(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)
“Now Esau saw that Isaac had blessed Jacob and sent him away to Paddan Aram, to take him a wife from there, and that as he blessed him he gave him a command, saying, “You shall not take a wife of the daughters of Canaan;” and that Jacob obeyed his father and his mother, and was gone to Paddan Aram. Esau saw that the daughters of Canaan didn’t please Isaac, his father. So Esau went to Ishmael, and took, in addition to the wives that he had, Mahalath the daughter of Ishmael, Abraham’s son, the sister of Nebaioth, to be his wife.”
(Genesis 28:6-9)
Esau had married at 40 years of age. He was now 77 years old. And it was NOW, almost forty years later, that he realizes that Isaac didn’t approve of his wives. Talk about being blind. This is yet more proof that Esau was a flesh-oriented person. Always looking at what HE wanted, what HE desired, and what HE felt. No thought to other people and how his actions might affect them.
Esau got the inkling because Jacob wasn’t sent off slinking in disgrace. Jacob got a blessing. Jacob got instructions on where to go. Jacob was sent of as a son doing the right thing. Esau saw the fuss his parents were making about this and how happy the idea made them and THAT is what clued him in to their disappointment in taking wives from Canaan.
This is a classic too little too late scenario. Esau was attempting to smooth everything over and gain some of the approval Jacob had in the wife department. But he wasn’t doing it by correcting his mistake. He did it by adding another one. Not from the place Jacob went, but from a different branch of the family. Instead of going to Rebekah’s relatives – evidence that their relationship mother to son was VERY strained, if not broken – Esau went to Isaac’s relatives. And the only ones that weren’t already in the camp were Ishmael’s offspring. That is where he found a wife, hoping to gain Isaac’s approval. It doesn’t say that Isaac approved or disapproved of the choice. The whole thing was an attempt to curry favour, but it seems to have fallen flat.
Esau could have pursued Jacob and killed him on the road, but he seems to have held to his personal vow to only kill Jacob once his father was dead (Genesis 27:41). He let Jacob go unmolested.
The Torah: A Women’s Commentary writes: ‘6–9. When Esau saw. The text portrays Esau as one who still wants parental approval. Whereas Jacob leaves on the advice of his mother and his father (28:7), Esau seeks only his father’s approval (28:8) in choosing a non-Canaanite wife. At the end of this parashah, Rebekah recedes to the shadows’
The sage Rashbam writes: ‘וירא עשו כי ברך יצחק את יעקב, Esau realised that in the blessings which Yitzchok had given Yaakov the land of Canaan as his heritage had been included, and that Yitzchok also had given Yaakov specific instructions to get a wife from amongst the daughters of Lavan, the brother of his mother, and on no account to marry a local Canaanite girl. Esau therefore arrived at the conclusion that he had been deprived of his share in the land of Canaan as a penalty for having married Canaanite girls and that this was the reason why Yaakov had been successful in stealing the blessing of Avraham from him. He therefore decided to marry into Avraham’s family, i.e. a descendant of Ishmael. He thought to himself that perhaps by doing this he would restore his claim to Avraham’s heritage. אחות נביות, seeing that Nevayot was the oldest of Ishmael’s children the Torah calls Machalat “the sister of Nevayot,” (instead of merely “the daughter of Ishmael”). We find something parallel to this in Exodus 15,20 ותקח מרים הנביאה אחות אהרן, “Miriam the prophetess, sister of Aaron, took, etc.” The reason she is referred to in that fashion is that she was older than Moses but younger than Aaron. On the other hand, in a verse where both Moses and Aaron are mentioned together with Miriam, (Exodus Numbers 26,59) she is referred to as “their sister.” The Torah employs the same formulation in Genesis 36,22 where Timna is described as the sister of Lotan, seeing that Lotan was the oldest of his brothers as we know from verse 20 in that chapter, i.e. לוטן, ושובל, וצבעון, וענה.’
The sage Radak writes: ‘וירא, seeing that the sense of sight is a more reliable sense of perception than any of the other 4 senses, the Torah describes Esau’s realisation of what had transpired as being visual. לקחת לו משם אשה, the fact that Yaakov was fleeing from Esau’s wrath had not become known, everyone thinking he had left to select a bride for himself. וישמע, Esau also heard that Yaakov had obediently followed his father’s instructions to get himself a wife from that far away He “saw” now that רעות בנות כנען, that the daughters of the Canaanite whom he had married were considered as evil in the eyes of his father Yitzchok. Even though he had been fully aware of this already previously, seeing that his father had already protested his marrying these girls at the time, he had not made it a major issue to forbid him to marry them as he knew that his major seed would not be Esau. Now Esau realised how deeply his father resented these daughters-in-law seeing he had sent Yaakov such a long way to get himself a wife from Charan. This is why he went to Ishmael. וילך…אחות נביות. This Nevayot was an extremely well known personality, and so was his sister. (25,20) Compare also the formulation in Genesis 10,21 which shows that Yaphet was a well known personality. על נשיו, he married Machalat in addition not instead of his other wives. She was to represent a higher level of spirituality in Esau’s household. His other wives now occupied a socially inferior status.’
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