Genesis 33:5
And he lifted up his eyes, and saw the women and the children; and said, Who are those with thee? And he said, The children which God hath graciously given thy servant. And he lifted up his eyes, and saw the women and the children; and said, Who are those with thee? And he said, The children which God hath graciously given thy servant.
Esau ran to meet Jacob and embraced him and kissed him, and they wept together, and then he lifted up his eyes and saw the women and the children and asked who those with Jacob were, and Jacob answered in humility as his servant that they were the children God had graciously given him. The meeting took place after Jacob's struggle and prayer at Peniel, after he had been met by angels and had received blessing, a changed heart, and a changed name, and it belonged to his coming in peace to the city of Shechem ten or eleven years after his rejoicing under God's blessing at Peniel, with his family beside him.
Jacob met Esau no longer as Jacob the supplanter but as Israel, a prince of God, having wrestled and fully surrendered and received a change of heart and a new name. His rough cunning was gone, he had been changed and refined and was reverenced by all, and he came humble and kind and truly noble, with a heart full of heavenly tenderness and the persuasive power of love. Having power with men because he had power with God, he needed no army against Esau's armed band.
The verse belongs to a genuine reconciliation showing the Lord's power to change men's hearts and to Jacob's miraculous deliverance from Esau by God's protection without use of the sword. Esau's former purpose to take revenge on Jacob for stealing his father's blessing when Isaac died was abandoned and his feelings were greatly changed. His murderous anger found no ground for quarrel but was transformed into tender love and friendliness when he met the converted prince instead of the scheming supplanter, so that enmity and jealousy and hatred no longer separated the brothers. The reconciliation shows forgiveness and calls each reader to examine whether the spirit of forgiveness is in the heart. Afterward the brothers united their grief at their father's death-bed, and when they parted it was only because their possessions were too great and their religious faith was too unlike for them to live together.
By calling the women and children the children God had graciously given him, Jacob acknowledged with his family beside him that his children were gifts graciously given by God. Being now wealthy, he returned to Esau the blessing of possession recklessly sold for a mess of pottage. By calling himself Esau's servant, Jacob used the common Eastern deferential address of an inferior to a superior in polite self-designation, not a claim to be owned. The word servant, evedh, there means only inferiority or political subjection and is applied to all classes of laborers and dependents, so by itself it does not imply a chattel slave bought with money, for Jacob was not Esau's slave and the reverse was true since Esau's brethren were given to Jacob for servants, and having servants does not prove slaveholding and gives no justification for American slavery. Jacob's attitude in meeting Esau with his women and children signifies his mind with reference to his former course concerning the birthright and invites comparison of the lives of Jacob and Esau, showing the difference between them in that Jacob erected altars to the Lord and Esau did not.