One point of controversy begins with the rather laconic statement in Genesis 36:31 concerning the Kingdom of Edom, whose kings reigned in the land of Edom before any king reigned over the sons of Israel. This did not attract much notice until surveys and excavations in modern Jordan began to tell a different story, one apparently at odds with the Biblical text. If this Biblical statement were true, then the kings of Edom would have necessarily antedated Saul, Israel’s first king, who ruled in the 11th century BC. The problem herein lay with the fact that no excavated site produced material consistent with state formation in the area formerly known as Edom.
These broad conclusive statements were not limited to Bible encyclopedias. None other than Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University contends in his recent book The Bible Unearthed (2001; co-authored with Neil Silberman) that archaeology has made it clear there were no real kings and no state in Edom before the eighth century BC because earlier large settlements and fortresses were lacking. Notice Finkelstein’s reliance on negative (absence of) evidence in arriving at his conclusion.
Recent discoveries in the Wadi Faynan, however, have now turned the consensus concerning state formation in Edom upside down.
Here a 24-acre site is being excavated that includes numerous mounds of slag, evidence of a large-scale industry that persisted for several centuries, presumably under Edomite supervision.
Four room house at the Edomite site of Kh. En-Nahas dating as early as the 13th century BC. This and other findings at Kh. En-Nahas demonstrate that Edom was an organized political entity prior to the formation of the United Monarch of Israel...Most of the pottery can be dated to the early Iron Age II period (tenth–ninth century). There are also forms indicative of earlier periods, including locally made hole-mouth jars known as Negebite Ware. A number of imported pieces include Midianite Ware and Cypro Phoenician Black-on-Red Ware, the former of which was produced as early as the 14th century.
Not all the sites in Edom had or have been subjected to excavation. It underlines the need to temper the conclusions drawn from the absence of archaeological data, particularly in an area as little understood as Biblical Edom. With the new findings from Khirbet en-Nahas, we can once again assert that absence of evidence is most definitely not indicative of evidence of absence, wisdom that archaeologists would be well advised to observe in the future." ABRNow these are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom
before any king reigned over the children of Israel;
1 Chronicles 1:43
