u/Aerialjim

I've always thought of Jacob as being an unethical person, but reading the Old Testament this year has made me realize how much deeper it goes than that. He is a con man who cheated his brother out of his inheritance and then set up a family dynamic, where his wives felt so much pressure to produce male heirs that they started offering other women to help with that. It just seems so much like he built his own cult of trying to produce male heirs.

I try to look at the redemption arc of Jacob, but I just don't see it. There people say that his story is a story of repentance, but what I see is a con man who was under duress and capitulated to his brother once his brother had an overwhelming army that would have killed him. It doesn't look like repentance, to me. It looks like a manipulator who continued to manipulate to save his own life.

It strikes me as odd that God would choose him as someone to bestow all of his promises to, but then it also makes me really uneasy to see the scriptures identify the church as Israel. I cant think of a more peoblematic role model in all if scripture, and it makes me feel icky to think that we named a nation and a lineage after him.

Am i the only person who feels this way on the topic? How do other people justify it?