The Kings of Edom Before Israel Had a King

A Throne That Would Not Stay in One Family

The verse sits in Genesis like a stone in a road: 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, chosen and buried and replaced, the throne passing not from father to son but from city to city - Bozrah, Temani, Avith, Masrekah, a river city, a place called Rehoboth in the field - while the descendants of Jacob were still a tribal federation with no throne, no palace, no royal bloodline at all.

Edom had kings when Israel had none. The first country to get there was the country descended from the firstborn who sold his birthright for soup.

The Last King of Edom Before Israel's First

The Book of Jasher names the last of the eight kings and gives him a life. His name was Saul, chosen from the city of Pethor on the river. He was young when they chose him, with beautiful eyes and a comely face, the kind of young man that communities send for when the previous king has died and they need someone who looks the part. He reigned over the children of Esau for forty years.

He outlasted every political arrangement around him. He buried the six kings who had come before him. He watched the political structures of the region shift around Edom and kept his throne while others lost theirs. He died eventually, as the list requires, and Baalhannan son of Achbor reigned after him, and then Hadar of the city of Pau, who was the last in the list.

The Full Procession

The Book of Jubilees, composed in the second century BCE and preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls, extends and fills in the Edomite kinglist with fuller genealogies and dates. It names them in careful sequence: Balaq son of Beor, then Jobab son of Zara of Boser, then Husham of the land of Teman, then Hadad son of Bedad who smote Midian, each one reigning and dying and being replaced by someone from somewhere else entirely. The Edomite kingship was not dynastic. There was no royal family. There was a position, and whoever held it was king, and when he died they found someone new.

The Jubilees account suggests that the Edomites had a coronation protocol but not a succession protocol. A king was chosen for his qualities. The throne was not heritable. This arrangement produced eight kings in what was probably several generations, a succession that kept the land governed without allowing any single family to accumulate the kind of power that would have given Edom the stability of a true dynasty.

What Israel Was Doing During All of This

While Edom was on its fifth or sixth king, the descendants of Jacob were in Egypt. They had gone down in seventy souls during Joseph's years of authority in Pharaoh's court and they had multiplied into a nation under the weight of bondage. They had no kings. They had tribal elders and then, for forty years in the wilderness, Moses. The kingship they would eventually establish - under Saul, the Benjaminite, not the Edomite - came only after judges and prophets and Samuel's reluctant anointing, centuries after Edom had already established and buried its line of city-kings.

The note in Genesis is not accidental. It marks time, the time between Jacob's grandchildren and Israel's first king, and it marks it by contrast with the nation Esau had founded. The country that got the firstborn blessing - or rather, did not get it - had a throne before the country that did. The tradition preserved the list without explanation, leaving it to later readers to decide what to do with the implication.