Genesis 36:1 Now these are the generations of Esau, who is Edom.
It may sound silly to you, but it will take all the time you have to live out your life. So, when we say that “experience is the best teacher,” we need to understand that life is not long enough to learn everything we need to learn on our own. There needs to be a way by which we can learn more than we could learn from our own personal experiences. We need to learn from the lives of others. We need to learn from the Bible.
That is why genealogies, like the one found in Genesis 36, can be such a rich resource to us. They are full of life stories compressed into mere verses. You can see from history what works, what doesn’t work, what honors God, what does not. We can learn from the experiences of other people when we learn from the Bible.
Genesis 36:1 says, “Now these are the generations of Esau, who is Edom.” What follows is the genealogy of Esau. Now, at this point is seems to be much bigger and more impressive than Jacob’s genealogy, but this is the last we hear of Esau’s family as such. There are lessons we can learn from this. Let me give you a couple.
First, you make a name for yourself between the beginning and ending of your life. We read several times of Esau “who was Edom.” The word “Edom” means “red.” Esau was “red” possibly because of his color when he was born, the red pottage he so desperately wanted from his brother, or because of the angry disposition that the Edomites had towards the descendants of Jacob, the Israelites. So, you are making a name for yourself every day. How you live does matter.
Second, things grow. Families grow. Verse 16 says, “In the land of Edom.” We are talking here both of a country and of a nation of people in that country. Edom was a man’s name. Then, the children of Edom, his family, were the Edomites who lived in what became the country of Edom.
Similarly, in Genesis 34:7 it says about the evil done against Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, that the brothers were angry because “he had wrought folly in Israel.” There was no Israel at this point. Israel was a man. It wasn’t a nation, and certainly it was not a piece of ground at that point. So, the children of Israel became the nation of Israel, and the children of Esau became a nation in the land of Edom. These nations took on many of the characteristics of their forefathers. So, things grow, whether you have a family or not.
Third, there will always be someone to follow you. Genesis 36:33 says, “And Bela died, and Jobab the son of Zerah of Bozrah reigned in his stead.” The following verses talk about kings that came from the family of Esau. In each case it says that they reigned, they died, and someone reigned in their stead. It doesn’t matter who you are or how much you accomplish, there will always be someone who will reign in your stead. That is not to discourage you, but to give you some context for life.
Winston Churchill said, “The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” You can’t see what is coming down the pike if you don’t know history. Churchill was a man who was way ahead of his time. He saw ahead of time what was coming because he knew history. Likewise, we look at this genealogy and we see that there were men who lived, reigned, died, and were subsequently replaced. There will always be someone to take your place. That should give us context for our lives.
Finally, we will be forgotten. There are a couple of random events mentioned here. One man found mules in the wilderness. Another man fought Midian in the field of Moab. These are obscure references that none of us remember anymore, but they were things that happened. So, at some point we will probably be forgotten by others, but we will be remembered by God. God knows you to your core. We are reading about people at the very beginning of history, some of the most ancient nations in the world, yet God remembers names. They may be obscure and odd to us, but these are real people who lived, died, and exist somewhere even now.
The point of all these lessons is that it will take all the time you have to live out the life that you have. A wise person will know more than he would otherwise know and will be wiser than he would otherwise be by learning from the lives of others, learning from a source of compressed history and God’s commentary on it. A wise person will learn from the Bible.