Ezekiel 1-12: Ezekiel Makes a Case for Performing Arts?

So now we skip to Ezekiel.  At this point in my reading, I was relieved because Jeremiah was so depressing, and Ezekiel starts on a high note, what with the awesome visions of God and the cherubim and everything.  But it goes downhill from there.

Okay, so the visions.  There are two of them, and they very closely mirror John's vision of the throne of God in Revelation.  I've heard that ancient Jewish boys were not allowed to read Ezekiel until they were 30 because these visions were considered way too transcendent to be grasped by the young mind or something like that, but I'm not sure if that's true.  Most of what Ezekiel describes, interestingly enough, is not the appearance of God but the appearance of the cherubim.  They are weird freaky creatures!  They have four faces and four wings and are covered with eyes and have something like hands under their wings and there are these wheel things with them that move when they do, and somehow their spirits are contained within the wheels.  It kind of makes me want to try drawing a picture of it just so I can get an idea of what he's talking about, because I'm really not sure how the wheel idea works.  Fortunately, though, I don't have to, because a bunch of other people already did.  I did a Google Image Search for "Ezekiel cherubim" and found some interesting stuff.  Most of them forgot to add the eyes though.

Now when God calls Ezekiel to be a prophet, it's pretty interesting what He says.  He tells Ezekiel to speak to the house of Israel whether they will listen or not (2:7 and 3:11).  But then He says that at some point He will tell Ezekiel -not- to speak to anybody.  Apparently, our responsibility to do what God tells us does not depend on the immediate results we get.

The other interesting thing about these chapters, to me, is the stuff God has Ezekiel do to get his message out. First he tells Ezekiel to build a model of Jerusalem and lay siege against it, to show that Jerusalem will be under siege soon.  Then he has him lie down next to it and not get up for 390 days (he makes food ahead of time), and then again not for 40 days, corresponding to the number of years that Israel and Judah (respectively) have been walking in iniquity, as best as I can figure.  And during that time he's supposed to eat his food baked using human, um, excrement.  Ezekiel is really grossed out by this and God says he can use animal dung instead.  But ew! all the same.  Then later, God tells Ezekiel to pack up and dig through a wall and go out into exile to show Jerusalem that's what's going to happen to him.

Can you imagine if you saw a grown man make a Lego model of your town and then start attacking it?  That would be weird.  Or if he lay in the dirt for over a year, eating only what he had brought with him?  That would be disturbing.  That was Ezekiel's job.

The neat thing about this is that God is using something besides just preaching to get a message across.  He's using visual representation and physically acting out the prophecy in a symbolic way.  Hey, that sounds an awful lot like drama!  Ezekiel has become, in a very weird sense, a performing artist prophet.

This probably isn't the number one thing you're supposed to get out of reading Ezekiel 1-12, but for me, as a performing artist, it really stuck out.  There is a growing movement in the Western Church to use creative elements to worship God or to spread the gospel or to teach a biblical lesson.  I think the reaction to it so far has been pretty mixed.  Drama is probably the most accepted art form (next to music, obviously, although there are denominations which don't believe in using musical instruments); visual art and dance, on the other hand, are a little iffy.  Don't believe me?  Go to a Catholic or high-tradition Protestant (like Lutheran or Episcopal) church and look at how much visual material there is (stained glass windows, etc.).  Then go to a lower-tradition Protestant church (such as Baptist or non-denominational) and look at how much visual material is there - I'm guessing that the most you'll see in the sanctuary is a cross somewhere.  This is, of course, because of the 2nd commandment - don't make an image to represent God so that you have something physical to worship.  Ever since the Iconoclast Controversy in the Catholic church, many Christians have been concerned that all that visual material leads to worship of that material.

Dancing, though, is probably the most iffy art there is for Christians.  For so many centuries it was denounced by the Church or important leaders within the Church, although there were always some who objected to demonizing the art as a whole.  A few years ago I read an article that's actually fairly recent arguing that dance, while not inherently evil, probably always leads to bad things - the author claimed that it was the Israelites' dancing that angered Moses and caused him to break the original 10 Commandments, and even blamed Michal's anger at David's behavior on David!  As a dancer, I found this incredibly disturbing.  Fortunately, I think that with the rise of dance ministries (more than even the rise of Christian dance companies), people in the church are beginning to see dance as simply a visual, physical way of expressing an idea or emotion, and that expression can be worship.

Anyway, so back to Ezekiel.  It's just comforting to see that the things we're just now figuring out, Ezekiel was commanded by God to do.  He was using art, as it were, to tell a story or to present a message.  That is the purpose of art - not to be worshiped or even to draw attention to itself, but to tell you something about real life.  Art has a way of breaking down barriers.  A lot of people will not listen to a sermon, or if they hear something that starts to sound like one, they'll just close their ears.  The arts have the ability to reach beyond our defenses and speak straight to our hearts, sometimes without us even knowing it at first.  That's why they're so powerful, and maybe that's why God had Ezekiel do this.

Or, you know, maybe He was saying it's okay to let your kids play in the dirt.

2 Samuel 6: The Ark

Somehow in writing this blog I got stuck on chapter 6, so I'm going to stick with it.  I know I'm behind (I'm reading 1 Kings now), but this passage stuck out to me.

Remember the ark of the covenant?  It's been sitting in a guy's house up on a hill for a while.  Well, now David is going to bring it into Jerusalem to stay permanently.  What they do is they put the ark on a cart, hitch the ark up to some oxen, and move it down the hill that way.  If you've ever ridden in a wooden cart over a dirt road, you know that this can get bumpy.  Well, it did, and so the ark started rocking pretty precariously, so this guy named Uzzah, who lived in the house where the ark was staying, reached out and touched it.  God struck him and he died.


At this point you might be thinking, what the heck?  Well, let's back up.  I remember reading in the Law about the ark of the covenant and how it was supposed to be made.  It had these four rings on the bottom with poles that ran through them so the ark could be carried.  And God specifically said that the rings were to remain in the ark and never be taken out.  The Levites would carry the ark, like they did when they crossed the Jordan; they were the only people who were supposed to handle it, as far as I remember.  And this is how it always was carried, up until it was stolen by the Philistines.  Remember that?  When the Philistines returned the ark, they put it on a cart and shipped it off to Israel.

So when the ark is being carried into Jerusalem, I see a few problems already.  First is that the Israelites know the proper mode of carrying the ark, and they have the proper means - the poles are, presumably, still in the ark.  Second is that not only are they breaking the rule, they're copying the Philistines.  Since when is that a good idea?  Third, for the past 20 years it's been in a guy's house.  If I'm not mistaken, it's supposed to be in the tabernacle.  And if I'm also not mistaken, the ark of the covenant played a very significant role in the sacrificial system - what with the sprinkling blood on the mercy seat and all that.  I wonder how that's been working out for the past 20 years?  I don't know who Abinadab is; it doesn't say whether he's a Levite or not.

Anyway, so what happened here?  I think that Uzzah and family, having the ark in their house for 20 years, kind of lost their sense of reverence for it.  Remember, the ark of the covenant was the earth's one physical dwelling-place of the presence of the Most High God.  The golden carved cherubim on the top of it had their faces covered because the angels who stand in God's presence cannot even see His face.  The ark is not a mascot, which is how they're treated it in the past; and it's not a pet, to be taken care of.  So when the ark is being toted down the hill on a cart and it starts to tip over, Uzzah feels like he has to take care of it.  He reaches out and touches, as it were, God, the God that cherubim in heaven don't even have the guts to look  at.  So that's why Uzzah died.  It's not that God has a thing for arbitrary rules of transportation; it's about reverence.

I think this is what happens to us sometimes.  We know what God expects of us, we have the means of obeying, but we think somebody else's stupid method is better than what we know we're supposed to do.  And sometimes, our idea of God gets really mutated.  We think that God is a lucky charm, a lamp to rub when we need something.  Or we think that God is a fragile little trinket that we have to protect, like if we don't, He won't be able to take care of Himself.  God is none of that, and we shouldn't treat him that way.

After Uzzah dies, the ark stays at another guy's house for three months (presumably he lived close to where Uzzah was killed).  Then David tries to bring the ark into Jerusalem again.  This time they have people carry it, and more than that, every six steps they stop and David sacrifices two animals.  They do this all the way to Jerusalem.  And nobody dies this time.  David is so psyched that the ark is coming to Jerusalem and nobody's dying that he has a party in the street as they go.  He and some girls start dancing, and David for some reason isn't wearing tons of clothing, and well, you can imagine how that would go.  His beloved wife Michal sees him from her window and gets really put off seeing her husband dancing the way he is.  I think she would rather the King of Israel be a little more dignified (maybe like her own father, although we all know how his reign turned out).  They have a fight, and David tells her that worshiping God is not about being dignified, and he would be even more of a disgrace if that's what worshiping God meant.  And guess what, we find out that David has kids with every woman in Israel, except Michal.  Either God made Michal barren, or Michal gets to sleep on the couch for the rest of her life.

Sometimes we get really caught up in what we look like, especially around other people, and sometimes we let that matter more than our love for God.  Actually, I'm going to back that up.  I think that if we look down on people who are so free in their worship in adoration of God, maybe it's because we are not free in our worship of God.  Have you ever noticed that the things that bother us the most about other people, are often things that we ourselves are guilty of?  I've noticed that about myself.  How lame is it to criticize other people for the way they worship God?  And if I do, maybe it's not their problem, but mine.  So maybe the next time somebody does something that really bothers me, instead of deriding them for it, I should check my own heart.

Leviticus 23-27: Final Laws

Here I am again. I'm going to finish the book of Leviticus even though I was originally going to break it into two sections, because I really want to move ahead into Numbers as soon as possible.

Chapter 23: Laws of Religous Festivals

That's the heading that my Bible gives for this chapter. It's about all the things the people have to do for certain holidays, and specifically for the Day of Atonement. I think it's generally well-known that the word "holiday" literally means "holy day." I dn't usually think so much about what that implies, but this chapter makes it pretty clear. It calls certain days "holy convocation," "sabbath of complete rest," and "appointed time of the LORD." It wasn't really about going water-skiing or picnicking with your family; it was about remembering God's faithfulness and worshiping Him for it for the entire festival.

What amazes me about these holy days is that they weren't just one day long. In fact there were some holidays that lasted for an entire week, and during that whole week the people couldn't do any "laborious work." I think that means there was -some- work they could do (and they kind of had to because back then you really couldn't cook a whole week's worth of food ahead of time).

Holidays were important to God. They were memorials, so that the Israelites would remember where they had come from and what God had done from them. It would be like having Black History Month, only specified to your own ancestors, and with God as the focus. And even though I said it wasn't all about water-skiing or picnicking, it was about celebrating. God told the people to get palm branches, which I guess they would wave around, and rejoice and celebrate before God for seven days. Have you ever celebrated about anything for seven days straight? I haven't. But there's a really good opportunity coming up, because next Sunday is Palm Sunday, the first day of Holy Week. I think Easter is definitely worth celebrating for seven days straight (at least).

Chapter 24

The chapter heading I have is "The Lamp and the Bread of the Sanctuary," but the chapter is not really all about that. In fact, this chapter is weird. It starts off talking about the instructions for the lampstand and the table of the showbread, which were both in the tabernacle, but then in the middle of talking about that, a horrible thing happens. A half-Israelite man and a full-Israelite man got in a fight, and the half-Israelite man "blasphemed the Name and cursed," so they brought him before Moses, and God told Moses that the man had to be put to death. Then God talks about some other things, like how if a man kills another man, he should be put to death, and if you injure somebody then whatever you do to them will be done to you (fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth). Then they take the man who blasphemed God's name outside the camp and stoned him to death.

Isn't that awful? Now, I don't know exactly what "blaspheming the Name" is, but I'm pretty sure it's not like saying "OMG," because the word "Name" is capitalized, which means it's not the generic word for God, which is "El," but God's holy and personal name, YHWH. Jews didn't even -say- this name verbally, which is why we don't know exactly how to pronounce it, so I'm guessing that to blaspheme this Name was a really, really big deal - a direct and deliberate disrespect and rejection of God. And apparently this was a really big deal.

I always find it interesting that freedom of religion wasn't allowed in Israel. Israel, you see, was not supposed to be a model governmental system; other nations are not supposed to look like Israel, and America certainly isn't supposed to look like Israel. Israel was supposed to be a symbol of God's holiness, a beacon to the rest of the world that showed who God is, what He is like, and what He wants from people. Think of a lighthouse. We don't really use lighthouses anymore, but you know the general idea - the glass which surrounded the flame had to be kept clean all the time, so that it reflected the light the best it could. If the glass was dirty, the light wouldn't reflect well, and that might mean that a ship would be unable to see the lighthouse in a storm, and that could be deadly. God wanted people to have a clear reflection of Him, which is why He was so strict with Israel.

Chapter 25 is about the Sabbath Year, the Year of Jubilee, and all the things that went along with that. Basically, every seven years, the people didn't plant any crops but let the land lie fallow, which replenished the soil and all that good stuff. And every seventh sabbath year was called the Year of Jubilee, which was when all debts were cancelled and slaves were set free and all sorts of wonderful things like that happened. It was like a "start over" year, so if you were really poor and had to sell your house and sell yourself into slavery, you could get everything back at the Year of Jubilee.

The rest of the chapter is about what happens when somebody becomes really poor and can't take care of themselves. What I find really awesome is that God commanded that if a countryman became poor, the other people in the community had to help him out and sustain him. I think that's something that the Church is really bad about today. We kind of let everybody mind their own business, and if somebody's having a hard time we feel bad for them, but we don't want to give them much because we don't want them to take advantage of us, but God makes it clear that we are not supposed to just let people stay desperate. Even if they had to become indentured servants, the poor were to be taken care of.

I'm going to do chapter 27 next. I don't really know what it's about, actually. It has something to do with values and how different people are worth different amounts of money, and it has something to do with making vows. I haven't done any research on the subject; does anyone have a clue what's going on here?

I'm doing chapter 26 last because it kind of sums up the whole book of Leviticus, and actually the rest of the Law as well. In this chapter, God tells the people what will happen if they obey Him and what will happen if they disobey Him. What is really neat about this part is that when He tells them about the consequences of disobedience, it's not like "if you mess up, BAM you're dead." There are punishments, but with each list of punishments there's the phrase "and after that, if you don't turn back, then this will happen." Meaning, the punishment only happens when the people are disobedient. If at any moment they repent, the curse will be lifted. God says, "If they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their forefathers . . . then I will remember My covenant with Jacob, and I will remember also My covenant with Isaac, and My covenant with Abraham as well, and I will remember the land. . . . When they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them, nor will I so abhor them as to destroy them. . . ." That was really abbreviated, but the idea is that God will never completely give up on His people, and that if they turn back to Him after messing up, He will forgive them. And that is what's going to happen, many times, in the next several books.

Exodus 7-12: My Deliverer Is Coming

Let me preface this post by saying that I really wish I had my Prince of Egypt soundtrack with me right now, or that I had ripped it onto my computer, because it's been running through my head since I started Exodus.

We start with God telling Moses exactly what's going to happen: Aaron is going to talk for him, Pharaoh's not going to listen, plagues are going to hit Egypt, Israel's going to be saved, and all Egypt will know that YHWH is God. Then we see it all happen more or less exactly the way God told Moses it would.

Imagine with me for a second that you're Pharaoh. You have the coolest empire in the world right now, and you've got a bunch of slaves to make it cooler by building stuff for you (we know that the Hebrews built Pithom and Raamses; we don't know what else they built. We also don't know that they were the only slaves in Egypt, and they probably weren't). If I remember 7th grade history right, approximately 2/3 of Egypt's population was the slave class. That doesn't mean 2/3 of the population was Hebrews, necessarily, but there were quite a few of them. So if you were Pharaoh, and some guy came to you and asked you to let a huge chunk of your population, your cheap labor force, and the people who make your empire cool, go off into the wilderness for a couple days, you would say no too.

I don't think the plagues were just about letting the Hebrews go. They were about showing Egypt - and the rest of the world, because word spreads - that the Hebrew God was number one. That's why the text says over and over, "then you will know that there is no one like Me in all the earth" (9:14) and things like that.

The Egyptians, as we all know, were polytheists. They worshipped the sun and the river and all this other stuff, and a lot of their gods were represented as birds or frogs or dogs or what have you. In sending plagues that attacked various Egyptian deities, God was asserting His sovereignty and authority over the gods of Egypt. If Egypt is powerless before YHWH, then surely no other nation could stand before Him. That's what I think, anyway.

I find the parts about Pharaoh's heart being hardened very interesting. Four times (after the first, third, fifth, and seventh plagues) the text says "Pharaoh's heart was hardened," twice (after the second and fourth plagues) it says "Pharaoh hardened his heart," and four times (after the sixth, eighth, and ninth plagues and before the tenth) it says "The LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart." Hebrew writers are usually pretty intentional about patterns and stuff, so I think these distinctions are worth noticing. Some people seem to think that God hardening Pharaoh's heart means that God made Pharaoh act against his will, like if God had left him alone, he would've let the Hebrews go the first time. That's not what I see in the text. First of all, it doesn't draw any extra attention to the fact that God hardens Pharaoh's heart; secondly, it specifically shows Pharaoh hardening his own heart, and thirdly, by the time we get to where it says that the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart, he's already done it himself six times (including the time Aaron's staff became a snake), so by now he's in such a habit of being contrary, the real miracle is that he ever let the Hebrews go.

I also find it interesting and sort of odd that it's only during the fourth, fifth, seventh, ninth, and tenth plagues that God sets Goshen, where the Hebrews are, apart from the Egyptians. Did they have to endure the other five? The text gives us no reason to believe they didn't, because it makes such a point of God setting them apart when He did. To take the text at face value, we have to assume that the Hebrews dealt with water turned into blood, frogs, gnats (or lice), boils, and locusts just as the Egyptians did. Weird, isn't it? But that seems (to me) to be the way God does things. He doesn't typically remove His people from disasters and trials and persecutions; He preserves them through those things. That's what He did with Noah and his family, and that's what He's been doing with the Israelites, and that's what He did with Job, and that's what He did with the early church, and that's what He does with us today. That's why I stopped believing in a pre-trib rapture. God has never been in the habit of stopping bad things from happening to His people. We can never be sure that He'll remove us from evil, from pestilence, from persecution, or even from difficult situations, but we can be sure that He will be faithful to be with us and help us through those times.

Finally, we have Passover. This is one of my favorite parts of the entire Bible I think, and I can't possibly do it justice with my writing, but I'll try to show you what I find fascinating about this passage.

First each family has to take a year-old lamb, a perfect lamb, and keep it in the house for four days. Now, I don't have much experience with lambs, but we bought a lobster from Walmart one time for dinner, and before we had even gotten home my little brother had already named it. If you keep a cute fluffy animal in your house for more than a few seconds, you can just bet that everybody will fall in love with it. Then four days later you slit its throat. That's kind of morbid, isn't it? Killing something that for a while was a sort of pet?

The second thing is that they have to put the blood on their doorways using a hyssop branch. Later on, when we get into Leviticus and talk about the sacrificial system, we'll see hyssop is used a lot in sacrifices to cleanse the people from sin. When I read this, I immediately thought of Psalm 51, where David says "Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me and I will be whiter than snow." I'm pretty sure that is a direct reference to the blood of a sacrificial animal that was sometimes sprinkled on the people (like at Mt. Sinai) to represent that the animal's death covered their sins and made them blameless before God. But as Hebrews says, "it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins," because they're only animals. That's why people had to sacrifice them day after day, year after year, from the first sacrifice back in the Garden of Eden until the Atonement Day when Jesus died. After that, all those sacrifices became obsolete, because the blood of the true sacrifice, the only sinless man who ever lived, had been sprinkled over the people, washing us and covering our sins for good.

The third thing is that this wasn't just for the Hebrews. At the end of the chapter it says foreigners could eat the Passover meal if they became circumcised first, and I wonder if there were any Egyptians who did what Moses said and were spared that night. It says that "a mixed multitude" went out of Egypt with them - does that mean some Egyptians went with the Hebrews? I don't know. I think the text leaves that option open.

Genesis 32-36: Turning Point

One of my new favorite parts in the whole Bible is coming up in this post.

When we last left Jacob, he was leaving Laban. Now, as he's on his way back home, he hears that Esau is coming toward him with 400 men. Considering that the last time Jacob saw his brother, his brother wanted to kill him, this comes across as really bad news. He gets scared, divides his people up, sends Esau several caravan-loads of animals , and has everybody go on ahead of him while he stays behind for the night to freak out alone.

This is one of the coolest things that ever happens in the Bible: "Then Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak."

Why did God wrestle with Jacob? Why did Jacob wrestle with God? I kind of get the theological significance of this event, but I still find it odd and interesting that God actually had a fist fight with Jacob all night. I bet it was really good for Jacob though. When I was in high school and my guy friends got mad at each other, they would beat each other up and then they'd be friends again. I wonder if this was like that. I mean, up until now we've gotten a pretty rotten picture of Jacob. He's a liar from a family of liars, a cheat, a swindler, maybe a coward, and whatever other nasty things we can attribute to him. For somebody who's called to father a nation that's supposed to be holy unto the Lord, I'd say he's not doing so well. I'm probably reading things into the text, but when I come across this part I think that Jacob's been avoiding God all this time, and now that he's finally alone, he can meet God face to face. And what happens isn't pretty.

This is the redemptive point in Jacob's life. After this point, as we'll see in a bit, Jacob starts acting different. He doesn't become a really good person (his parenting skills, for example, are . . . well, like his father's), but he does start doing some things right where God is concerned. But I'll get to that in a bit.

So God meets with Jacob, and they wrestle. This is what I do like about Jacob: at this point, he and God didn't have a friendly encounter, but they did have an encounter. Maybe they didn't have a very good relationship, but they had a real relationship. I don't know what Jacob thought about God before this night, but one thing's for sure: God had to have been real for Jacob after this point. It's hard to ignore a God who dukes it out with you all night long, then leaves you with a limp to remind you of it.

Other things I'm wondering . . . why did Jacob win? And why did God dislocate Jacob's hip when He wasn't winning? That's just weird. What did He mean, "You have wrestled with God and men and have prevailed"? How can you prevail against God? I mean, I don't think He was talking just about the wrestling match.

Jacob's name, as we all know, means "deceiver" (or more literally, "he grasps the heel," which is an idiom). Israel means "He wrestles with God." That's a fitting name for the nation-to-be if ever there was one. All of Israel's history can pretty much be summed up in three words: wrestling with God. Huh. Not sure what else I can add to that. Do you guys have any thoughts?

So, moving on. Jacob goes to meet his brother, who isn't mad at him anymore. They talk a little and keep going their separate ways. Short meeting, evidently. At least they're all still alive. Next Jacob goes to this place called Shechem and his daughter Dina gets raped, so her brothers kill all the men in the entire village.

Now, I know that we generally think that back in the day women were considered property, and they probably were, but these brothers don't sound too different from my brothers. I'm not sure they'd go kill an entire town if something happened to me, but then again, my brothers weren't raised in ancient Near Eastern culture either. Either way, the big brother protective streak evidently goes a long way back. I kind of appreciate that they cared about their sister and stuff, but they really should've just not let her wander off in the first place instead of going and killing everybody. After that happened they had to leave (my guess is people in other towns were mad at them now), so they went back to Bethel.

What's cool is that when they go, Jacob tells them to purify themselves and get rid of their false gods and stuff (I assume this means Rachel's dad's action figures too). Nobody in the story has done that yet. The next thing that happens is Jacob renames Bethel, which means "house of God," to El-bethel, which means "the God of the house of God." That sounds redundant, but in a forgotten sermon I wrote some notes in my margins that I'm now going to elaborate on. "El-bethel" is commemorating the God of the place rather than the place. Islam, incidentally, is about a journey to a place. One of the things you have to do as a good Muslim is make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in your life. Judaism, too, is a lot about places: the promised land, particularly Jerusalem, and more particular the Temple Mount. Christianity, or at least what Christianity is supposed to be, is a journey to a Person. That's why Jesus said whoever wants to worship God must worship Him "in spirit and in truth."


The next thing that happens is that Rachel dies. Okay, and I've got to say something nice about Rachel even though I don't like her, because the other day Justin made a good point that in this culture, bearing children was really the only thing that gave women any worth. So as far as society was concerned, nobody cared that Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah; she was worthless because she was barren. So that's why she got desperate and went crazy trying to have kids. But now she dies having Benjamin, which is really sad.

Next there is one sentence about Reuben sleeping with Bilhah, one of those maids from before. It only gets one sentence, but later on it will be important because Reuben was the firstborn and should've gotten all the inheritance. It's important for the same reason that it's important that Simeon and Levi, the second and third born, were the ones who killed the men of Shechem. You'll learn why another time though, because we're not there yet.

The next thing that happens is account of Isaac dying, and then it talks about Esau's descendants. The only thing I have to say about this is that it's nice that both Esau and Jacob were there to bury their dad, just like both Ishmael and Isaac buried Abraham; and that if you read through the descendants of Esau there are a few names you might recognize, like Amalek.

Well, that's probably more than long enough. Next time we'll hear about Joseph.