And Jacob lifted up his eyes and looked, and, behold, Esau came, and with him four hundred men of war. And he divided the children unto Leah, and to Rachel, and to the two concubines, and placed the concubines and their sons foremost; for he said, “If Esau come to destroy the children, and ill-treat the women, he will do it with them, and meanwhile we can prepare to fight; and Leah and her children after, and Rachel and Joseph after them.”[[389]] And he himself went over before them, praying and asking mercy before the Lord, and he bowed upon the earth seven times, until he met with his brother; but it was not to Esau that he bowed, though Esau supposed he did, but to the Lord God Most High.[[390]]
And Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell upon his neck and bit him, but by the mercy of God the neck of Jacob became marble, and Esau broke his teeth upon it; therefore it is said in the Book of Genesis that he fell on his neck, and kissed him; and they wept.[[391]] But the Targumim apparently do not acknowledge that the neck of Jacob became marble, for the Targum of Palestine explains their weeping thus: “Esau wept on account of the pain of his teeth, which were shaken; but Jacob wept because of the pain of his neck;” and the Targum of Jerusalem, “Esau wept for the crushing of his teeth, and Jacob wept for the tenderness of his neck.”
“The Lord God prospered Jacob,” and he had one hundred and two times ten thousand and seven thousand (i.e. a thousand times a thousand, seven thousand and two hundred) sheep, and six hundred thousand dogs; but some Rabbis say the sheep were quite innumerable, but when Jacob counted his sheep-dogs he found that he had twelve hundred thousand of them; others, however, reduce the number one-half. They say, one dog went with each flock, but those who say that there were twelve hundred thousand dogs, count two to each flock.[[392]]
Jacob, says the Rabbi Samuel, could recite the whole of the Psalter.[[393]] Of course this must have been in the spirit of prophecy, as the Psalms were not written, with the exception of Psalm civ., which had been composed by Adam.
Adam, after his fall, had been given by God six commandments, but Noah was given a seventh—to this effect, that he was not to eat a limb or portion of any living animal. Abraham was given an eighth, the commandment of circumcision; and Jacob was communicated a ninth, through the mouth of an adder, that he was not to eat the serpent.[[394]]
If we may trust the Book of Jasher, the affair of Shechem, the son of Hamor, was as follows:—The men of the city were not all circumcised, only some of them, so as to blind the eyes of the sons of Jacob, and throw them off their guard; and Shechem and Hamor had privately concerted to fall upon Jacob and his sons and butcher them; but Simeon and Levi were warned of their intention by a servant of Dinah, and took the initiative.[[395]] But this is a clumsy attempt to throw the blame off the shoulders of the ancestors of the Jewish nation upon those of their Gentile enemies.
Jacob, say the Rabbis, would have had no daughters at all in his family, but only sons, had he not called himself El-elohe-Israel (Israel is God).[[396]] Therefore God was angry with him, for making himself equal with God, and in punishment he afflicted him with a giddy daughter.[[397]]
Esau, say the Mussulmans, had no prophets in his family except Job. All the prophets rose from the family of Jacob; and when Esau saw that the gift of prophecy was not in his family, he went out of the land, for he would not live near his brother.[[398]]
The father of the Israelites, from the land of Canaan which he inhabited, could smell the clothes of Joseph when he was in Egypt, being a prophet; and thus he knew that his son was alive. He was asked how it was that he divined nothing when his beloved son was cast into the pit by his brothers, and sold to the Ishmaelites. He replied that the prophetic power is sudden, like a lightning flash, piercing sometimes to the height of heaven; it is not permanent in its intensity, but leaves at times those favoured with it in such darkness that they do not know what is at their feet.[[399]]
The Arabs say that Jacob, much afflicted with sciatica, was healed by abstaining from the meat he most loved, and that was the flesh of the camel. At Jerusalem, say the Arabs, is preserved the stone on which Jacob laid his head when he slept on his way to Haran.