1So Isaac called Jacob and blessed him and charged him, and said to him, “You shall not take a wife from the daughters of Canaan. 2“Arise, go to Paddan-aram, to the house of Bethuel your mother’s father; and from there take to yourself a wife from the daughters of Laban your mother’s brother. 3“May God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and multiply you, that you may become a company of peoples. 4“May He also give you the blessing of Abraham, to you and to your descendants with you, that you may possess the land of your sojournings, which God gave to Abraham.” 5Then Isaac sent Jacob away, and he went to Paddan-aram to Laban, son of Bethuel the Aramean, the brother of Rebekah, the mother of Jacob and Esau. 6Now Esau saw that Isaac had blessed Jacob and sent him away to Paddan-aram to take to himself a wife from there, and that when he blessed him he charged him, saying, “You shall not take a wife from the daughters of Canaan,” 7and that Jacob had obeyed his father and his mother and had gone to Paddan-aram. 8So Esau saw that the daughters of Canaan displeased his father Isaac; 9and Esau went to Ishmael, and married, besides the wives that he had, Mahalath the daughter of Ishmael, Abraham’s son, the sister of Nebaioth.
Esau is more or less getting what he deserves for taking his birthright so lightly in this passage, and Jacob is reaping the rewards of valuing the inheritance. Esau could have moved on, and tried to make something of himself, and try to get back in the good graces of his parents, but that apparently didn’t suit Esau very well, so he goes out of his way to make things worse. He marries another Canaanite woman, just to spite his parents. If you had asked Esau about all this before the ‘birthright incident’, he probably would have laughed at you. But he showed poor judgement in one thing (and it probably didn’t start with that either), and now he’s making serious life choices that are totally rebellious (and thus, by definition, sinful). We’ve seen this lesson several times. Don’t let sin even have a foothold.