What Colour Were Jacob and Esau?

The easiest way to discover your own iMA High Colour is to take the iMA Questionnaire by clicking on the button below.

what colour are you?

Discovering another person's iMA High Colour is more challenging. If you can have that person agree to take the iMA Questionnaire, great!

If not (which is usually the case), you need to figure it out for yourself. Like anything, it takes practice but it gets easier the more you do it.

People give clues as to their iMA High Colour. If you observe them carefully, these clues will jump out at you and their iMA High Colour will become clear.

In this series of Biblical iMA posts, I have taken a number of well-known characters from the Bible and used what we know about them (either from the biblical text itself or on the basis of Jewish traditional interpretative texts) to determine their iMA High Colour to the best of my ability.

I hope that you will find these interesting and that they will serve as examples as to how to figure out the iMA High Colour of another person.

What Colour Were Jacob and Esau?

When we are first introduced to Jacob and Esau, the Bible tells us that already in their youth. Esau was “a bunter, a man of the field” whereas Jacob was “a simple or pure person, dwelling in tents.” We are then told that Isaac loved Esau whilst Rebecca loves Jacob.

(As I mentioned in my piece on Rebecca, she and Isaac seemed to cooperate little if at all as regards parenting.)

Esau was a man of action - assertive and goal-driven.

Like his mother Rebecca, Esau was a High Red.

High Reds are known for their impatience, their dominance and their determination. They can often come across as gruff and rude. Esau certainly fit the bill.

Jacob was a quieter character. The Talmud interprets his being a man who “dwells in tents” as meaning that he was involved in contemplation and study.

Jacob quietly and non-assertively digested his grandfather’s teachings and understood his grandfather’s mission intimately.

Jacob was a High Blue.

Esau had no time for spiritual missions. It was all about immediate satisfaction and the pleasures of this world for Esau.

Again according to Jewish oral tradition, the pot of lentil stew that Jacob was cooking on the day that Esau sold him the birthright was being prepared for the mourners returning from Abraham’s funeral. Esau could have cared less.

Isaac and Rebecca each saw in the son that they favoured qualities that they lacked - an example of how opposites attract.

Isaac thought that Esau was an assertive, go-getter and thought that this quality was what was required to lead the family of Abraham into its next period of existence.

Rebecca saw Esau’s dangerous lack of learning, people-skills and inspiration. These were qualities possessed in abundance by Jacob, qualities that the family of Abraham required in a leader.

It is interesting to note that Laban - Rebecca’s brother - was also a High Red (as I will discuss in my upcoming piece on Jacob and Laban).

High Reds often have difficulty getting along with each other because they both want to be the boss.

I suspect that Laban held sway at home, being that he was a man in a male-dominated society.

I suspect too that Rebecca saw in her son Esau everything that she didn’t like about her brother and that this contributed to her poor relationship with Esau.

Esau was a High Red. Jacob was a High Blue.

What colour are you? Click below to find out.

what colour are you?

A Great Place To Start