The Torah opens in a world where inheritance belongs to the firstborn — where privilege is order, and order is destiny. Yet from its very first stories, the Bible breaks that rule.

Cain, humanity’s firstborn, murders his brother and loses everything. Abel, the second, dies without heirs. Humanity continues through Seth, the third son. The pattern is set. Abraham, father of monotheism, is not his father’s eldest. His younger son Isaac inherits the covenant, and Isaac’s younger son Jacob inherits it again.

By the time Israel becomes a nation, the inversion is complete. The Jewish people today descend from Levi and Judah — the third and fourth sons — not from Reuben, the firstborn. A book born in a culture of primogeniture systematically overturns it.

Why?

The Bible begins by showing the cost of bad choices. Adam and Eve possess everything, yet choose wrongly. The Fall from Eden inaugurates the central lesson of Scripture: that moral choice determines inheritance. Paradise is not lost by fate but forfeiture.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote that this pattern is not incidental but revolutionary.

“The Torah is not a chronicle of power. It is a critique of power.”
— Covenant & Conversation: Genesis

The Bible’s rejection of firstborn privilege is a moral protest against the idea that greatness is inherited. Sacks called it “the divine displacement of power” — God’s way of declaring that leadership is not a birthright but a calling.

Each time the younger supplants the elder, it signals that the future is not fixed. The world may honor the order of birth, yet God honors the order of the heart. Greatness is not bestowed by lineage but achieved through moral courage.

This inversion gives agency to every person. The Torah’s message is that destiny is not preordained. We are not bound by family rank or societal hierarchy. Cain’s fall was not inevitable. Abraham could have ignored God’s call. Jacob could have reconciled instead of wrestled. Every figure in Genesis acts — and through action, alters the story of the world.

Sacks extends the idea to Israel itself:

“God’s chosen people are not the privileged people; they are the choosing people — those who freely choose to live by the call of holiness.”

We are all born into someone else’s order. Or disorder. The question is whether we accept it, or, like our forefathers, we choose holiness — and through that choice, earn that inheritance.