After Jacob is reunited with Esau, against all odds they hug, kiss, and weep together as brothers should, so why did Jacob bow down 7 times to Esau, a complete rasha-criminal representing ra-evil? After having defeated Esau’s angel, Jacob knew that he could overpower Esau. What is the number 7 telling us here?
Traditionally, Esau’s angel is depicted as a seven-headed snake, representing this world’s 7 forces of impurity. Torah’s answer here requires some gematria, starting with these 5 words: Yitzchak-Isaac, Hashem’s 4 letter name (the tetragrammaton), Ya’acov-Jacob, Esav-Esau, and tameh-impurity.
The name of Jacob’s father, Isaac has the numerical value of 208, which equals 8 x 26. The numerical value of Hashem’s name, “yud-kay-vav-kay” is 26. So Isaac’s name equals 8 times Hashem’s name, his name contains 8 elements of g-dliness.
Jacob’s name equals 182 or 7 x 26. When Isaac gave his blessings to Jacob, he bequeathed to Jacob seven of his “yud-kay-vov-kay”s, seven forces of holiness, and seven of his 26’s.
So Jacob received seven out of eight “26” in Isaac’s name, but what happened to the one remaining “26”? That was given to Esau.
But, Esau’s name does not equal 26. It equals 376, so where did the extra 350 come from? Well, 350 equals 7 x 50, and 50 is the numerological value of the Hebrew word for tameh-impure, so Esau equals: 1 x Hashem’s name 26 + 7 x “impure” 350 =376
Each time Jacob bowed, he provided to Esau one of his forces of holiness, each of which neutralized 1 of his impure forces. After 7 bows, all the impurity in Esau had been neutralized, and all that was left in Esau was one holy, godly “26”. Jacob thus succeeded not only in overpowering his brother but in returning him to “goodness”.
That is how he cut off the seven heads of the snake, Esau was now ready to do teshuva, and Jacob should have given Dinah to him as a wife, a great mistake he didn’t as it resulted in Esau returning to his path of wickedness. Rome and Christianity came forth from that mistake but part of Esau (Rome/western civilization) will do Teshuvah in the near future.
By Yoeri Schepens
Sources: @internet and gematrix.org gematria calculator.
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