Today, I am reading and commenting on  Genesis 36-38.

I have never understood why this passage contains the genealogy of Edom’s kings.  Today it occurred to me that this might provide information which can be checked against archeological finds.  So, I did a little looking and discovered that, until the late 1990s, the consensus in the field of archeology was that Edom did not exist as a kingdom this early in history.  However, recent finds indicate that there was indeed a kingdom there at the time these kings would have ruled.  Which makes this yet another example where archeologists and historians were convinced that a civilization mentioned in the Bible never actually existed, only to have discoveries confirm that the Biblical account was more accurate than they had wanted to believe.

For a long time I thought that Joseph was a spoiled brat in the account of his behavior before his brothers sold him into slavery, that his brothers’ animosity towards him was partly his fault.  But as I have re-read the passage over the years I have come to the conclusion that he genuinely did not understand that his dreams suggested he thought he would rule over his brothers and father.  The other thing I find interesting is that Joseph’s brothers were pasturing their flocks in the vicinity of Shechem, where a few years earlier they had killed most, if not all, of the men of the town, and Jacob sent his favorite son there without an escort.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.