Genesis 14:6: As far south as the road goes, and then the wilderness

"And the Horites in their hill country of Seir as far as El-paran on the border of the wilderness." The campaign keeps going south, and this verse is where it runs out of country. Seir is the red sandstone mountain wall east and south of the Dead Sea, the highland that becomes Edom — steep, defensible, and inhabited in Genesis by the Horites, the people Esau's descendants later displace. El-paran is at the bottom of it, at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, where the mountains stop and the desert of Paran begins. "On the border of the wilderness" is the verse's own way of saying: this is the end of the line. It is about a hundred and forty miles from the Moabite plateau of the previous verse to the gulf, and the road is the same one — the eastern highway, running along the spine of the highlands with the Arabah trench below it to the west. Taken with the verse before, this is the whole eastern flank of Canaan swept in two sentences, from Bashan in the north to the Red Sea in the south, roughly three hundred miles of it. The next verse turns the army round. It has cleared everything behind and beside the five rebel cities, and only now does it come back north-west, through Kadesh and up to the edge of the Dead Sea plain, to fight the war it came for. Whoever composed this chapter understood how an army moves. Neither place is somewhere Abraham goes. Seir belongs to Esau's story and Paran to Ishmael's — Genesis 21 leaves Hagar's son living in the wilderness of Paran, which is the same desert this verse stops at the edge of.