The Abrahamic blessing, “I will bless those who bless you, and those who curse you I will curse,” raises questions that run through centuries of Jewish and Christian history: who carries Abraham’s blessing, and what does being chosen authorize? The formula moves from Abraham (Gen. 12:3), to Jacob (Gen. 27:29), to Israel as a people (Num. 24:9). But that formula contains a tension from the start. Abraham is singled out, protected, and promised descendants and land. Yet in the same promise, all the tribes of the earth are to be blessed through him. Abraham is chosen in particular for a purpose that reaches beyond him. Then, Isaac inherits this covenant while Ishmael is still explicitly blessed. God promises to bless Ishmael, multiply him, and make him a great nation, even while saying that the covenant will be established through Isaac (Gen. 17:20–21). Now we get to the deep contention. With the next generation the line narrows again. Before Jacob and Esau are born, God tells Rebekah that two nations and two peoples are in her womb and that the greater will serve the lesser (Gen. 25:23 LXX). Jacob’s precedence is announced before the birthright sale, before the deception, and before either brother has done anything. I’m using the Septuagint (LXX) here because it gives us a major pre-70 textual witness, and the LXX leaves Jacob’s moral problem right where it is. Jacob tells Isaac that he is Esau, and after the trick is exposed Isaac says that Jacob came μετὰ δόλου, “with deceit” (Gen. 27:35 LXX). Yet the blessing stands. Genesis 28 makes the point even harder to get around. Isaac now knows exactly who Jacob is and deliberately gives him “the blessing of Abraham” (Gen. 28:3–4). God then confirms the land, descendants, and the promise that all the tribes of the earth will be blessed through Jacob and his seed (Gen. 28:13–14). So Jacob is the covenantal heir without becoming morally innocent. Election does not wash the deception. Esau receives his own divine grant as well. Israel is warned not to seize Seir because God has given that land to Esau’s descendants (Deut. 2:4–5). The result is an asymmetry of vocation: one line carries the covenantal calling, while the purpose announced with Abraham reaches beyond that line. The early Christian church wrote a lot about Jacob and Esau, but Justin Martyr is my favorite because he goes straight at the name Israel itself. Writing in the second century, Justin reads the Jabbok encounter through the preexistent Son or Logos. In other words, the mysterious figure who wrestles Jacob, blesses him, and gives him the name Israel is, for Justin, Christ before the incarnation. In Dialogue with Trypho 58–61, the divine figure appearing to the patriarchs is the Son acting on the Father’s behalf. So when Jacob wrestles, is blessed, and receives a new name, Justin understands him to be encountering the one later revealed as Christ. In chapter 125 Justin makes the claim explicit: “Israel was His name from the beginning.” Christ gives Jacob his own name. That is the hinge. Israel doesn’t originate with Jacob in Justin’s reading; Jacob receives the name from Christ. And once Justin has made that move, chapter 135 follows naturally. Christ is Jacob and Israel, and those who belong to Christ become the true Israelitic people. Justin even distinguishes a line of Jacob “by blood and flesh” from one “by faith and the Spirit.” For Justin, then, the inheritance is relocated around Christ. The nations enter Abraham’s blessing through him because Christ is the source of the Israelite name, and those joined to him share in it. Dialogue 47 still allows Jewish Christians to keep Mosaic observance so long as they don’t impose it on Gentile believers, but ancestry by itself no longer decides who finally carries Israel’s identity. Let's then fast forward a few centuries to discuss the Jewish POV on Esau-Jacob, and I think Rashi is ideal here. Rashi, or Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, 1040–1105, draws on later Talmud and midrash to build a defense of Jacob’s title that culminates at Jabbok. His reconstruction starts earlier. On Genesis 27:19, where Jacob tells Isaac, “I am Esau your firstborn,” Rashi reparses the sentence so Jacob isn’t directly lying: Jacob identifies himself as the one bringing the food, then separately identifies Esau as Isaac’s firstborn. On 27:35, Isaac’s charge that Jacob came through mirmah, deceit, becomes “with cleverness.” And on 27:36, Rashi supplies a conversation in which Isaac learns that Esau had already sold the birthright and realizes that he blessed the rightful holder. The Greek has the sale and the deception, but it doesn’t supply that validating conversation. At Jabbok, all of that becomes an adjudication. Rashi follows earlier midrash in identifying the mysterious “man” as Esau’s guardian angel. Jacob’s demand, “bless me,” now means: acknowledge my right to the blessing Isaac gave me and which Esau still contests. The new name does legal work as well. “No longer Jacob, but Israel” means that Jacob’s possession of the blessing will no longer be attributed to supplanting and deceit. Esau’s own heavenly representative has been forced to concede the title. Rashi then brings Hosea 12 into the case. Chullin 92a asks who wept and pleaded with whom and answers that the angel pleaded with Jacob. Rashi expands that into a scene where the angel asks Jacob to wait until Bethel for public confirmation, while Jacob refuses and demands acknowledgment immediately. But the Old Greek Hosea has ἔκλαυσαν καὶ ἐδεήθησάν μου, “they wept and implored me.” The verbs are plural, and God is the object. That grammar doesn’t furnish the defeated angel begging Jacob to recognize his title. And Rashi carries the acknowledgment into Genesis 33. Esau’s offer that Jacob keep what is his becomes an admission that the blessings really belong to Jacob. Jacob’s remark that seeing Esau’s face is like seeing the face of God points back to Esau’s angel, and Rashi has Jacob invoke that victory partly to intimidate Esau. He still preserves a genuine moment of reconciliation in Esau’s kiss, but the reconciliation now sits inside a larger story of Jacob’s vindication. The dispute over Jacob’s title did not stay a family dispute. Once Jacob and Esau became ancestors of rival peoples, their story could be used to read later political history. That is where Esau becomes Rome. Bereshit Rabbah 63:7 already reads Rebekah’s two nations as Jews and Romans, and by the medieval period Edom could stand for the Christian imperial world. Jacob and Esau now signified Israel and the civilization ruling over it. Rome and Jerusalem later became a way of reading Jacob and Esau, but the political beginning is interesting and worth a little bit of expansion. Jewish rule had already come back under the Hasmoneans. When Salome died (67 BC), the house split between Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II. Rome was not occupying Judea. Pompey’s people were in Syria, taking over the old Seleucid east, when both brothers went to them and asked Rome to decide who should hold the country. They argued the case at Damascus before Pompey’s legate Scaurus. Aristobulus bought the first hearing with gifts, including money from the Temple, and Scaurus backed him. Then Aristobulus would not wait for Pompey himself. He pulled back to a fortress, armed, and strengthened Jerusalem while the judgment was still open. Pompey treated that as contempt, arrived in 63 BC, and chose Hyrcanus, the weaker brother and the safer client. Aristobulus’s people then shut the city against Roman troops. Pompey took that as revolt and took Jerusalem. Josephus’s later judgment is blunt here: the brothers’ war cost the Jews their liberty and subjected them to Rome. So, the Jewish state had returned, and two people who couldnt get along pulled in Pompey into an inheritance fight, double-dealed Pompey, and then lost that state. Roman rule then became something much harder to reverse. Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed in AD 70, and the defeat of the Bar Kokhba revolt in AD 135 devastated Judea again. It’s almost impossible to overstate the impact of the Second Temple’s destruction on later Judaism. For the argument here, one consequence is especially important: Roman domination gave the older Esau-Edom typology an increasingly concrete historical target. Rome could now become Esau. After Jewish sovereignty disappeared, restoration increasingly moved into the realm of messianic expectation. Rabbinic traditions such as the Three Oaths could be read to restrain attempts to force the end of exile, and Sabbatai Zevi gave the danger of activated messianism a spectacular historical form. In 1665–66 a mass movement formed around him, mixing Kabbalah, prophecy, radical ritual innovation, and the conviction that human action below could participate in redemption above. His conversion to Islam shattered the movement, although some followers made even the apostasy part of the redemptive mystery. Anyway, the episode became a powerful warning about believing that the moment of redemption had arrived and that human beings were authorized to help force it. Fast forward roughly a century and a half, and enter Tsevi Hirsch Kalischer. He brings human agency back into redemption from inside traditional Judaism, but in a material form. In Derishat Zion he proposes migration, pooled money for land purchases, agricultural colonies, and the rebuilding of Jewish life in the Land. Redemption begins through human action. Jews themselves can “take charge of ending” their exiled condition. Kalischer’s Kabbalistic formula says exactly what is happening: “the awakening of the lower world will lead to the awakening of the upper world” (Derishat Zion). So, action below calls forth action above. He even says that “the beginning of redemption does not depend on repentance, but on returning to the land.” So Kalischer gives a 19th-century answer to the question running through the whole essay: if Israel carries Abraham’s blessing, what does that election authorize Israel to do? For Kalischer, it authorizes the covenant-bearing people to become an agent of their own collective restoration. Kalischer did not settle the debate with the nineteenth-century quietists. The dispute was over who starts redemption: must Jews wait for God and the Messiah, or can Jewish action below begin the process and call forth the response above? His opponents could still say that settlement did not prove redemption had begun, and even the creation of Israel in 1948 did not end that theological dispute. For Kalischer’s later Kookian heirs, 1967 was the moment when history seemed to answer the objection. Kalischer’s end is wider than Jewish resettlement. His messianic sequence eventually brings the nations to the Temple, where they receive divine teaching and share in the blessings of the messianic age. Land and labor begin the process; the nations remain inside its final horizon. Moses Hess similarly makes the modern Jewish nation the bearer of that vocation in Rome and Jerusalem (1862). He reaches directly back to Genesis 12:3: “In thee … shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” For Hess, national restoration gives Israel the historical form in which that mission can operate again. In the messianic age, Hess says, “the Jewish nation and all the other historical nations” arise again to new life. His “Sabbath of History” is the maturity of human development, when history reaches its messianic completion. So, for Hess, Israel remains a distinct historical people inside that future. In the Eleventh Letter, Hess calls the returning Jews the “triumphal arch” under which the “great covenant of humanity” will be written and sealed. Theodor Herzl then turns national restoration into an organized political program. Der Judenstaat (1896) gives the project machinery: the Society of Jews handles the political work, the Jewish Company handles property and economic organization, and sovereignty becomes something to be pursued through diplomacy, migration, finance, and land acquisition. Fast forward a few decades, and we get to Rav Abraham Isaac Kook. He reads secular Zionist action back into providence. Settlers and political organizers may not understand themselves as religious agents, yet their work can still participate in a divine historical process. Kook also places a moral limit on the nation that acts. In his early essay “Israel’s Mission and Nationhood,” he describes Jewish nationalism as an ethical mission for the benefit of all humanity and warns that nationalism detached from that mission can become self-loving chauvinism and a pretext for immorality and xenophobic violence. Back to Kalischer and the old debate with the quietists, 1967 looked to Kook’s activist heirs like the answer from above that Kalischer’s theology had anticipated. If Jewish action below could awaken redemption above, the Six-Day War seemed almost tailor-made as confirmation. And from this point of view, the irony was that the secular state and its leaders could be instruments of redemption without even recognizing what they were doing. In May 1967, R. Kook publicly lamented that Hebron, Shechem, Jericho, and other biblical territories still lay outside the Jewish state. Weeks later, Israel’s unexpectedly rapid victory brought East Jerusalem and the West Bank under Israeli control. Anyway, for his students, this looked like more than military success. The state they already understood as an instrument of redemption had acted, and history had placed the biblical heartlands in its hands. What Kalischer had described as an awakening below could now be read, by this camp, as having received an answer above. I suppose we could keep going with Rome as Esau or Dispensationalism, but let’s leave it with Justin Martyr, Rashi, and 1967. The Old Greek still leaves a constraint on every later answer. Abraham is chosen for a blessing aimed beyond Abraham. Jacob carries the covenant without becoming morally innocent. Election is real, but it does not erase moral judgment. Who carries Abraham’s blessing, and what does being chosen actually authorize?