My Hebrew name is Ya’akov, Hebrew for Jacob. When I celebrated becoming a bar mitzvah years ago at the age of 13, the observance coincidentally coincided with readings in the Torah about the life of ...

Jacob and Esau reunite after decades of separation following Jacob’s tricking Isaac into blessing him (while masquerading as Esau). Esau felt livid, cheated, and destroyed, determined to kill Jacob in ...

The first ethnic joke in the Bible is in chapter 25 of Genesis. Rebekah gives birth to twins, and the first comes out red and hairy all over, so she and Isaac name him Esau. They name him “Hairy.” ...

The fifth biblical man in this series is Jacob. Jacob is the second son of Isaac, and as such he started out without an inheritance of the promises given to Abraham and Isaac. When I think of Jacob, I ...

This is an adaptation of Looking Forward, a weekly email from our editor-in-chief sent on Friday afternoons. Sign up here to get the Forward’s free newsletters delivered to your inbox. I was thrilled ...

Sometimes Torah simply refuses to give us the straight dope. Were man and woman created simultaneously from God’s command (Genesis 1:26-27)? Or did God sculpt Adam out of clay (Genesis 2:7) and then ...

Parashat Toldot includes one of my favorite parts of the Torah — specifically, the stealing of the blessing. We can see the warm relationship between Isaac and Esau. We see the comfort in their ...

The relationship between the brothers Jacob and Esau is shot through with dramatic tension: manipulation and deceit, violence and forced separation, conflict and unexpected rapprochement. So it seems ...

Isaac blesses Jacob. Engraving by the German painter Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (March 26, 1794 – May 24, 1872) gldburger/Getty Images Joseph Official, the 13th-century author of the polemical work ...