Genesis 36:20–30
The Bible4Jesus.com Podcast
About this episode
It is a common temptation for the modern Christian, when undertaking to read through the Bible, to treat a passage like this one as a patch of bad road. You hit the gravel of the genealogies, and you speed up, hoping to get back to the smooth pavement of the narratives or the epistles as quickly as possible. But we must resist this temptation with all our might. There are no parenthetical asides that were included by mistake. The same Holy Spirit who inspired the soaring poetry of the Psalms and the dense theology of Romans also inspired this list of names. Our task is not to skip over what we find difficult, but to dig in, trusting that there is gold to be found. This chapter, Genesis 36, is dedicated to the descendants of Esau, the brother of Jacob.