people.  On the one hand, the Israelites required a leader who should lead them in the first instance against the Canaanites, in the second against the foreign oppressors who enslaved them from time to time.  On the other hand, the high-priests at Shiloh exercised many of the functions which would naturally have belonged to the head of the tribe.  Neither “judge” nor high-priest was needed in Edom.  There the native population was weak and uncivilised; it possessed neither cities nor chariots of iron, and its subjugation was no difficult task.  Once in possession of the fastnesses of Seir, the Edomites were comparatively safe from external attack.  It was a land of dangerous defiles and barren mountains, surrounded on all sides by the desert.  There was no central sanctuary, no Levitical priesthood, no Mosaic Law.  The “duke” consequently had no rival; the history of Edom knows nothing of judges or high-priests.

The law of evolution, however, which governed other Semitic communities prevailed also in Edom.  The dukes had to give place to a king.  The tribes were united under a single leader, and the loosely federated clans became a kingdom.  As in Israel, so too in Edom the kingdom was elective.  But, unlike Israel, it remained elective; there was no pressure of Philistine conquest, no commanding genius like David, no central capital like Jerusalem to make it centralised and hereditary.  Several generations had to pass before the Edomites were called upon to fight for their independence against a foreign invader, and when they did so the struggle ended in their subjugation.  The elective principle and the want of a common centre and feeling of unity that resulted from it had much to do with the victory of David.

The song of triumph with which the Israelitish fugitives celebrated the overthrow of their Egyptian enemies mentions the aluphim or “dukes” of Edom.  But before the Israelites had emerged from the wilderness the dukes had been supplanted by a king.  It was a king who refused a passage through his dominions to Moses and his followers, and in this king some scholars have seen the Aramaean seer Balaam the son of Beor.  At all events, the first Edomite king is said to have been Bela or Balaam the son of Beor, and the name of the city of Din-habah, from which he came, has a close resemblance to that of Dunip in northern Syria.

A list of the kings of Edom is given in the thirty-sixth chapter of Genesis, extracted from the state annals of the country.  It seems to be brought down to the time when Saul was elected king over Israel.  The chronicles of Edom were probably taken to Jerusalem at the time of its conquest by David; at any rate, they would then have become accessible to an Israelitish writer.  The conquest was very thorough, all the male population being put to the sword, and a few only escaping to Egypt.  Among these was a member of the royal house, Hadad by name, who grew up at the Egyptian court, and, after marrying the sister-in-law