Week 2 Genesis
Chapter 36 is a list of mostly names of Esau’s clan members.
If you weren’t reading through you’d likely skip the chapter.
There are pencil lines crisscrossing the pages where I’ve tried connecting the names sometime before. Today I get a pad of paper and on the left write Esau-Adah, in the middle Esau-Oholibamah, and on the right Esau-Basemath. Esau’s three wives.
Below that I write Eliphaz (left), J-J-and-K (middle), Reuel (right). Esau’s sons.
Then the thing pyramided out dizzyingly into grandsons and beyond. So I quit writing.
There’s one thing here that I’ll try to keep in mind.
After Isaac died Esau & Jacob put their bad blood behind them and lived in the same territory for a while – brothers, and maybe kind-of friends. Eventually the rangeland couldn’t support all their livestock and so: Esau…went into another land away from his brother Jacob.
Esau moved away, far enough away that his clan pretty much completely disconnected from Jacob’s: so Esau lived in the hill country of Seir; Esau is Edom. My bible map shows that Edom is a big sprawling territory south of the Dead Sea. I’ll try to keep that in mind.
I check my word book and see that Edom is mentioned more than eighty times after Genesis 36. Esau and Edom and Seir are different names for the same group. I remember them from before. They don’t just quietly disappear.
They’re important enough that I’ll try to keep them in mind.
Notes: quotes from Genesis 36:6, 8 (NASB)