God's Stories #4: Isaac and Jacob
This may be the only film about the Genesis patriarchs that is told primarily from Isaac's point of view.
As Genesis patriarchs go, Isaac is something of a forgotten middle child. There are stories about his father Abraham, and there are stories about his son Jacob, but there are very, very few stories that are just about him. Cinematically, this has meant that Isaac is pretty much neglected as a character in his own right. He’s certainly a supporting character in movies about Abraham and Jacob, and often a fairly passive one, but the protagonist in his own story? Not so much.
So I was intrigued when I learned that the fourth film in the ‘God’s Stories’ series of Arabic Bible movies, produced and directed by Robert Savo, is called Isaac and Jacob. Several years ago I wrote a blog post arguing for a movie that would look at the stories of Genesis from Isaac’s point of view. Would this film fit the bill?
Well, it isn’t quite the movie I proposed—how could it be, when Isaac’s youth was already covered in The Promise, the movie about his parents?—but I’m happy to say that this film joins the others in this series in offering a perspective that we don’t often find in the Bible-movie genre. I had wondered if maybe this would be a conventional Jacob movie with Isaac’s name tacked onto the title, but the film really is concerned with Isaac and his family dynamic as a whole.
Consider how the movie is structured:
It begins with Abraham’s servant Eliezer going to Haran to find a wife for Isaac, and meeting Rebekah by the well. And it ends with Jacob arriving in Haran to find a wife for himself, and meeting his cousin Rachel by the well. Unlike a typical Jacob movie, which would draw parallels between Jacob’s deceptions and his uncle Laban’s deceptions, this movie draws a parallel between Isaac’s search for a bride and Jacob’s search for a bride.
This film, like The Promise before it, enhances the role of Isaac’s half-brother Ishmael. Near the beginning, Isaac is reunited with Ishmael for their father’s funeral—and he takes Ishmael to the spot where their father almost sacrificed him, which leads to an interesting conversation in which Isaac says that Abraham, in a sense, sacrificed Ishmael too by sending him away. Meanwhile, Rebekah criticizes Isaac for favouring their firstborn son Esau, the hunter, the same way Abraham favoured his firstborn son Ishmael, who was also a hunter—so there is a sense that one generation is copying the habits and mistakes of a previous generation. And finally, at the end of the film, Esau says he will take a wife from Ishmael’s clan, and the statement means something to us because Ishmael has been a bigger presence in the story all along.
And speaking of Esau: a recurring theme in this film is Rebekah’s frustration that Esau has married local Hittite women, instead of finding a wife from within the extended family like Isaac did (with help from his father’s servant, of course). So when Jacob leaves Isaac’s camp at the end, both to flee Esau’s wrath and to find a wife for himself in Haran, Esau’s decision to marry one of Ishmael’s daughters—a decision he announces after his anger has cooled down—comes across as part of an effort to be reconciled to his parents, which in turn suggests that he will one day be reconciled to Jacob, as well.
So basically, if there is an arc to this film, it is how Isaac’s two sons both learn to follow his example by finding a wife from within the extended clan—Jacob by marrying one of his mother’s relatives, and Esau by marrying one of his father’s relatives. And if any character changes the most over the course of this film, it might very well be Esau, who comes to see the error of his ways.
Honestly, it might make more sense to call this film Isaac and His Two Sons. (Actually, I notice that the poster for the film calls it Isaac & Jacob: The Brothers, but Isaac is Jacob’s father, so “The Brothers” must mean Jacob & Esau.) Though even that wouldn’t do justice to the strong role Isaac’s wife Rebekah plays throughout the story.
Here’s another sign of the movie’s Isaac-centredness: There is really only one chapter in the book of Genesis that is all about Isaac and not about Abraham or Jacob—Genesis 26—and this film makes use of that chapter, by referencing how Isaac dug one well after another, only to be chased away by the locals.
In this film, we see some actual well-digging, and we see Isaac express the hope that he won’t be chased away from this well, for once, because there is plenty of room between it and Isaac’s neighbours. But the film doesn’t just tell the well-digging story, it also draws a link between Isaac’s well-digging and the favouritism he shows Esau. Isaac, we are told, is a peaceful man who has always avoided getting into fights over his wells, and it is strongly suggested by both Jacob and Eliezer that Isaac is now relying on his brawny son Esau to “protect” him from future attacks.
So on multiple levels, this film really does give Isaac his due—it puts him front and centre—in a way that I don’t think any other film has ever done.
A few other brief thoughts about the film:
This is the first film in the ‘God’s Stories’ series that could be called a direct sequel to one of the earlier films. The actors are all different, I believe, but we do see a few clips from The Promise, showing Ishmael and Isaac when they were younger.
Abraham dies fairly early in this film, but this may be the only movie about Isaac and his sons that I can think of that also depicts Abraham. According to the Bible, Jacob and Esau were born about 15 years before the death of Abraham, but the only other film I can think of that even acknowledges that there was an overlap between their lifespans is The Bible Collection’s Jacob, which has a few lines of dialogue to the effect that Abraham is out there, somewhere, in his tent—but it never actually shows him.
Rebekah’s assertion that Isaac is favouring Esau the same way Abraham favoured Ishmael reminds me of a scene from The Story of Jacob and Joseph, in which Joseph complains about being Jacob’s favorite son and says something like, “You had only one Esau to worry about, I have ten Esaus.”
Esau mocks Jacob relentlessly, at first, for not being as manly as him, and for being a “weak mama’s boy” who stays home and cooks all the time. Isaac seems to take Esau’s side when he asks Rebekah who is more useful, the man who cooks food or the man who hunts it—and Rebekah says both men are useful.
The movie is surprisingly emphatic on the idea that Esau can’t lose his birthright, no matter what deal he makes with Jacob or what trick Jacob and Rebekah play on Isaac. When Esau agrees to trade his birthright for some of Jacob’s stew, Eliezer says neither of the lads are in a position to make that deal, and when they dismiss his objection, he gets up and leaves to go tell Isaac, who affirms that something as important as a birthright can’t be traded by “silly children”. And then, when Jacob “tricks” his father into giving him his blessing, it’s not clear whether Isaac is actually tricked, or whether Rebekah thinks he was tricked, or whether there was even any point to the trick, because Rebekah herself eventually tells Jacob that Esau’s birthright and the blessing Jacob stole are still Esau’s, and it is only the blessing that God gave to Abraham—a blessing that is not tied to birth order—that Isaac can now pass on to Jacob.
The point is made a few times that being chosen by God can have its hardships. When Jacob says he wants to be like his grandfather Abraham, Rebekah reminds him that Abraham was tested when God told him to sacrifice his son (i.e. her husband Isaac). And when Isaac tells Eliezer about how he gave Jacob the blessing that had been set aside for Jacob, he says, “He (Jacob) is chosen. And as my brother Ishmael said to me, it’s the harder way.”
In one early scene, Rebekah reminds Isaac about the prophecy she was given when she was pregnant with Esau and Jacob—the prophecy that said there were two nations in her womb, and the older would serve the younger—and Isaac chastises her for repeating that prophecy all the time, even in front of Jacob! This kind of foreshadows how Joseph won’t be able to stop talking about the dreams he’s had, about his father and brothers bowing before him.
Esau’s wives are utterly flippant and frivolous, openly mocking their mother-in-law Rebekah and even laughing it off when Rebekah smashes their idols; they’ll just go buy new gods, they say. When Jacob leaves for Haran, the wives mock Jacob as a “coward” and start talking about the luxury items they’ll buy now that Esau is the “lord of the camp”—but by this point, Esau has already told his parents he wants to find a wife from Ishmael’s clan, and he tells his Hittite wives to stop “babbling like the clucking of chickens.” He also smashes their idols and, when his wives say the gods will be angry, he says he doesn’t care. “Let them be angry in someone else’s tent, then!”
Isaac’s blindness is temporary here. In Genesis 27, it seems pretty clear that Isaac’s blindness is a consequence of old age, and Isaac openly says he doesn’t know how soon he’s going to die; Esau, too, assumes that Isaac will be dead soon. But we know from other passages that Isaac was basically just a little more than half-way through his life when this story took place, so there’s room to suppose that he might have recovered from whatever was ailing him. (Like the other patriarchs, Isaac is said to have had a very long life. He was 100 when Esau married the Hittite women, but he lived to be 180, so was he just super-old and medically compromised for almost a century? Or was 100, for him, basically middle-aged, like 40 to 60 would be for someone today?)
The more I think about this film and look over my notes, the more it seems to me that Jacob—a character who has had entire films all to himself—really does make the smallest impression here. He does what his mother tells him to, he pushes back a bit against Esau’s big-brother status, and so on, but the dominant characters really are the parents and the big brother with the problem wives. Heck, even Eliezer makes an impression as the steward of sorts who intervenes occasionally in family politics. (I liked the way Eliezer tells an enraged Esau that Jacob has left the camp and taken a jug—a mere jug!—and a donkey for his inheritance.) The part of the biblical story where Jacob’s personality really comes through—his mutually-duplicitous tug-of-war with his uncle Laban for wives and herds—is simply outside the scope of this particular movie.
In fact, that part of Jacob’s story is not only outside the scope of this movie, it’s kind of glossed over in the final narration. When Jacob meets Rachel by the well, there is no audible dialogue, and a narrator tells us that “Laban welcomed Jacob into his house and was gracious to him.” And that’s all the film has to say about Jacob’s experiences in Haran! The narrator then tells us that Jacob wrestled with God and was blessed by God and given the name Israel—all of which happened after Jacob left Haran and traveled back home to Canaan, decades later. So the dramatic centre of the Jacob story is basically skipped over entirely. (The next film in the ‘God’s Stories’ series, Joseph, starts after Jacob and his family have returned to Canaan. It’s Joseph’s story, not Jacob’s.)
But, all that being said, Jacob does at least hear God speak to him in a dream on his journey to Haran. That sense of divine destiny is still there.
And that, I think, about covers it! The next film in this series will wrap up the book of Genesis by telling the story of Joseph and his ten jealous brothers.
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Bonus feature: The Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has preserved an Israeli short film from 1952 called Isaac and Rebecca—but note how, even here, despite the fact that his name is in the title, Isaac himself has very little to do. This is a movie about Abraham sending Eliezer to fetch a bride—and all Isaac can do is listen to Abraham talk about God’s promises at the beginning of the film, and watch as Abraham gives Rebecca a blessing at the end of the film.
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Several years ago I contributed a chapter on movies about the Genesis patriarchs to a book called The Bible in Motion: A Handbook of the Bible and Its Reception in Film. As noted above, there are no other feature films that focus primarily on Isaac, but I have written about Jacob-themed films like Jacob (dir. Peter Hall, 1994), Prophet Joseph (dir. Farajollah Salahshoor, 2008-2009), and The Red Tent (dir. Roger Young, 2014).
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Bits of Isaac and Jacob appear in this super-trailer for the ‘God’s Stories’ series:
Isaac and Jacob also has its own trailer: