca and Jacob. “It is a mystery”, he said, “and not a lie”, meaning that the whole transaction was a kind of drama wherein a divine truth was acted in a human scene in which the actors were but dramatis personae. Anyhow their moral guilt is not so evident as the author might lead us to suppose. Another interpretation is possible. Indeed the author shifts the sin to something else. (E. E.)
