“Your mother’s right about those Hittites, Jacobaleh,” Isaac told his son.  “You can do better.  But none of these Canaanites, either!  I mean, you can date them, but you wouldn’t want to marry one, you know what I mean?  We have standards in this family.  Now I want you to head off to Paddan-Aram and marry one of your uncle’s girls.  Keep it in the family, right, boy?  Heh, heh.”  Jacob headed off to find the cousin of his dreams, wondering if maybe his brother Esau hadn’t gotten the better end of the deal. Esau still hoped to make a good impression on his father.  Snooping on Jacob, he learned how his parents felt about the Canaanite women, so in order to impress them, he took a third wife, only this time taking care to marry one of Ishmael’s daughters.  Ishmael was only his father’s half-brother, so it’s like they weren’t even related. Jacob walked on to the town of Haran, in Paddan-Aram, where Uncle Laban and all those s...

"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 ...

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...