The pattern of the settlement stories of the founding father found in the genealogical traditions of both cultures, ties the origin of an ethnic group or residents of a certain city to a forefather who at some point emigrated to the area. This pattern does not exist within the literatures of the ancient regional civilizations, such as Mesopotamia or Egypt, whose people did not regard themselves as immigrants, even though, throughout the centuries, many wanderers and immigrants from other places integrated within their societies and even held leadership positions. This chapter discusses the founding-father pattern and traces signs for the existence of similar literary traditions in other areas within the Mediterranean basin, such as in a series of Anatolian inscriptions that originated in the kingdom of Que in Cilicia, northwest of the Syrian coast. Following this, the chapter discusses the reasons for the growth of this literary pattern in the eastern Mediterranean.

References to Jacob and Esau proliferate in Jewish and Christian late antique and medieval texts.Recent scholarship has focused on this material to present Christian–Jewish relations through the prism of sibling rivalry. This chapter focuses on the Glossa ordinaria and the commentary of Rashi on Genesis chapters 25 and 27 to explore how exegetes used the story of the struggle between Jacob and Esau to express their own collective religious identity and how they employed the shared material to characterise the religious other. It examines how the narrative was used by commentators to pass judgement on members of their own religious communities and how these internal evaluations interacted with external assessments. The purpose of the chapter is to gain a deeper understanding of how medieval Jews and Christians internalised the claims made by their respective religious traditions as well as to explore whether the image of fraternal rivalry adequately encapsulates the ambiguous and paradoxical relationship between medieval Christianity and Judaism.

This second chapter of Part I continues the thread of the preceding chapter, with a focus on the case of the Edomites. Using both texts and archeological data, it treats the role of the Edomites in the biblical narrative, from Genesis to the fall of Jerusalem. It concludes by reflecting on the implications for theories of the Pentateuch’s formation.