When we left off last time, Isaac had gone on to be with the Lord and his sons Esau and Jacob took care of his funeral and burial together. Before continuing on with the study of Jacob's life, the author of Genesis tells us about the large family of Esau. Genealogies can seem a bit dry to us if they are not our own, but the Bible includes this record of Esau's family for at least two reasons. One, when the nation of Israel later comes out of Egypt to take over the promised land, they will be forbidden to drive out any of the descendants of Esau. This genealogy list will help them to know who his descendants are. Second, this genealogy proves that God kept His word that He would make Esau fruitful and prosperous even though he is not the one who inherited the birthright and the covenant blessing that the Lord swore to Abraham..
"This is the account of the family line of Esau (that is, Edom)." (Genesis 36:1) The tribe of Esau and the region they inhabited was known as Edom. We sometimes find the Bible using the names of Esau and Edom interchangeably.
"Esau took his wives from the women of Canaan: Adah daughter of Elon the Hittite, and Oholibamah daughter of Anah and granddaughter of Zibeon the Hitite---also Basemath daughter of Ishmael and sister of Nebaioth." (Genesis 36:2-3) There are some discrepancies between the names of Esau's wives here in Genesis 36 and the names of his wives in Genesis 26 and Genesis 28. In the earlier chapters of Genesis we were told that he married two Canaanite women: Judith the daughter of Beeri the Hittite and Basemath the daughter of Elon the Hittite. When he realized how much it displeased his parents that he married pagan women, he tried to placate them by taking a third wife who was Mahalath, the daughter of Ishmael and the sister of Nebaioth.
Scholars have several theories regarding why we find these discrepancies. One is that the women went by more than one name or changed their names. It's not uncommon for Bible characters to undergo a name change. The Lord Himself changed Abram's name to Abraham, Sarai's name to Sarah, and Jacob's name to Israel. If Esau's Canaanite wives converted to the God of Abraham they may have taken on a new name to reflect their new identities. It was also common in those times to be called more than one name if you were living very closely with people of another language and culture. The nearby tribe who spoke a different language might call you something other than what the people of your hometown called you. It was also common for cities, water wells, rivers and streams to be called by more than one name. Each tribe might have their own name for different places. We've already found Jacob changing the name of Luz to Bethel, but that doesn't mean the tribes in the area didn't keep on calling it Luz. In the Bible we are usually going to find it referred to as Bethel by the descendants of Jacob, but the Canaanite people likely didn't know or care why Jacob called the place "House Of God" and I'd be willing to bet many of them stuck with the name of Luz.
Another theory is that Esau married more than just the three wives we've previously been told about. This is especially likely if some of them were not fertile. If some of his wives did not produce children we would not expect to find these wives listed in the family tree. For example, if the Judith mentioned in Genesis 26 never had children, that explains why she isn't mentioned here in Genesis 36 as a wife of Esau who bore him children.
Another theory is that early translators of this section of our chapter were working with a very fragmentary portion where part of the words were missing in verses 2-3. In Genesis 36 we are told that Basemath was the daughter of Ishmael but earlier in Genesis we were told that Basemath was a Hittite woman and that the name of Ishmael's daughter was Mahalath. If portions of the sentences found in verses 2 and 3 were missing, the translators would have had to make their best educated guess as to how the pieces were connected. This might have ended up in Basemath being connected with the wrong father.
We really have no clear answer, scholars have debated this for centuries, and we won't come to any satisfactory answer for it in our study today. I think the main thing to keep in mind is that this discrepancy doesn't alter anything whatsoever about the foundations of our faith. If someone transposed a name or two of Esau's wives, or if he had more than just three wives, or if his wives went by more than one name, it makes no difference in the gospel message that saves our souls. It changes nothing about who God is and it changes nothing about the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. I think we can regard it as an interesting puzzle but in no way do I feel it constitutes a "falsehood" in the Bible. If a mistake was made with these women's names it was unintentional and it makes no difference in the long run.
We don't need to worry that the Bible contains errors, for whenever there is an unclear word in the original language or wherever a portion is missing in the original text, it always appears to be non-essential small words or small group of words or a discrepancy in the name of a person or place. We've already seen some examples of why a person might be called by something different or why a place might be called different names by different tribes. Some Bibles print in italics the words the translators had to guess at, and usually those are connecting words such as "a, an, the, and, but" and so on. None of these missing fragments do any harm to the doctrine of the Bible and none of them alter the gospel message in any way. In fact, the New Testament was written in Greek (the language most of the developed world was using at the time) and the books of the New Testament were widely distributed even in their early years while most of the developed world was under the rule of the Roman Empire and when a person could safely and easily travel throughout the empire. Because the books of the New Testament were hand-copied and distributed over and over, translators really didn't have too many fragments to deal with. If a portion of one of the copies of the Apostle Paul's letters was missing, for example, a translator could compare it to another copy that was in better shape. There were no printing presses back then, and a copyist had to do all the work by hand, but still the written accounts of the gospel and the letters of the various apostles were well known and were being circulated.
It took a fair amount of time to deal with our subject today and we will need to take tomorrow's session to look at the remainder of Esau's family tree, but I was not going to gloss over the fact that Esau's wives are called something different here than they were earlier. Some of the commentaries I consulted completely skipped over any discussion of verses 2 and 3, I suppose because they didn't want to deal with them, which is understandable. But if you'd noticed their names were different, and if I didn't try to provide and explanation for that, I wouldn't be doing a very thorough or honest job with this Bible study. We don't have to be afraid of puzzling over things or asking questions. When we do have to delve deeply into something that confuses us, we usually come away with a better understanding of how the world worked in the Bible days. And even when we don't find a clear answer to our question, we still find that the puzzle doesn't alter anything regarding the Lord's plan of salvation for us. It doesn't change the gospel message at all. Because of that, our faith need not weaken when we are faced with things we don't quite understand.
No comments:
Post a Comment