Was Esau's kiss when he met Jacob sincere?

Centuries of rabbinic commentary have raised an eyebrow at Esau's kiss. But the text itself does not.

Five rapid verbs and no editorial comment

וַיָּרָץ עֵשָׂו לִקְרָאתוֹ וַיְחַבְּקֵהוּ וַיִּפֹּל עַל־צַוָּארָיו וַיִּשָּׁקֵהוּ וַיִּבְכּוּ

va-yarotz Esav liqrato va-ychabqehu va-yipol al-tzavvarav va-yishaqehu va-yivku

«And Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him, and they wept.» — Genesis 33:4

Five verbs in a cascade — he ran, he embraced, he fell, he kissed, they wept — with no narrator commentary inserted between them. The biblical narrator is not shy about flagging deception when it is present; Genesis is full of it. Here the narrator says nothing. What the narrator does say is the last verb: va-yivku, "and they wept" — a third-person plural. Both brothers wept. That is the narrator's chosen ending to the scene.

The scribal dots are a later mark, not the original text

In the Masoretic text — the standard Hebrew Bible produced by Jewish scholars in the early medieval period — there are small dots placed above the consonants of the word "he kissed him." These marks (called puncta extraordinaria) were a scribal notation used to flag a word as unusual or uncertain. Rabbinic tradition read them as casting doubt on Esau's sincerity.

But those dots are not original. They are an editorial addition by scribes who came long after the text was written. They are not part of the consonants themselves — the actual letters of the Hebrew word — and no pre-Christian manuscript contains them.

The Septuagint offers a pre-Christ reading

The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made around 250 BC — roughly a millennium before the surviving Masoretic manuscripts — renders the word plainly: ephilēsen, "he kissed him," with no qualifications, no hesitation, no hint that the kiss might be theater. The oldest surviving Greek witness to this passage reads it as a genuine kiss.

The man who had vowed to kill runs to embrace

Esau had "hated Jacob" over the stolen blessing and vowed to kill him the moment Isaac died (Genesis 27:41). That vow stood for twenty years. What Genesis 33:4 records is not a formality — it is the collapse of a twenty-year threat into a run across a field. The same man who had reason for murder becomes the one who runs. The five verbs are not a protocol of diplomatic courtesy; they are the body's response to seeing someone you thought was gone.

For the full account — the scribal dots, the Septuagint evidence, and the two brothers weeping — read The Brothers Reconciled.