Genesis36chapter 36

Genesis 36:1

This is the first of two toledoth headings inside one chapter, which happens nowhere else in Genesis. The book has run this order before: Isaac and Ishmael buried Abraham together at 25:9, then Ishmael's generations were given at 25:12 and closed off so that Isaac's could open at 25:19. Esau and Jacob buried Isaac together at 35:29, one verse before this one, and Esau's generations are given here so that Jacob's can open at 37:2. Missler built his reading of the book on these eleven headings, each one narrowing the account until it rests on a single family.

Genesis 36:2-3

Esau's wives come from the peoples Abraham sent a servant hundreds of miles to avoid, and the third of them, Bashemath, is Ishmael's daughter. The line set aside at 21:12 and the line passed over at 25:23 marry into each other here. The names do not agree with those given at 26:34 and 28:9, and Clarke reports the difficulty plainly instead of smoothing it, observing that the same people in Scripture often go by more than one name.

Genesis 36:4-5

Five sons are born to Esau, and the text is careful to say where, in the land of Canaan, because he is about to leave it. Jerome notes that the Eliphaz named first shares his name with the friend who speaks to Job, and Job's Eliphaz is called the Temanite, which is the name of this Eliphaz's own firstborn in verse 11. The connection is an old one and often repeated, and it rests on names rather than on anything Genesis says.

Genesis 36:6-8

Esau leaves Canaan to Jacob, and the reason given, that their riches were more than that they might dwell together, is close to the words used of Abram and Lot at 13:6. This is the man who had said in his heart that he would slay his brother at 27:41, who wept on Jacob's neck at 33:4, and who had just buried their father alongside him. Genesis opened with one brother killing another in a field, and Deuteronomy 23:7 will tell Israel not to abhor an Edomite, for he is thy brother.

Genesis 36:9-11

The second heading names him differently from the first, where he was a man with wives and sons; here he is the father of a nation with a country under him. Deuteronomy 2:5 has God telling Israel not to meddle with his people, because mount Seir was given to Esau for a possession, so Esau holds land by grant and holds it already. The fathers of Israel own two plots in Canaan, a burial cave bought for four hundred shekels at 23:16 and a field at Shechem bought for a hundred pieces at 33:19, and Hebrews 11:13 says they died in faith without receiving what was promised.

Genesis 36:12

Amalek is born in this verse, and it is the first time the name appears in Scripture. Amalek attacks Israel at Rephidim within a few generations at Exodus 17:8, the LORD swears war with Amalek from generation to generation at Exodus 17:16, Israel is told to remember what Amalek did at Deuteronomy 25:17, Saul loses a kingdom over sparing Agag in 1 Samuel 15, and Haman the Agagite is still at it in Esther. Missler's method of watching where the Bible first names a thing pays here as plainly as anywhere. Timna is sister to Lotan the Horite by verse 22, so Amalek is half of the people already living in the land.

Genesis 36:13-14

these are the sons of Reuel: The grandsons are counted as carefully as the sons, and within two generations Esau's household has become clans. Jacob at this same moment has twelve sons, no ground of his own, and a famine coming. Paul reaches back past all of it to the word spoken before either brother was born, that the elder shall serve the younger, and sets it beside Malachi's line about the two men at Romans 9:12 and 13.

Genesis 36:15-19

The word the King James translators give as duke stands for a clan chief, and Clarke traces the English back to the Latin dux, a leader. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown compare these men to the sheikhs of the East rather than to any European peerage, and count fourteen of them alive at once. Duke Korah is listed among Eliphaz's sons in verse 16 though verse 14 makes him a son of Aholibamah, and Kennicott judged the line an addition to the text while Gill allowed for a grandson carrying the same name.

Genesis 36:20-23

Genesis lists the people who held Seir before Esau reached it, and gives them the same care it gives the covenant family. They are first named at 14:6 among the peoples Chedorlaomer struck, and Deuteronomy 2:12 says the children of Esau succeeded them and dwelt in their stead. Verse 22 quietly closes a circle, since Lotan's sister is Timna, the woman who bore Amalek to Esau's firstborn.

Genesis 36:24-25

One line of story breaks into the register, that Anah found the mules in the wilderness while feeding his father's asses, and nobody is certain what he found. Jerome says the question was much debated among the Hebrews and that the Greek and Latin writers say nothing about it, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown report that several old versions read water springs instead of mules. What the next verse does settle is that Aholibamah, one of Esau's wives, comes out of this Horite house, so Esau's line and the people of the land are one household by the end of the chapter.

Genesis 36:26-30

The Horite chiefs carry the same title given to Esau's, so two sets of dukes hold one country at the same time. Gill notes that these Horite dukes ruled together rather than one after another, unlike the kings named next. Uz in verse 28 gives its name to the country Lamentations 4:21 assigns to the daughter of Edom, and Job's own land is called Uz, which is part of why the older writers kept looking for Job somewhere in this chapter.

Genesis 36:31-32

Eight kings reign in Edom before Israel has one. On the line about Israel's kings, some read it as Moses writing in the light of the promise that kings would come out of Jacob at 35:11, and others as a note set down later by a scribe, and the text itself does not say which. Wesley reads the whole list as a trial to Israel's faith, that they heard of Edom's kings while they were slaves in Egypt, and Henry observes that little beyond names is recorded because the history outside the covenant line carried the book no further.

Genesis 36:33-36

Some have taken this Jobab for Job himself, a reading Jerome reports from the Hebrews and from the close of the Greek book of Job, and Clarke answers that there is no proper proof of it. The named cities, and Hadad's victory over Midian in the field of Moab, give the list the texture of real chronicle rather than a bare register. Bozrah returns at Isaiah 63:1, where one comes from Edom with dyed garments from Bozrah, and Henry takes that figure to be Christ coming back from judgment.

Genesis 36:37-39

Not one of these kings hands the crown to a son, and the throne moves from city to city instead, so Edom's kingship is taken or chosen rather than inherited. The last king, Hadar, is the only one whose wife is named, along with her mother and her grandmother, and the list stops without recording his death. Gill notes that Rehoboth by the river was placed near the Euphrates by the Targum and inside Edom by Jerome, and the two readings have never been settled.

Genesis 36:40-43

The chapter closes with dukes again after the kings, and this second list runs by places rather than by fathers, so the names are territories as much as men. Henry reads the order as a fall, that sin brought Edom from kings to dukes and from crowns to coronets, while Clarke takes these to be the chiefs holding the country at the time Israel came out of Egypt. The last words leave Edom settled in the land of their possession, and the next heading in the book opens the account of Jacob, whose sons will end it as strangers in Egypt with one bought grave behind them in Canaan.