#Genesis 26:34-35

Esau marries a couple of Hittites

Two nearly throwaway verses - as if Esau’s personal life, or the names of his Hittite wives, are interesting - but maybe a useful place to talk a little about how we flatten the text, and how we impose ideas on texts.

As always, we have a tendency to read canonically, to flatten the various biblical perspectives into one consistent universal biblical stance. It’s natural enough, but it undermines our ability to recognize in the text, and in the culture that produced it, diversity of thought.

We end up saying things like “in ancient Israel, marrying outside the clan was unacceptable” or “the Canaanites were viewed as morally corrupt” or whatever. It’s not that those positions don’t exist in the Bible - it’s that they aren’t necessarily universal.

And right here is a fun case where I think our understanding of the text is conditioned by all sorts of such universals, not all of them accurate.

The redaction of the text has left these two verses just sitting there, distant from their natural and original continuation.

This is among the more obvious source-critical disjunctures. Esau marries the Hittite women, then it’s totally ignored until 27:46, when it comes right back, totally oblivious to the entire narrative of Jacob tricking Isaac that comes in between.

Everyone knew that Jacob went to Aram to get married; but why? For J, he’s running away from Esau with Rebekah’s help; for P, he’s going to find a wife from his relatives, with Isaac’s blessing. Okay: so these two verses at the end of Gen 26 are P.

In their canonical setting, they’re almost contextless. Esau married a couple of Hittite women, and Rebekah wasn’t into it. We import all sorts of stuff in here: that exogamous marriage is bad, that Hittites are bad, that Esau is bad.

And I think exactly none of that is true for P. Exogamous marriage isn’t bad in P - Rebekah herself wasn’t from the family line when she married Isaac. (J makes her kin, but not P - she’s just an Aramean.) P never denigrates marrying outside the family.

Nor does P have any problem with the Hittites. These are the same nice folks who sold Abraham the burial plot for Sarah in Gen 23. That and this are the only contexts they’re mentioned in in P. P doesn’t do the list of Canaanite peoples to be dispossessed.

And P never prohibits intermarrying with the indigenous Canaanites even after the conquest, as we find elsewhere. (P doesn’t really talk much, or at all, about how the conquest will go, or what will happen to the Canaanites. It certainly doesn’t worry about marrying them.)

So what’s the problem with Esau marrying Hittites? I don’t think P has any problem with it at all. It’s Rebekah who has the problem. And we’re conditioned as canonical readers to trust her, mostly on the basis of the next chapter, where she helps screw Esau over just for fun.

P doesn’t give us reason to align with her. She may be xenophobic, but it’s not at all clear that Isaac gives a damn. In fact, it’s pretty clear that Isaac wouldn’t have intervened at all if Rebekah hadn’t complained.

And of course we’re conditioned to read everything Esau does as bad, because it’s Esau. But P likes Esau just fine, thanks. No bad blood between him and Jacob - just two happy, healthy, devoted sons of Isaac. (Watch what happens when Esau realizes that he’s married “badly.”)

Esau, like Ishmael, is totally respected in P. Ishmael gets an explicit promise of nationhood, but Esau implicitly gets the same - his lineage, royal even, will be detailed in Gen 36. It’s only when we import other readings of Esau into this text that he becomes blameworthy.

All of that to say: so much of the value of reading the sources separately is to be able to see how they differ, and how values and perspectives that appear universal are in fact nothing of the sort. All of which makes the Bible, and ancient Israel, that much more interesting.