A Tale with No Heroes

The tricky part of this lesson I'm going to give this Sunday isn't deciding what parts of the story I want to share or focus on, but deciding what to say about them. Of course, I'm going to cover the birthright-for-pottage trade (and I'll probably have to take a minute to explain what birthrights and pottage are), but what should I say about that exchange? I usually try to teach my Primary kids some moral lessons when I give examples of people in scriptures. I use scriptural figures to demonstrate behavior that they should or should not engage in. The trouble is that neither Jacob or Esau demonstrate exemplary behavior here. Esau was foolish and Jacob was selfish. Maybe they had good reasons for what they did, but it would take rather extraordinary circumstances to justify either of their behavior. I take some solace from the fact that we can learn for either kind of example, good or bad, but it kind of bugs me that there is no "good guy" here.

And the morality of this tale gets even murkier when Jacob actually receives the birthright by tricking his father into thinking that he's Esau. Jacob is being blatantly dishonest here, which is, naturally, very wrong. Perhaps one could say that he only did it so he could claim something that was technically owed to him, but I don't know why Jacob couldn't just tell his father, Isaac, about the deal he and his brother had made. Sure, Isaac would have been confused, and Esau might have lied about the deal they made, but Jacob could have at least tried to be honest.

But Esau wasn't much (if any) better. When he learned of Jacob's deception, he was terribly upset and made plans to kill Jacob. If lying to your father is immoral, planning to murder your brother certainly is. Luckily for Jacob, he was warned about Esau's intentions, and he managed to get away, but I'll want to be careful how I word that because he was warned by his mother, and she wasn't exactly a "good guy" either, since she helped Jacob pull off the deception of Isaac. In fact, it seemed to be her idea. We know that she was a decent person; we learned that last week, but she seems to be showing some favoritism here, and I'd rather not get into that. There's too much questionable morality in this story as it is.

Thankfully, the story has a happy ending. Jacob and Esau reconcile as brothers and they start to live in the same area again, non-murderously. There could be a lesson in forgiveness there. Plus, since both of the brothers are generous with each other at this point, that might be an indicator of character growth, which could contribute to a lesson on overcoming one's vices by learning from one's mistakes. Still, even with a happy and blogworthy ending, this lesson is going to be difficult to teach. There's a lot of behavior in this lesson that's not necessarily good, and I don't want to give my children the impression that such behavior is okay. I have to cover the events of the story, and I will, but but I'm not entirely sure how I want to portray them.