Did you know that Esau’s behavior is connected to a specific mitzva?
We know that Esau is a hunter. The Torah uses one word for it: צַיִד, tzayid. Hunting is definitional for Esau – it is not only how he feeds himself and others, it is his occupation and his very identity:
When the boys grew up, Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the outdoors; but Jacob became a mild man, raising livestock. (G.25:27 (Genesis 25:27))
Even his father’s love is told with the same word: Isaac favored Esau (ki tzayid b’fiv), because tzayid was in his mouth (G.25:28 (Genesis 25:28)). Esau is a predator with the catch still in his teeth.
Esau was not the first. The word is introduced with Nimrod, the Torah’s first hero, a man who made sport of hunting things weaker than he was (more on Nimrod in Wrapping My Head Around Child Sacrifice):
He was a mighty hunter by the grace of G-d; hence the saying, “Like Nimrod a mighty hunter by the grace of G-d.” (G.10:9 (Genesis 10:9))
Tzayid is the word of the apex predator. Nimrod and Esau share it – and nobody else in the Torah earns it.
Esau’s animal impulses lead him to act instinctively and urgently. Look at what happens when he comes in from the field:
Once when Jacob was cooking a stew, Esau came in from the open, famished. And Esau said to Jacob, “Give me some of that red stuff to gulp down, for I am famished”—which is why he was named Edom. (G.25:30 (Genesis 25:30))
“Gulp down,” הַלְעִיטֵנִי, is a word found nowhere else in the Torah. It is how an animal eats. Esau’s hunger must be sated now.
And now look at the letters. Red is אָדֹם – an aleph followed by דָּם, dam, blood. Esau says it twice, (ha-adom ha-adom), “this red, red.” And the name he carries forever after, אֱדוֹם, Edom, holds the same letters. Jacob may not even have made a red dish. But Esau sees it as red, as bloodlike, as containing the life force he believes he must have in order to survive. He says so himself: “I am at the point of death.” (G.25:32 (Genesis 25:32)).
The famished hunter does not wait. He must eat to save his life.
Why blood? Because the Torah tells us, again and again, that blood is the life:
But make sure that you do not partake of the blood; for the blood is the life, and you must not consume the life with the flesh. (D.12:23 (Deuteronomy 12:23))
The Torah first says this to Noah: But flesh with its life, which is its blood, you shall not (G.9:4 (Genesis 9:4)), a verse I explored in Creative Conundrums: Tazria. And look at what comes two verses later:
Whoever sheds human blood, by human [hands] shall that one’s blood be shed; for in the image of G-d was humankind made. (G.9:6 (Genesis 9:6))
Now look at the letters again. Esau’s הָאָדֹם, ha-adom, is spelled exactly like הָאָדָם, ha-adam, “the man”: ה-א-ד-ם. By the time Esau speaks, ha-adam has already appeared 35 times in Genesis – and nowhere more pointedly than here, where דָּם and הָאָדָם stand side by side. Esau grabs at ha-adom, the blood-red, and in doing so he trades away ha-adam, the human being made in G-d’s image. The very letters warn him.
Here is where the linkage within the words becomes essential.
The noun tzayid appears eight times in seven verses of Genesis – twice for Nimrod, and the rest for Esau. The verb, לָצוּד, “to hunt,” appears three times, all for Esau (G.27:3 (Genesis 27:3); G.27:5 (Genesis 27:5); G.27:33 (Genesis 27:33)). And then the words disappear. No more hunters and no more hunting in the rest of Genesis, all of Exodus, or the first sixteen chapters of Leviticus. Until both words come back, side by side, in a single verse. And when they do, we are presented with a commandment:
And if any Israelite or any stranger who resides among them hunts down an animal or a bird that may be eaten, that person shall pour out its blood and cover it with earth. (L.17:13 (Leviticus 17:13))
Look at the Hebrew: yatzud tzeid … damo. Tzayid and dam, together. The two words that define Esau – one in his trade, the other hidden in his name – meet in exactly one mitzva. And the very next verse spells out why:
For the life of all flesh—its blood is its life. Therefore I say to the Israelite people: You shall not partake of the blood of any flesh, for the life of all flesh is its blood. Anyone who partakes of it shall be cut off. (L.17:14 (Leviticus 17:14))
The Torah does not forbid hunting. Even when we hunt like Esau or Nimrod, we moderate our behavior. We do not act like ravenous animals. We stop. We pour out the blood. We cover it. We are patient. Esau says “let me gulp it down.” The Torah says “pour it out.” Esau takes the אָדֹם into himself; we return the דָּם to the earth.
There are two reasons for this, and both connect back to Esau.
First, we pour out the blood because it is meant to give the earth an aliyah. The animal’s life force goes back to the earth it came from, and when the animal has served a higher purpose than merely dying in nature, the earth itself is elevated (I wrote about this in Pour Out the Blood: Equal and Opposite).
Second, we do not eat blood because we do not want to absorb the soul of the animal within us. The blood is the life force, so taking it in leads to animalism. We are not supposed to aspire to becoming more like an animal (The Symbolic Importance of Blood in the Torah).
Which links right back to Esau, who is as close to a talking animal as the Torah gives us. He has tzayid in his mouth. He gulps. He insists on acting like a starving animal by absorbing food that he sees as akin to blood – because, he says, he is dying!
Esau gives us the example to not follow.
So this is Esau’s contribution to Jewish law, just as Jacob made his (Jacob’s Contribution to Halacha). The words themselves tell us where to look: wherever tzayid and dam meet, the Torah wants us to remember Esau – and do the opposite.
P.S. This example of Jewish Law that stems from events in the Torah joins many others we have collected! (Top-Level: How the Torah’s Events Lead to the Commandments).