Genesis 32:3: Where his brother has got to in twenty years, and how far the message has to go

"And Jacob sent messengers before him to Esau his brother in the land of Seir, the country of Edom," The verse fixes the one thing Jacob has been unable to plan around. Esau is not at Beersheba, where they were last in the same tent; he is in Seir, a hundred and forty miles south of where Jacob is standing, in the sandstone highland running down the eastern side of the Arabah from the Dead Sea to the gulf. He has a country. He has four hundred men. The brother Jacob left holding a stolen blessing has spent the twenty years becoming a power in a place of his own. Seir and Edom are two names for one ground and the verse gives both, in that order, as if the second were the explanation of the first — Seir is the hill country, Edom is what the nation in it came to be called. The sources hold a representative point for each and nothing finer, because a country has no site: Edom's sits at Buseira, which is Bozrah, and Seir's out on Jebel esh-Shera. The map draws the range and rings the point. The distance is the argument. Messengers going down and four hundred men coming back up is the better part of two weeks on the King's Highway, and Jacob has that long to be afraid in. What he does with it is divide the camp, pray the longest prayer anyone prays in Genesis, send five droves of livestock ahead as a present at intervals along the road, and then spend the night alone at a ford. Everything on this page happens before he knows what his brother intends. When the four hundred men arrive, Esau runs, embraces him and weeps, and refuses the present twice.