Jacob's Stew
Genesis 25: 29 reads: Once when Jacob was cooking a stew, Esau came in from the field and he was famished. Esau said to Jacob; “Let me eat some of that red stuff, for I am famished!”
The common consensus among the biblical scholars I am familiar with is that the ‘red stuff’ was in fact a red lentil stew. I have pondered the makeup of this stew over many years in many different contexts. While living in Saskatchewan I helped with the lentil harvest. Vast 160 acre fields of lentil were swathed, combined and trucked directly to the elevator or to bins for storage in hopes of a higher price somewhere down the road. I drove truckload after truckload of lentils from the combine to the elevator or granaries.
Once established in Oregon I decided to grow the red lentil myself as a lentil stew was, and remains, a savoury dish that my family enjoys. I planted a 50 foot row of red lentils.
They grew easily and with great vigour. But oh the misery when it came to harvesting!
You see, the red lentil is like a pea. It grows in a pod…but only two lentils per pod! This meant that I had to harvest them when they were dry and then thrash them out by hand. What a job! And my 50 foot row gave me about 3 quarts of dried lentils. I was thinking, “Ok, so those lentils that Jacob used in his stew were pretty hard to come by…a precious commodity that had to be used sparingly. It’s not like he could go to his mother Rachel and say, “Hey, mom, I want to make a lentil stew. Where do you keep the lentils?” and then procede to add a quart of lentils to his boiling water.
Shift gears to the English broad bean that is showing up in your boxes. My research suggests that this bean originated in the Middle East arund 6000 b.c. and subsequently spread into Turkey, India, China, and the Far East…eventually spreading westward into present day Europe. I think it a very sustainable proposition that Rachel had quite a few more broad beans in her larder than lentils and in fact that ‘red stuff’ that so tempted Esau was laced with a generous amount of broad beans.
The Old Testemant writers had a fascination with red. In Numbers 19 a red heifer is specified for a purification offering. In the vivid vision recorded in Zechariah 1, the prophet is recorded seeing a man riding on a red horse. Jacob cooks ‘red stuff’. Red is significant beyond question but it seems to me more as a colour than as a substance; i.e. it is the red…not just the heifer that matters…it is a red horse…not just any horse. It is a red stew…not just any stew. My point in all of this is to simply argue for the probability that the story of Jacob’s Stew, as it was passed on from generation to generation was most likely a broad bean stew with a few red lentils added but the fact of the ‘redness’ dominates because of the importance of the colour red.