Isaac favors Esau to be the next head of the household so Jacob and his mother Rebekah set up an elaborate con to get Isaac’s blessing for Jacob in stead. Since Isaac’s eyes are bad by the end of his life, they’re able to put some animal pelts on Jacob’s skin so he seems more hairy and less delicate, and then send him into his father’s tent while Esau’s out hunting. Isaac unknowingly hands over the keys to the head tent to the wrong son. When Esau get’s back, he’s understandably pissed, so pissed in fact, that Rebekah decides to send Jacob away to Paddan Aram, back where their family had originated, to find himself a bride from among her people, and, by the way, no hurry coming back.
Esau begs Isaac for another blessing so he gets kind of a shitty one about serving his brother until he gets tired of it and then throwing off his yoke. When he hears that Rachel sent Jacob to Paddan Aram to get a wife, he realizes how much his mother doesn’t like Canaanite omen, like the two he married. Ever the good son, he goes to see uncle Ishmael to take a third wife from his people, who were also basically Isaac’s people and therefore I’m sure seemed just as good as the women back in Paddan Aram, which, by the way, is in northwest Mesopotamia.
On the way north Jacob has a dream in which God tells him that he’s getting the inheritance of Abraham, that he will have lots of relatives and his decedents will get all this land eventually. The fact that this actually worked out so well for Jacob is really weird. It seems like God was really lax with Abraham and his first few descendants, so I guess it’s possible that God would have just gone along with whatever Isaac had said. The alternative is that this is some kind of lesson about how being tricky and lucky like Jacob is better than being earnest and hard-working, albeit perhaps a little slow, like Esau. Either way, Jacob sounds like an asshole, and if I remember his story correctly, it’s only going to get worse.
Once Jacob got to Paddan o’ rama he met Laban’s daughter Rachel and fell in love. Laban was his relative so he was okay with Jacob marrying Rachel, but first he wanted him to work with the flocks there for seven years. Jacob was pretty sure he would get the shit kicked out of him by his large, angry brother if he went home right away anyway so that suited him fine.
After seven years there was a glorious wedding ceremony and raucous wedding night after which Jacob realized that he’d been hoodwinked and somehow married Rachel’s older sister Leah. It wasn’t customary in that place to marry off a younger sister before the older was married. Apparently it’s also not customary there to mention that to anybody who might want to marry a younger sister either, or to look at the woman your marrying until after the ceremony and first couple rounds of copulating.
No harm done though, Laban said Jacob could have Rachel too, but it would cost him another seven years of work with the flocks. Again he agreed, but this time at least he got to marry Rachel at the beginning of the seven years in stead of having to wait until after. He liked Rachel more, obviously, even though she was barren and Leah kept giving him sons. After producing four sons to Rachel’s zero and still not winning over the affections of Jacob, she gave up, and stopped having children.
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