The story of Jacob and Esau (Genesis 26:34-8:22) remains a puzzle to readers with respect to acts of the characters involved. What readers might identify in this story as acts of gross treachery which cannot be by passed by our contemporary legal and cultural norms seem to have received God’s approval.  In an attempt to resolve this mystery, scholars have, for long developed various methods of reading and interpretation of this text. How successful this has been remains uncertain.

My research focuses on three of the many methods (literary, text-syntactical and cultural-anthropological) of reading the above text with the challenge to determine how they can interact in order to bridge the gap between them and to offer a better understanding of this story.