It is one of the hardest lines in the Bible. Read in its own language and its own century, it says something very different from what it sounds like in English.
Why did God hate Esau? In the sense we mean by hate, He did not. “Jacob I loved, Esau I hated” is Hebrew covenant language for choosing one line and not the other, and Malachi said it about two nations, Israel and Edom, centuries after both brothers were dead.
Paul quotes it in Romans 9 to show that God chooses His covenant people by promise and not by birth order or merit. It is not a statement that God despised Esau as a person or sealed his fate before he was born.
A serious Christian tradition reads the verse differently, so we will take it in order: the words, then Malachi, then Paul, then the brothers.
The ordinary Hebrew verb for hate. It can mean hostility, and it also covers the one not preferred.
Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah, and the next verse uses this word for Leah. The King James says hated. The NIV says Leah was not loved.
A man with two wives, one loved and one unloved (King James: hated). The law protects the unloved wife’s son.
The Greek verb in Romans 9:13 and Luke 14:26. Lexicons note that here it carries the Hebrew sense of loving less.
Where English says “I prefer this one,” Hebrew says “this one I love, that one I hate.” It marks which one is chosen. Jesus talks this way too, and the Gospels hand us the translation.
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters … such a person cannot be my disciple.”
“Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”
The Jesus who told us to love our enemies was not telling us to despise our mothers. Matthew shows what Luke means: put Him first.
When the Bible pairs love with hate like this, it usually describes a choice between two, not an emotion toward one.
The line first appears in Malachi, speaking to discouraged Jews back from exile in Babylon.
“I have loved you,” says the Lord. “But you ask, ‘How have you loved us?’ “Was not Esau Jacob’s brother?” declares the Lord. “Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated, and I have turned his hill country into a wasteland and left his inheritance to the desert jackals.”
Malachi 1:2-3Look at the evidence God offers. Hill country. Inheritance. Ruins. This is about land and nationhood. Jacob means Israel, Esau means Edom, and the two men had been gone for centuries. Genesis 25:23 had already told Rebekah that two nations were in her womb, and the history between them was raw.
Israel asks to pass through Edom, calling Edom a brother. Edom comes out armed and turns them away.
Even so, the law tells Israel not to despise an Edomite, because he is their brother. Deuteronomy 2:5 says God gave Esau his hill country as surely as He gave Israel theirs.
When Babylon destroys Jerusalem, Obadiah charges Edom with standing aloof, gloating, looting and handing over survivors. Psalm 137:7 remembers it too.
Edom’s land now lies in ruins, and the prophet tells a doubting Israel that God has not stopped choosing them.
The region carries a Greek name by now. Herod the Great came from an Idumean family, and Mark 3:8 lists people from Idumea among the crowds who came to Jesus.
Brad Anderson of Dublin City University, writing for Bible Odyssey, sums up the way the prophets remember this nation: “Whether deserved or not, Edom is remembered in the biblical record as the sibling who doesn’t live up to family expectations.” That is the tone of Malachi 1.
Malachi 1:2-5 is not about the afterlife of a man named Esau. It is God reminding a discouraged nation that He chose them.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
Paul puts the line in one of his most debated chapters.
“Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad … in order that God’s purpose in election might stand: not by works but by him who calls” … “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”
Romans 9:11-13Christians read this two main ways, and the first deserves to be stated at its strongest.
Paul is talking about salvation. He opens the chapter grieving over Israelites who are cut off. He then speaks of God having mercy on whom He wills. The objections he raises next, whether God is unjust and why God still blames anyone, only make sense if he means God chose individuals for salvation apart from anything in them. Jacob and Esau are the example.
Paul is answering a first century question: has God’s word failed, now that most of Israel is saying no to Jesus while Gentiles pour in? He answers with 9:6, not all who descend from Israel are Israel. God has always chosen His covenant line by promise, Isaac not Ishmael, Jacob not Esau, and He is free to do it again in Christ.
The Calvinist is right about one thing, and it matters. Paul really does say the choice came before the twins did anything, which rules out merit. Where we part ways is on what was chosen.
Paul quotes two verses, and both are about nations. “The older will serve the younger” comes from the oracle that two nations were in Rebekah’s womb. “Esau I hated” comes from Malachi’s word about Edom. And the Jew and Gentile question runs through chapters 9 to 11 until Paul ends with God showing mercy to all. We trace that argument in our overview of the book of Romans.
Our position at Sound of Heaven is that “Jacob I loved, Esau I hated” is covenant language. God chose the line through Jacob to carry the promise that would bless every family on earth, and that promise arrived in Jesus. It is not a verdict on Esau’s soul, and it is not a decree of damnation passed on a baby.
So we say plainly that the reading which makes Esau a man created for rejection is wrong. The oracle said the older would serve the younger, and Esau the man never did. In Genesis 33 it is Jacob who bows to the ground seven times and keeps calling his brother lord. The prophecy was about peoples, and that is how Paul used it.
We also refuse the opposite fix, the one that says God hated Esau because Esau was the worse man. Paul shuts that door himself: before either had done anything good or bad. Jacob was the one who cheated his brother and deceived his blind father. The choice was grace, not reward, which is exactly why it is good news for every Jacob reading this.
And we are honest about what remains hard. Romans 9 speaks of God hardening Pharaoh and of the potter and the clay, and those are strong words. We hold that God is free, and we hold that the God who is free has shown us, in Jesus, what He does with His freedom. He uses it for mercy.
This is the same ground we cover more fully in predestination in the Bible, where election is located in Christ, and in our response to TULIP Calvinism, point by point.
The oracle said “the older will serve the younger.” What actually happens when the brothers meet in Genesis 33?
In the brothers’ own lifetime the roles run the other way. Jacob does the bowing. The words about serving were fulfilled between the nations, which is why Malachi and Paul both read them as being about Israel and Edom.
Genesis gives us a man who is careless, then wounded, then astonishingly gracious. Not a villain.
He comes in starving and trades his birthright for a meal. Hebrews 12:16 holds this up as a warning about treating sacred things cheaply. That is fair, and it is a real lesson. It is not the reason Paul gives for the choice.
Jacob dresses in his brother’s clothes and lies to their father to take the blessing. Esau weeps aloud. His rage afterward is real, and so is the injury.
Twenty years later Jacob comes home terrified, sending gifts ahead to buy peace. Esau does not want them. He tells Jacob he already has plenty, and then he does this:
“But Esau ran to meet Jacob and embraced him; he threw his arms around his neck and kissed him. And they wept.”
Genesis 33:4Jacob then says that seeing his brother’s face is like seeing the face of God. The chosen brother learns something about God’s face from the brother who was not chosen. We tell the rest of Jacob’s side of it in Jacob in the Bible and in the night he wrestled with God.
Some people carry this verse like a stone. They were the less favored child, or they sat under teaching that left them searching themselves for proof they were not an Esau. If that is you, hear this: the verse was never about you, and God is not keeping a list with your name on the wrong side.
The One who is fully chosen is Jesus, and He opens His arms the way Esau did on that road. Anyone who comes to Him is welcomed. If you would like someone to pray with you about it, you can send us a prayer request.
God’s choosing was never meant to shut people out. Abraham was chosen so that all the families of the earth would be blessed through him, and Jacob’s line carried that promise until it arrived in a person.
At the transfiguration the Father calls Jesus His chosen Son. He is the elect one, and everyone who is in Him shares His place. That is why election in the New Testament sounds like invitation rather than exclusion, and why the covenant family by the end of the age was made up of Jew and Gentile together.
And here is the detail that ought to stop us. Mark tells us that people from Idumea, Esau’s own country, came to Jesus with the crowds from Judea and Galilee. The Kingdom Jesus brought is here now, and its door has no family tree posted on it.
Read Malachi as history, Paul as an argument about God’s faithfulness, and Esau’s embrace as a picture of the mercy the whole story was heading toward. For related reading, see what God hates, who the Edomites were, what a sovereign God means and what we believe.
“Esau I hated” is Hebrew for “I chose Jacob’s line,” said by Malachi about two nations and used by Paul about God’s freedom to form His people by promise, and the promise itself is Jesus, whose arms are open to every Esau.
If this passage has troubled you, you are not the first. Send us your questions and someone at Sound of Heaven will walk through it with you.
In the sense English means by hate, He did not. “Jacob I loved, Esau I hated” comes from Malachi 1:2-3, where the subject is two nations, Israel and Edom, many centuries after the brothers died. In Hebrew, pairing love with hate is a common way of saying one was chosen and the other was not, as when Genesis 29:31 says Leah was not loved. Paul quotes the line in Romans 9 to show that God forms His covenant people by promise, not by birth order or merit.
We do not believe it does. Calvinist readers argue that Paul is describing God choosing individuals for salvation, and they point to the objections Paul answers about fairness. But both verses Paul quotes in Romans 9:12-13 are about nations, and his question in 9:6 is who counts as Israel. He is defending God’s freedom to choose a covenant line, now opened to Gentiles in Christ. Nothing in the passage says anything about Esau’s eternal destiny.
Often it describes preference or choice rather than emotion. Hebrew sets strong opposites side by side where English would say more and less. Jesus says in Luke 14:26 that a disciple must hate father and mother, and Matthew 10:37 records the same teaching as loving them more than Him. Deuteronomy 21:15 speaks of a loved wife and an unloved one, which the King James renders hated. Context decides, and in covenant passages hate usually means not chosen.
Genesis tells it honestly. Esau traded his birthright for a meal, and later Jacob, with his mother’s help, deceived their blind father Isaac to receive the blessing. Scripture does not approve of the deception, and Jacob spent years reaping it. Paul’s point in Romans 9:11 is that God’s choice of Jacob’s line was announced before either twin had done anything good or bad, so the blessing rested on grace and promise, not on Jacob being the better man.
Genesis gives a mixed and very human picture. Hebrews 12:16 warns against being godless like Esau, who sold his inheritance rights for a single meal, and his anger at Jacob was real. But Genesis 33 ends the story with Esau running to meet his brother, embracing him, kissing him and weeping, and refusing Jacob’s gifts because he already had plenty. Jacob says seeing Esau’s face was like seeing the face of God. That is not the portrait of a man God despised.