The symbolism of the hunter in scripture

Genesis 25:27 draws an interesting contrast between Jacob and Esau: Esau is a man knowing hunting, a man of the field; but Jacob is a “perfect” man, dwelling in tents.

Most Bibles will not translate the word tam as perfect, but that is what it means; for more on this, see:

Jacob was a perfect man (not a plain or quiet one)

The point is that Jacob is like God himself, establishing an ordered center for human existence; man is made as the image of God, the point at which heaven and earth are joined — so the tent of meeting, the tabernacle, the temple, is the axis mundi: the center of the world, where man mediates between God and creation. Here we have Jacob dwelling in a tent, just as God does later in Exodus. By contrast, Esau is out in the field, in the periphery. While Jacob looks forward toward Moses speaking with God “face to face” at the tent of meeting, Esau looks back to Nimrod, who was a hunter “in God’s face” as we would say in English (Hebrew: li-pene; Gen 10:9) at the founding of Babel; which in turn looks even further back to Cain, who was driven away “from being in God’s face” (Hebrew: mi-li-pene; Gen 4:16), after hunting his own brother “in the field” (Gen 4:8).

This is why in scripture, the hunter is a cursed man: a man with no place, made to integrate into untamed nature; rather than a man who tames nature and integrates it into his place — which is the task of dominion that God gave Adam, to act as his image.

And this is also why there is a paradox with the hunter: he is both a wanderer, and a city-builder. As soon as Cain is driven out into the field, away from God, he builds a city; and Nimrod, the hunter, builds a tower and a city to exalt his own name, and goes on to be an empire-builder. Their placelessness drives them to grasp for an axis mundi of their own making, lest their name, their identity, be dispersed into the chaos of the periphery. They are driven away from the true axis mundi, the integration point of the world where God’s name holds all things together — so they must forge their own counterfeit version, exalting their own name, “lest they be scattered over the face of all the land” (Gen 11:4). This is the origin of the demonic world order which the kingdom of Christ breaks in pieces; they are imitating their father the devil:

And thou saidst in thy heart: I go up to the heavens; I raise my throne above the stars of God, and I sit in the mount of meeting in the sides of the north; I go up above the heights of thick cloud; I am as unto the Most High. Only—unto Sheol thou art brought down, unto the sides of the pit. (Is 14:13–15)

Rather than planting roots, cultivating, tending, producing; a hunter tears out, captures, destroys, consumes. But ultimately, because of how consumption works — he is not infinite and neither is creation, and he won’t consume God — he consumes himself. He is under the dominion of time, as a symbolic category opposed to space; i.e., unstable, always responding to changes within and without. To counteract this, he seeks to gather everything to himself; to retake dominion with himself as the point of stability. But he is still under the dominion of time, so it doesn’t work. The more he accumulates, the less control he seems to have. He can’t hold it all together.

This extends well beyond city-building, of course. All kinds of empire-ish concepts are drawn into this pattern. For instance, because of the analogy between idolatry and adultery, the characteristics of a hunter naturally extend to sexuality. He is a self-idolater, and so he is also a natural adulterer. The same paradox of placelessness causes him to consume women. Hence Lamech, the fifth in line from Cain, takes two wives. Five is the number of power; the hand, with its five fingers, is how we grasp. When the power of Cain is fully grown in the world, it issues in polygamy: in grasping for women. And later kings and emperors accumulate entire harems, seeking to gather up all the power of sexuality into a single place to exalt their own name and propagate their own seed, at the expense of mankind in general.

Christ, by contrast, inverts this pattern by gathering all people to himself, yet integrating them into a single, pure bride. He builds a garden city, and extends it out into the world — until there is no place left for hunters.