Is There Brawn in Gilead? The Figure of Esau in the East

Abstract: Characters in the ancestor narratives of Genesis, and especially in the Jacob cycle, are often modeled on the places and peoples that are thought to descend from them. Both Esau and Jacob, as national progenitors of Edom and Israel, occupy similar spaces to their later polities, and behave in similar ways. Yet, strangely, Jacob encounters a threatening Esau at the Jabbok River, far from where the Edomites would have reasonably interacted with the kingdom of Israel. In this article, I look at the literary history and narrative description of Esau and his relationship with the lands east of the Jordan. Before he was made the father of Edom, the character of Esau reflected monarchic-period projections of the broad networks of mobile groups involved in movement throughout the eastern highlands, and which were presented as threatening to inhabitants east of the Jordan.