They Fought Over Esau's Unburied Body at Hebron

The Burial That Turned Into a Battle

The body of Esau had not yet gone into the ground when the spears came out.

His sons had carried him to Hebron, to the cave at the field of Machpelah, where Abraham and Isaac already lay in the rock. There the sons of Jacob stood waiting, and the old quarrel of the two brothers, the heel and the hairy man, the bought birthright and the stolen blessing, woke again over a corpse that still had not been washed into the earth. No one waited for the mourning to end. The sons of Esau fell on the sons of Jacob in the field, and the field that was meant for burial became a field for killing.

Joseph led his brothers, and his brothers held. They broke the line of Esau's sons and drove them back across the rocks. They seized Zepho, the grandson of Esau, and fifty of his fighting men with him, and bound them, and the war that had begun over a grave ended, that day, with prisoners and a head left in the dust of Hebron.

The Head Stayed in Hebron, the Body Went to Seir

The sons of Esau who survived ran. Eliphaz, Esau's firstborn, gathered what was left of them and lifted their father between them and fled toward the mountains of the south. But the head of Esau did not go with the body. It had fallen where the battle fell, in the ground of Hebron, and there it was buried, in the very field his sons had wanted for him, only a piece of him and not the whole.

The rest of him they carried to Mount Seir, the red country, and laid him in that land of stone and copper. So the man who had sold one birthright lay divided at the last, his head in the cave-country of the patriarchs, his body in the wilderness he had chosen for himself. And the war did not stop because the burial was finished. It had only found its first dead.

The Sand of the Sea Marches on Egypt

Word went out to the sons of Seir the Horite and to the children of the east that Zepho and fifty men were taken, and the country rose. They gathered an army that the old tellers measured the only way they knew how, calling it a multitude like the sand on the shore of the sea, and they turned toward Egypt to break Joseph and free their men.

Joseph did not wait behind walls. He came out with his brothers and with the strong men of Egypt at his back, and the two hosts met near Rameses. When the dust settled, six hundred thousand of the sons of Esau and their allies lay dead in the field. Eliphaz ran again, and Joseph's men chased the broken army as far as Succoth before they let the survivors crawl home into the desert. Twice now the sons of Esau had come for Jacob's house, and twice they had been buried in their own thousands.

The Allies Turn on Each Other in the Wilderness

The sons of Seir looked at what was left of themselves and counted. Their own land had been emptied to fight a war that was never theirs, and they came to the sons of Esau with the bitter arithmetic of it. "You have seen and you know," they said, "that this camp fell on your account, and not one mighty man or one skilled in war is left among us. Leave our land. Go back to Canaan."

The sons of Esau refused. So the country that had marched together against Egypt now tore itself apart. The sons of Esau sent to Angeas, king of Africa, the city men called Dinhabah, and the sons of Seir called in the children of the east and the children of Midian, and they fought through the wilderness of Paran with alliances that shifted and oaths that broke. In the end the sons of Esau won, carried by the soldiers Angeas sent them. Then they turned on the Horites who had once been their hosts and killed nearly all of them, men and women and children together, sparing only fifty boys and girls to keep as slaves and wives.

Why Edom Chose a Foreigner to Rule It

The sons of Esau took Seir for themselves and divided it among their families. But the land they had won was soaked in distrust. They had betrayed and been betrayed, slaughtered their own allies, watched brother turn on brother in the sand. They did not believe one another anymore, and a people that cannot trust its own blood cannot crown its own blood.

So Edom did a strange thing. It refused to be ruled by any son of Esau. It went looking for a stranger instead, and found Bela, son of Beor, a brave and shrewd man out of the people of Angeas, a man with no claim and no kin in the country. Him they made king. They gave him gifts and a palace and a throne, and a foreigner sat over the children of Esau because the children of Esau could not bear to be ruled by one of their own. Bela reigned thirty years, and under a king who shared none of their blood, the red country at last sat still.

The Enmity That Outlived the Grave

Generations down, the seed of that field in Hebron was still bearing fruit. Long after the crossing of the Jordan, war came again to Edom, this time from the sea. Abianus, king of the Chittim, the people of the islands, led a host against the red country, and Hadad the king of Edom went out to meet him. Twenty-two thousand of Edom's men fell. Hadad himself was captured and put to death, and Edom, the text says, could no more lift up its head. The country that had killed its hosts and crowned a stranger became a tribute land, its officers appointed by a king from across the water.

And while Edom bled, Israel was burying its dead in peace. The bones of the twelve sons of Jacob came home to the land of promise, each laid in the portion of his own tribe, Reuben and Gad across the Jordan, Judah near Bethlehem, Joseph in the ground at Shechem that Jacob had bought with his own silver. The one house had a grave for every son in the land of its inheritance. The other had begun in a war over a corpse that was never wholly buried, and the war had never truly ended.