A little bit of Bible sleuthing...

So in Genesis 33:4, Esau behaves in a way that is echoed by the Father in Luke 15, in their response to the returning (wayward) son - Gen 33 it's Jacob coming home, Luke 15 it's the younger brother, the prodigal.

The connection in the LXX (the greek translation of the Old Testament) to the greek in Luke 15 is quite marked - both contain this exact phrase: ἐπὶ τὸν τράχηλον αὐτοῦ καὶ κατεφίλησεν αὐτὸν.

So the Pharisees (the elder brother in the parable) refuse to do what Esau did (and what the father in the parable does) in welcoming the returning repentant one home. The Pharisees despised Esau and his descendants (the Edomites) yet Esau's actions were more in line with those of Jesus than theirs were.

It's the 2nd time in Luke a despised outsider has acted more righteously than the in-crowd (the Samaritan in Lk. 10). And Jacob then tells Esau that his face is like the face of God - the face of one who welcomes in mercy. 

Music and Song in the Bible

 Mark Futato:

One thing is clear when you look at God’s revelation, from Genesis to Revelation, that whenever really big things happen in the history of redemption, there’s music, there’s poetry - for example, when the Man meets the Woman for the first time in the Garden of Eden we have the first poem; at the time of the Exodus we have poetry; during the height of King David’s reign we have poetry; when Christ comes we have poetry; at the end of the Book of Revelation we have poetry, we have music. And I think part of the reason for this is that God not only wants to engage our minds and our wills but he wants to capture our emotions as well - and music and poetry have a way of capturing the heart, they have a way of capturing the mind, they capture the will, they capture the emotions, they capture the intellect. And so I believe that God has put a lot of his revelation, for example the whole book of Psalms, in musical poetic form because it captures the whole person.

Dr. Mark Futato