We know that Esav may have wanted to make Yitzchak happy, but he may not have known how or why what he had already done (his previous marriage to the Cnaani woman) was wrong. We know that Yitzchak and Esav had a good relationship-- Esav may or may not have been Yitzchak's favorite child. When he (Esav) married the Cnaani woman and Yitzchak and Rivka got angry, he obviously knew that he had done something wrong, but he probably didn't know what it was that he had done wrong. Yaakov was the spiritual one. He would have known about Birkas Avraham and everything that it was about and included. Esav definitely would not have, being the outdoorsy type. He was probably just trying to make his father pleased with him again in whatever way he could think of that he thought could work. He was like a child that does whatever it can think of without thinking to aks how to perfect itself. It was like he was trying to please his father to the best of his ability, so much so that he didn't realize that the location of the girl didn't matter, only her background, faith, and people. And as mentioned before, he probably didn't know anything about the whole nivchar/nidche thing, so how could he have been expected to do the exact right thing if he had never been taught/told? Though Esav was evil according to more than one source, there are sources that say that Esav was very into the mitzvah of Kibbud Av, whether or not that applied to Kibbud Eim. I think that Esav was not entirely evil, and in this case was just trying to do what he thought could remedy the situation.
Great post, Mirel! Don't you agree, Mrs. Perl?
ReplyDeleteIt is possible that Eisav knew what kind of girl Yitchak would have wanted him to marry. Avraham had told Eliezer that Yitzchak could not marry a Canaani girl, he had to marry a girl from Charan (Rivka). If Eisav had really wanted to please his father, he could have tried to follow in his footsteps and married a girl from Charan, like Yaakov did. Even when Eisav heard Yitzchak tell Yaakov to marry a girl from Charan, Eisav still didn't make an effort to marry a girl from there too to make his father happy.
Alyssa-
ReplyDeleteI can see what you're saying, but we also know that Esav HATED Yaakov. If he just didn't know what was right and what was wrong about which girls to marry and he hated his brother (so obviously he would want to be around him as little as possible), he probably would have chosen any other place he could have gone other than where Yaakov went. Remember, he said that he would kill Yaakov AFTER his father died. If he was going to kill him after and his father was still alive at that point, then Esav would try to make it so that he wouldn't kill his brother UNTIL then. Anyway, Esav would have tried to stay away from Yaakov, and if he really didn't know what made one girl ok to marry and another girl not ok, he would have just tried to make any connection he could think of. The connection he made was that his parents had sent his brother to marry a relative of his father's. His desire to make a connection and do the right thing as far as his father was concerned coupled with his desire to stay away from his brother... it makes sense that he chose to marry a daughter of Yishmael (who was, after all, his father's brother).