Wrapping Up Esau, Introducing Joseph

Genesis 36-37

            Another genealogy… There sure are a lot of them in Genesis. This one is wrapping up the account of Esau, who isn’t mentioned again in Genesis after chapter 36. There are two things we should note here. First, the Lord continues to keep his promise to Abraham that he would have descendants like the stars in the sky. Esau is Abraham’s grandson, and even though he is not the carrier of the promise of a Savior he does become the father of a nation. Second, these genealogies serve to explain things come up later in the story. For example, there’s an overlap between some of the descendants of Esau and certain place names (Teman becomes the name of a prominent town in the land of Edom). Or, Esau’s grandson through a concubine was named Amalek. The Amalekites were a particularly difficult foe for the Israelites during the exodus—500 or 600 years after Esau. Are we to think that this illegitimate offspring of Esau was the source of those troublesome people? Maybe… (The territory of Amalekites was named in the days of Abraham (Genesis 14), but that may have been an anachronism.) Remembering that Genesis was put in written form by Moses several hundred years later, it’s not unlikely that some of the later history is in view as a kind of way to explain why things are like they are in that latter day.

            If another genealogy is terribly interesting, just wait until you start reading about Joseph! The end of the book of Genesis reads like a soap opera!

            Jacob wasn’t a great husband, loving Rachel more than Leah. (Yes, I know, Leah was foisted on him by his conniving father-in-law, but still, he didn’t seem to treat her very well.) And Jacob isn’t a great dad, doting on Joseph to the exclusion of Joseph’s 10 older brothers. Genesis 37 tells us that Jacob loved Joseph more than the others and that he gave him what NIV translates as an ornate robe. We’re not entirely sure what that robe meant; the phrase only comes up one other time in the Old Testament to refer to a robe that King David’s virgin daughters wore. Maybe it indicated royalty, so Joseph’s brothers took it as a sign that dad was going to skip all of them with the inheritance and go to Joseph. Whatever it meant, it was clearly a sign of favoritism. And Joseph’s brothers resented it.

            Joseph’s dreams didn’t help. Dreaming that you would rule your brothers is one thing; telling those brothers—who already hate you—is another. The boy was, as my wife pointed out, either really arrogant or kind of stupid, a conclusion supported when he tells Jacob that the old man will bow down to him, too.

            This is when things get really out of hand. Jacob sends Joseph to his brothers, and it seems likely that his brothers took this as Joseph spying on them. So, you know, naturally, they decided to kill him. To their credit, they were convinced not to kill Joseph, but their alternative wasn’t much better: they sold him into slavery and faked his death.

            One interesting note (and I wish I could say I discovered this for myself, but someone else pointed it out) is that they stripped Joseph of his robe. Not extraordinary in itself; they needed some way to prove to their father Jacob that Joseph was really dead. But clothing figures prominently in Joseph’s story. He’s going to lose a cloak again to Potiphar’s wife (ch. 39); he will be dressed in clean clothes when he leaves prison (ch 41); and he will be dressed in fine clothes when he enters Pharaoh’s service (also ch. 41). It reminds me (and this is my insight) that we are clothed in Christ’s own righteousness (Galatians 3:27, Ephesians 4).