"These two sons, Esau and Jacob, were very different one from the other. Esau was a big strong man, rough and hairy in appearance, who delighted in all sorts of sport and exercise, especially in hunting. People admired him for his great strength and skill and most of them thought that surely this big, strong man was the one whom God had chosen to be the father of His people. And Isaac himself loved Esau more than he did Jacob, because, now that Isaac was growing old, Esau used to hunt food for him in the forest and would tell him wonderful stories of his strength and skill in catching the deer and other game that he prepared for him for food. But Jacob was very different. He was not above the average man in strength and he had no particular skill in hunting as had Esau. He was a quiet man, who used to sit for hours in his tent, while his flocks were pasturing nearby and think about the things he had learned from his father and mother and from his grandfather Abraham, about how God had made the world, and about how he had told Abraham to leave his country and go to a new land, and, above all, about the promise that God had given to Abraham to make of his descendants a great people. Which of these two sons of Isaac and Rebekah had God chosen to become the father of the Jewish people? Most people, no doubt, thought at the time that Esau was meant, because he was the stronger and more successful in the hunt, but there was one person who thought differently, and that was the mother of these two young men, Rebekah. For she remembered a prophecy that God had told her before either of the two children were born, and this prophecy said, 'Two nations will come from thee and two peoples will be born of thee and one will be stronger than the other, but the elder will serve the younger'."