Odd twinship in the line to kingship

Overturning the firstborn

It is well known that the role of the firstborn in the ancient Near East was of great cultural, social, and legal significance. It carried responsibilities, privileges, and symbolic meaning. We can see this in the plague of the firstborn, with the Egyptians being hit where it hurt.

But in the Torah narratives, especially in Bereshit, this whole notion of the firstborn being the one to get the inheritance, and the priority in the lineage, is constantly being overturned.

Already in the Cain and Abel story, G-d favours Abel. Arriving at the beginnings of the Jewish nation, Abraham may be the firstborn – at least he appears so, according to the verse listing Terah’s sons. However Isaac is not, and neither is Jacob. The son of Jacob who receives the kingly line –

Judah – is not. Joseph is a kind of firstborn, of Rachel, but his sons Menashe and Ephraim have their birth order reversed by Jacob when he blesses them and crosses his hands to privilege Ephraim the younger.

This is the bloodline leading down to King David – who himself is very much the youngest son, so much so he is overlooked initially for the anointing by Samuel.

Odd twin behaviour at birth 

Going one step further, though: what is interesting within the ancestors of King David is that we find two sets of twins, both of which exhibit strange behaviours at birth. In Toldot we have Jacob coming out of the womb grabbing Esau’s heel. The symbolism of might vary but one reasonable possibility is that this seems to be an attempt to overtake him in birth order.

Jacob buys the birthright off Esau in a not particularly nice way. (G-d does not reverse this, but Jacob is punished by having Lavan deceive him later by giving him Leah the firstborn instead of Rachel the younger). What this means is that in the case of Jacob and Esau, unlike with Isaac or Judah, the legacy and privilege doesn’t cleanly and clearly pass to a younger sibling. Rather, the firstborn status is muddied. Here, we have a biological firstborn, but his younger brother has managed to grab that status off him, purchased by a bowl of soup. Perhaps had Jacob let things unfold naturally, he would have received the divine legacy as the younger son, in some obvious way. Instead we have a somewhat muddy and ambiguous thing going on in terms of who is the real firstborn, with a proactive coup.

Fast forward to the second set of twins: those Judah has with Tamar. Also a strange story, she is married off to his two sons and they both die, and he doesn’t give her to this third son as he ought to. So she dresses as a prostitute and becomes pregnant from him. She gives birth to twins but here too something ambiguous happens. At the birth, one baby puts his hand out, and the midwife immediately ties a piece of red string around it to mark that he is the firstborn. But then he puts his hand back in again and then the other comes out. So who is the firstborn here? Seemingly the other, Peretz, who actually came out first (his name means “breach” as he broke through). Yet Zerach has a red string around his little wrist, which normally indicates a firstborn. (His is the firstborn hand!) So once again, something indistinct and unclear has occurred.

Wave/Particle Theory

Something about this reminds me of wave/particle theory in physics. Both progenitors of David – Jacob and Peretz – are the firstborn and yet simultaneously in some aspect not the firstborn.

I feel as if this is a legacy passed down to King David, to be able to be contradictory things simultaneously: a dedicated servant to God who is also able to take another man’s wife and try to send him to his death. A warrior and a poet. Our most celebrated King is like the wave/particle. He is born of ambiguity and he reminds us that life is not clear cut, not always “either/or” but sometimes ‘also this and that”.