Esau’s Choices

Last updated:

18-May-2022 at 17:47

(biblechronology.net/EsauChoices.html)

Esau’s Wives

In the book of Genesis, in two different places it makes it clear that Esau had three wives, two of whom were Canaanite women, and the third a daughter of his uncle Ishmael, Abraham’s son. It explicitly makes clear that his marrying the Canaanite women displeased his parents: Genesis 26:35 “They were a source of grief to Isaac and Rebekah.” It also makes it clear that it took a while for Esau to realize how much it displeased them, some 37 years in fact! We see this in Genesis 28:6-8:

6 Now Esau learned that Isaac had blessed Jacob and had sent him to Paddan Aram to take a wife from there, and that when he blessed him he commanded him, “Do not marry a Canaanite woman,” 7 and that Jacob had obeyed his father and mother and had gone to Paddan Aram. 8 Esau then realized how displeasing the Canaanite women were to his father Isaac;

His solution to this problem is rather strange, though it fits in with his general approach to life, which included selling his birthright for a bowl of stew (Genesis 25:27-34), and the fact that he was clueless about the effect his marrying Canaanite women would have in the first place. And his solution is par for the course:

9 so he went to Ishmael and married Mahalath, the sister of Nebaioth and daughter of Ishmael son of Abraham, in addition to the wives he already had.

It is not clear why he thought it would help to add a more acceptable wife to the unacceptable ones, besides the fact that Ishmael’s offspring were not really much of a better choice than the Canaanites, given Ishmael’s history with God’s chosen line through Isaac (e.g. Genesis 21:1-20). But he was clueless about what really mattered to his parents or to God.

However, the problem is that the accounts of his wives are confusing, both as to their names and their ancestry. The following chart shows all of the information we have about them. Because of these apparent inconsistencies, various commentators have suggested that errors entered into the Scripture text in these accounts, since obviously (to them) the various descriptions cannot be reconciled.

	Married	Genesis 26:34	Genesis 28:9	Genesis 36:2-3	Genesis 36:(20-21),24-25
Wife #1	in 1966 B.C., age 40	Judith the daughter of Beeri the Hittite		Oholibamah the daughter of Anah [and] the [grand]daughter of Zibeon the Hivite	Oholibamah the daughter of Anah (son of Zibeon son of Seir the Horite)
Wife #2	in 1966 B.C., age 40	Basemath the daughter of Elon the Hittite		Adah the daughter of Elon the Hittite
Wife #3	soon after 1929 B.C., age 77 or more		Mahalath the daughter of Ishmael…, the sister of Nebaioth	Basemath, Ishmael’s daughter, the sister of Nebaioth

However, careful study reveals that all of the inconsistencies are only apparent, not fundamental.

First of all, each wife seems to have two names. Worse yet, two of them who are clearly not the same woman share the same name: in one account Ishmael’s daughter is called Basemath, and in another Elon’s daughter is called Basemath. But by looking at their parentage, it becomes clear that they should be arranged as in the table above. Wife #2[1] is clearly the daughter of Elon the Hittite, and wife #3 is clearly the daughter of Ishmael and the sister of Nebaioth. So even though they each have two names, the correspondences between the two lists are clear. Individuals in the Bible often had two names, so by itself this fact is not significant.

But the problem is with wife #1. There seems to be no correspondence whatsoever between the information in Genesis 26:34 on the one hand and Genesis 36:2-3,24-25 on the other. In fact the three passages give three different tribal ancestries for her: Hittite, Hivite, and Horite! However, again it turns out that the inconsistency is only apparent. This wife was clearly a Horite, based on Genesis 36:24-25, which is within a section dealing strictly with Horites. The Horites are only associated with Seir, which was south of the Dead Sea, later a part of Edom. So why would her father and grandfather be identified as Hivites in Genesis 36:2-3, and her father as a Hittite in Genesis 26:34 (assuming Judith the daughter of Beeri the Hittite is even the same person, but see below)? However, it seems that the terms Hittite and Hivite were both sometimes used generically, essentially as synonyms of Canaanite!

We find that the Hivites are found all over Canaan, in southern Canaan in Gibeon (Joshua 9:3-7, 11:19), in central Canaan in Shechem (Genesis 34:2), and far to the north in Lebanon, from Mount Hermon to Lebo-Hamath (Joshua 11:3, Judges 3:3). Once this term is paired with Canaanites as if they were synonyms (2 Samuel 24:7), and in most of its other uses it is simply found in the list of peoples who made up the Canaanite people.

And as for the Hittites, the main area of the Hittites[2] proper in Canaan seems to have been the Hebron area, at least according to Genesis 23 and 25:9-10, though earlier in Genesis 14:13 the inhabitants of the area are called Amorites rather than Hittites. Then Genesis 27:46 (ESV) says:

Then Rebekah said to Isaac, “I loathe my life because of the Hittite women.[3] If Jacob marries one of the Hittite women like these, one of the women of the land, what good will my life be to me?”

At this point Isaac and Rebekah were living in Beersheba, which unlike Hebron was not a Hittite area, and they probably had been living there since before Esau’s first marriages 37 years earlier (see Bible chronology main page), so the women around them were not Hittites, but simply Canaanites. And just like the term Hivite, in most of its other uses it is simply found in the list of peoples who made up the Canaanite people.

Keil and Delitzsch also propose that Hittite is being used here as a synonym for Canaanite, saying, “Hittite is used in Genesis 26:34 sensu latiori for Canaanite.” However, they suggest that Anah’s father Zibeon may indeed have been a Hivite in the strict sense who moved to Seir and became a Horite by association, and I suppose this is possible, and this would explain the distinct descriptions within the same chapter.

But even if Hittite can be considered a synonym of Canaanite in Genesis 26:34, how do we reconcile the fact that none of the information in Genesis 26:34 about wife #1 matches any of the information in Genesis 36 about her? Well, if we dig a little deeper it turns out that we do find a match. In Genesis 36:24 (ESV) it says:

…he is the Anah who found the hot springs[4] in the wilderness, as he pastured the donkeys of Zibeon his father.

Now it turns out that Beeri is an unusual and uncommon name, which means “my well”. Ellicott and the Pulpit Commentary have suggested that this could be interpreted as “well-finder”, and the Pulpit Commentary matches this up with what Genesis 36:24 says about Anah to suggest that these are two names for the same person. Keil and Delitzsch make the same association, giving the definition “spring man” for Beeri. R. A. H. Gunner in his article on Anah in The New Bible Dictionary also makes this association with Beeri, saying that the name “commemorates the discovery of the hot springs”.

Esau’s Move to Edom / Seir

Another somewhat surprising choice Esau made was to move from Canaan to the Mount Seir area, south and slightly east of the Dead Sea. Later this became the heart of the nation of Edom, which was named after Esau, from his nickname Edom, which meant “red”, from Genesis 25:25,30. It is clear that he was already living there when Jacob returned from Canaan in 1909 B.C., as we can see in Genesis 32:3. It is also clear that Jacob knew he was living there, since he sent him a message there. But the story in Genesis 27 of when Jacob deceived Isaac to receive Esau’s blessing in 1929 B.C. gives the impression that he was still living with or near his parents, even though he already had his own family. So he must have made the move sometime in the intervening 20 years, though we have no additional information to pin it down. (Genesis 36:2-6 suggests that he did so after he married his third wife, but since this probably took place soon after Jacob left for Haran in 1929 B.C., as we saw in Genesis 28:6-8 above, this doesn’t help much.)

To make things more confusing, Genesis 36:6-8 says:

6 Esau took his wives and sons and daughters and all the members of his household, as well as his livestock and all his other animals and all the goods he had acquired in Canaan, and moved to a land some distance from his brother Jacob. 7 Their possessions were too great for them to remain together; the land where they were staying could not support them both because of their livestock. 8 So Esau (that is, Edom) settled in the hill country of Seir.

But when Jacob left for Haran he had no livestock, and it is clear that Esau made the move before Jacob returned from Haran with his great wealth in livestock. So there does not seem to be any moment when the situation in verse 7 would have existed. However, both Barnes and Keil and Delitzsch suggest that Isaac’s possessions already belonged to Jacob as the heir. Barnes says, “What remained in the hands of Isaac was virtually Jacob’s, though he had not yet entered into formal possession of it,” and Keil and Delitzsch say, “after founding a house of his own, when his family and flocks increased, Esau sought a home in Seir, because he knew that Jacob, as the heir, would enter upon the family possessions.”

It is also clear that Isaac made a move in the years Jacob was in Haran, from Beersheba, where he lived from before 1966 B.C. until sometime after 1929 B.C., to Hebron, where Jacob was reunited with him around 1900 B.C. and settled down (see supporting references on my Bible chronology page). However, there is no way to know who moved first, or if it sort of happened at the same time. More than likely it was not Isaac who moved first, since this would mean Esau would have had to move twice, once to Hebron and then again to Seir.