Another Torah Session--Rebekkah and the twins

We had a very interesting discussion about this parashah, which has a lot of juicy bits. First, I brought up Rebekkah's seeming-identity problem while she was carrying the quarrelsome twins, Jacob and Esau. The commentators saw it as her usual sharp wits working an angle, trying to find out her role in the family drama that was about to unfold, and which she precipitated.
Rebekkah is one of very few women to whom God speaks directly in the Torah. The first was Hagar, the outsider. But I wondered whether it isn't the usual question pregnant women ask themselves, whether they are more than, as Plath put it, "a means." There is nothing in the text to indicate that; it is its usual tacit self, with more lacunae than anything else.
Then we discussed Isaac, who is a nonentity who repeats many of his father's actions and takes none of his own, really. Unlike his father, who fights 7 kings over water wells, Isaac simply moves on when challenged. Some people speculated that he was so traumatized by the binding that he could never take action for himself. But he didn't take action for himself even then, and since was supposed to be at least 30, by the text's chronology, that's kind of odd unless that's just the sort of person he always was.
But commentators believe that Isaac, though no one's idea of a sharp fellow, knows that Jacob is not his favorite son, Esau, but goes along with it. All those folk-tale questions asking Jacob about his identity seem a bit too pointed to be true.
I noted the pattern of the physical man/farmer/hunter and gatherer vs the schemer, familiar from Cain and Abel. Jacob also harks back to his grandfather, Abraham, in his craftiness. There is one member of the group who is very disturbed by this, and by the fact that the text seems to approve it. Of course, overturning the custom of primogeniture (another pattern in the text) is a sign of Judaism's desire to benefit the underdog and to place itself, an embattled nation, in the direct line of destiny, where no one would expect it to be.
As in the start of Genesis, where there were two creations, there are two thefts of Esau's inheritance in this book. The first is even odder than the second because there Esau outright gives it away for a pot of lentils as red as he is. Why then is he so surprised when he loses the rest of his blessing from Isaac?
The characters in Genesis are so well drawn despite the scant detail--perhaps because of it. We can all imagine them, scheming and disfunctional, on some modern-day talk show.