"Isaac Blesses Jacob" by Govert Flinck (1615-1660). Isaac was old and practically blind.   He felt the end was coming, so he called his boy Esau in and told him to go out hunting wild game for him.   “Kill me something that tastes good and I’ll do something really nice for you before I die.   Which is soon.”   So Esau took off for the countryside to go kill an animal. Rebekah heard this and approached her boy Jacob.   She told him she’d like him to bring her a couple of kids so she could make something she knows Isaac will like, rather than take their chances on whatever animal Esau happens to catch.   (Oh, and kids means baby goats, just to be clear.   Isaac hasn’t converted to Baalism or anything like that.   Kosher laws do not exist yet, but cannibalism is still frowned upon.)   Jacob wasn’t sure about this plan.   “Dad expects Esau to do this, not me,” he told his mother.   “He can barely see anymore, so we might ...

Here's a map, in case you're having as much trouble following these people around as I am. Isaac had a dream.  In it, God told him he shouldn’t go to Egypt or to anywhere else, and that he should stick around.  If he did, God would tell him where he should go, and what he should do so that he would be heaped with blessings, and that his descendents would be, as well, and any country where they would choose to live in the future would be happy to have them.  God told him to go to Gerar, where the Philistines were.  Gerar wasn’t a great option—it was no better, in fact, than where he’d been living before.  There was a drought everywhere, so moving on was tempting. The king of the Philistines at Gerar was, of course, Abimelech.  This might have been the same King Abimelech whom Abraham ran into; this might have been a different one.  Since the name Abimelech translates roughly as “my father was the king,” it’s possible that this Abimelech was ju...

Isaac Blessing Jacob - Govert Flinck, c. 1638 With his son Isaac married off, the old widower Abraham figured he might as well get around to getting himself married again.  This was easy to do, since Abraham had a lot of property and was very old, which is a combination that a certain kind of woman finds very appealing.  Keturah was one such woman.  She and Abraham had six kids together.  They lived to see their grandchildren and great-grandchildren be born.  Well, we know Abraham did.  After the mention of her bearing six children, Keturah disappears from the narrative, and there’s no telling what happened to her.  Abraham himself lived to be 175.  Odds are Abraham treated his second wife well, in light of the fact that he had been decent enough to set up the sons of his concubines with nice little nest eggs and sent them off to the east to get their lives going.  Anything Abraham had that didn’t go to his concubines’ sons (and, possib...