A bowl of red stew cost Esau his birthright. Jacob gave him “bread and pottage of lentiles,” he ate, got up and left, and Genesis closes the scene with a blunt verdict: “thus Esau despised his birthright.” Lentiles turn up as plain, honest food elsewhere. Friends bring them to David and his weary company at Mahanaim, and Ezekiel is told to bake them into bread with wheat, barley and other grains. A field full of them even becomes the setting for one of David’s mighty men holding his ground against the Philistines in 2 Samuel 23.
4 verses
Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.
Brought beds, and basons, and earthen vessels, and wheat, and barley, and flour, and parched corn, and beans, and lentiles, and parched pulse,
And after him was Shammah the son of Agee the Hararite. And the Philistines were gathered together into a troop, where was a piece of ground full of lentiles: and the people fled from the Philistines.
Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentiles, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof, according to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon thy side, three hundred and ninety days shalt thou eat thereof.
Matthew George Easton, 1897
(Heb. ‘adashim), a species of vetch (Gen. 25:34; 2 Sam. 23:11), common in Syria under the name addas. The red pottage made by Jacob was of lentils (Gen. 25:29-34). They were among the provisions brought to David when he fled from Absalom (2 Sam. 17:28). It is the Ervum lens of Linnaeus, a leguminous plant which produces a fruit resembling a bean.