Father of Edom

Genesis identifies Esau with Edom, the hill country south and east of the Dead Sea, and traces its ruling clans back to him in a genealogy of its own. He settles in the hill country of Seir, marries Hittite and Ishmaelite women against his parents' preference, and by the time Jacob returns from twenty years abroad Esau has become prosperous enough to ride out with four hundred men, not as a threat but as an escort. Jacob approaches bowing seven times and braced for violence over the stolen blessing; Esau runs to him, embraces him, and weeps on his neck, and the text gives no sign that the old grievance survives the reunion.

The brothers bury their father Isaac together at the end of his life. Because Edom and Israel remain rival, sometimes hostile neighbors for the rest of the biblical period, later prophetic and rabbinic literature reads the twins' relationship as a template for a much longer national history, and Genesis Rabbah in particular develops Esau into a figure standing for the nations that oppose Israel, a reading well beyond anything the patriarchal narrative itself states about him as a person.