The Kings of Edom Before Israel Had a King

Edom had kings when Israel had none. That fact sits in Genesis (36:31) like a splinter: these are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom before any king reigned over the Israelites. Eight kings. Eight deaths. A procession of rulers in the land of Esau, passing the throne not from father to son but from city to city, chosen and buried and replaced, while the descendants of Jacob were still a tribal confederation with no throne at all.

The Book of Jasher, a Second Temple-era chronicle that fills in the spaces Genesis leaves empty, names the last of these kings and gives him a story. His name was Saul, chosen from the city of Pethor on the river, a young man of beautiful eyes and comely aspect. The children of Esau sent for him when their previous king died in the eighteenth year of his reign, buried in the temple he had built for himself as a royal residence. Saul reigned over all the children of Esau in the land of Edom for forty years. He outlasted every political arrangement around him.

The Book of Jubilees, composed in the second century BCE and preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls, provides the fuller list of these forgotten kings. It names them in careful succession: Balaq son of Beor, then Jobab son of Zara of Boser, then Husham of the land of Teman, then Hadad son of Bedad, each one reigning and dying and being replaced by someone from somewhere else entirely. No dynasty. No continuity. The Edomite kingship moved like water finding a new channel after each dam broke.

What Jubilees preserves that Genesis only implies is the theological weight of this sequence. Israel had been promised a kingdom since the days of Abraham (Genesis 17:6). That promise passed through Isaac and Jacob and the twelve tribes. But the kingdom did not come first to Jacob's line. It came first to Esau's. The older brother, who had sold his birthright for a bowl of red stew, who had wept when the blessing went to Jacob, whose descendants had been called Edom ever since, the land of red, those people had eight kings rise and fall before Israel appointed a single judge.

The Book of Jubilees names seven of the eight Edomite kings in its list. Each one reigned and died and was replaced by someone from a different city entirely. No son inherited his father's throne. The throne moved: from Danaba to Boser to Teman to a city near the river, from name to name, each ruler chosen for reasons the text does not explain. The Edomite kingship was real and functioning and entirely without the dynastic principle that would eventually make David's throne lasting.

Rabbinic tradition noticed this and refused to let it go without comment. The sages argued that Esau's line was given its fulfillment early precisely because the promise it had inherited was smaller. Esau got his kingdom now. Jacob's line would get theirs later, and it would last. That reading is consoling, but the Jasher account does not offer consolation. It simply records: while Israel's children were making bricks in Egypt, while Pharaoh was demanding that any brick found deficient in a man's daily labor be replaced with his youngest son, while the tribe of Levi alone stood apart from the forced labor because they had foreseen the trap from the beginning, the eighth king of Edom sat on his throne in the city of Pethor and reigned for forty years.

The name Saul will recur in Israel's own story, centuries later, when the tribes finally demand a king of their own. The first king of Israel will also be named Saul. He will also be chosen partly for his appearance, a man head and shoulders above his peers (1 Samuel 9:2). He will also reign and be replaced. The echoes are not coincidental. The traditions that preserved the Book of Jasher understood that history runs in patterns, that the stories of Esau's line and Jacob's line rhyme across centuries, and that the eight forgotten kings of Edom were the shadow of a story that Israel had not yet lived.

The apocryphal tradition that preserved both the Jasher account and the Jubilees king list was doing something deliberate with this material. It was insisting that Israel's lateness was not failure. The eight kings of Edom had their glory, brief and unrepeated. The promise to Jacob's line was a different kind of promise, one that did not begin until it was ready to last.

The last of those Edomite kings, that Saul from Pethor by the river, ruled his people for forty years and died, and was buried, and is remembered only in the genealogical lists of a people who were not his people. His name was taken up by another kingdom, in another land, centuries on. Whether that constitutes a kind of immortality or simply the way history recycles its material is a question the ancient scribes did not answer.