Did Esau Go to Heaven, and How Did He Die? The Bible Does Not Say

Scripture never says where Esau went when he died, and it never says how he died. Genesis last shows the brothers together at their father’s grave: “his sons Esau and Jacob buried him” (Genesis 35:29). Later Jewish writers told several stories of his death, and they contradict one another. They are legends, not Scripture.

What Genesis does give us is the man, and his story turns on two things he said. As a young man, faint from the field, he begged his brother, “Feed me, I pray thee, with that same red pottage” (Genesis 25:30), and sold his birthright for a meal. After Jacob’s twenty years away, Esau ran to meet the brother who had cheated him, “and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him: and they wept.” When Jacob pressed gifts on him, he said, “I have enough, my brother” (Genesis 33:4, 9). The hungry man of the first scene is content in the last. Genesis gives us both scenes and leaves his end to God.

Esau was the elder twin of Isaac and Rebekah, born after Isaac prayed for his barren wife. Before the boys were born, the Lord told Rebekah, “Two nations are in thy womb”, and “the elder shall serve the younger” (Genesis 25:23). Esau came out first, “red, all over like an hairy garment; and they called his name Esau” (Genesis 25:25). He grew up “a cunning hunter, a man of the field”, and “Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison: but Rebekah loved Jacob” (Genesis 25:27–28). Genesis ties his other name, Edom, to the red stew he sold his birthright for: “therefore was his name called Edom” (Genesis 25:30). Only one other man in Genesis is called a hunter: Nimrod, “a mighty hunter before the Lord” (Genesis 10:9).

The sale itself is told in a few plain words. Esau said, “Behold, I am at the point to die: and what profit shall this birthright do to me?” He swore, ate, drank, “and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright” (Genesis 25:32–34). At forty he married two Hittite women, who “were a grief of mind unto Isaac and to Rebekah” (Genesis 26:34–35).

Then he lost the blessing too. Rebekah and Jacob deceived the blind Isaac, and Jacob received the blessing meant for the firstborn. When Esau came in from hunting and learned what had happened, “he cried with a great and exceeding bitter cry, and said unto his father, Bless me, even me also, O my father” (Genesis 27:34). Isaac gave him a lesser blessing, and Esau “lifted up his voice, and wept” (Genesis 27:38). His grief turned to rage: “The days of mourning for my father are at hand; then will I slay my brother Jacob” (Genesis 27:41). Jacob fled. Esau, seeing that “the daughters of Canaan pleased not Isaac his father”, took a third wife, Mahalath, the daughter of Ishmael (Genesis 28:8–9).

Twenty years later Jacob came home terrified, praying, “Deliver me, I pray thee, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau: for I fear him” (Genesis 32:11). Esau came with four hundred men, and he came to embrace him. He refused Jacob’s gifts at first, then took them, and went home to Seir (Genesis 33). The brothers stood together once more to bury Isaac. Genesis 36 tells how Esau took his household and his herds and moved away from Jacob, because “the land wherein they were strangers could not bear them because of their cattle”. Genesis closes his story with a line that sounds like a name on a map: “Thus dwelt Esau in mount Seir: Esau is Edom” (Genesis 36:7–8).

The Bible does not say. When Jacob died in Egypt, his sons carried him to the family tomb in the cave of Machpelah and buried him there (Genesis 50:13), and Esau is not mentioned. Jewish tradition filled the silence with several stories:

• At Jacob’s funeral: the Talmud (Sotah 13a) tells that Esau tried to stop the burial, claiming that Jacob had already used up his share of the cave, and that “Hushim, the son of Dan, struck Esau on the head with a stick so that the latter’s eyes fell on Jacob’s knees”, killing him, as the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 summarises it. The Sefer ha-Yashar goes further and says that Hushim cut off Esau’s head, which was buried there.
• At Isaac’s funeral: another tradition, in the Midrash on the Psalms, says that Esau was slain by Judah in the cave at Isaac’s burial.
• In battle: the Book of Jubilees, which most churches do not count as Scripture, describes a war between the brothers’ households, in which “Jacob bent his bow and sent forth the arrow and struck Esau, his brother (on his right breast) and slew him.”

The stories cannot all be true, and the last two sit badly with Genesis, where Esau buries Isaac beside Jacob and the brothers part in peace. They tell us how later readers felt about Edom. They do not tell us how Esau died.

It holds him up as a warning to believers:

Lest there be any fornicator, or profane person, as Esau, who for one morsel of meat sold his birthright. For ye know how that afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears.

Hebrews 12:16–17

A profane person treats a holy thing as common. Esau traded his birthright, his place as firstborn in the family that carried God’s promise to Abraham, for a bowl of stew. The tears are the ones he shed before his father in Genesis 27. Readers take “no place of repentance” in two ways. John Wesley read it as a lost inheritance: “There was no room for any such repentance as would regain what he had lost,” and what Esau sought with tears was “the blessing of the birth-right”. John Calvin read it as a judgment on Esau himself: “repentance here is not to be taken for sincere conversion to God”, and “the tears of Esau were those of a man past hope”. On either reading Hebrews does not say where Esau went when he died. It turns the story to us: “Looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God” (Hebrews 12:15).

The same letter names Esau in its great chapter of faith, not as a hero but as a son blessed by a believing father: “By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau concerning things to come” (Hebrews 11:20).

Paul quotes the prophet Malachi in Romans 9. Speaking of the twins, he writes, “For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth; It was said unto her, The elder shall serve the younger. As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated” (Romans 9:11–13). In Malachi the words are about Esau’s land and people: God “laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness” (Malachi 1:3). Christians read Paul’s use of them in more than one way.

• Reformed: John Calvin read Romans 9 as God’s free choice of some people for salvation and his passing over of others. Esau, he wrote, “was justly rejected”, and “God has a sufficiently just reason for electing and for reprobating, in his own will.” On this reading Esau stands for those God did not choose.
• Wesleyan and Arminian: John Wesley read the verse as about two nations, Israel and Edom, and the place each would have in God’s plan. “This does not relate to the person of Jacob or Esau,” he wrote, “Nor does it relate to the eternal state either of them or their posterity.”
• Catholic: The New American Bible’s note on Romans 9:13 says that “in Semitic usage ‘hate’ means to love less”, pointing to Luke 14:26, where Jesus says his disciples must hate father and mother. Genesis uses the word the same way of Leah: Jacob “loved also Rachel more than Leah”, and “the Lord saw that Leah was hated” (Genesis 29:30–31).

The readings divide over God’s election, a question taken up in what is the meaning of predestination? Neither Romans nor Malachi reports where Esau went after he died.

Calvin, reading Romans 9, counted Esau among those God passed over. Those who read it with Wesley see no verdict on Esau’s soul in the verse at all. The Catholic Church has no teaching that names anyone in hell, and its Catechism teaches that although we can judge an act to be grave, “we must entrust judgment of persons to the justice and mercy of God.” Pope John Paul II said in 1999 that “it is not granted to us, without special divine revelation, to know which human beings are effectively involved” in damnation.

What we can say is what Genesis shows. Esau despised his birthright and wept for the blessing he lost. He planned to kill his brother, and twenty years later he ran to meet him and embraced him.

They became Edom, the people of Mount Seir. Genesis lists their chiefs and says that Edom had kings “before there reigned any king over the children of Israel” (Genesis 36:31). Genesis names an Amalek among Esau’s grandsons (Genesis 36:12), and tradition links him to the Amalekites who “fought with Israel in Rephidim” soon after the Exodus (Exodus 17:8), though Genesis already speaks of “the country of the Amalekites” in Abraham’s day (Genesis 14:7).

God gave the land to them. When Israel came out of Egypt, Moses was told, “Meddle not with them; for I will not give you of their land, no, not so much as a foot breadth; because I have given mount Seir unto Esau for a possession” (Deuteronomy 2:5). Moses asked the king of Edom for safe passage in a brother’s words: “Thus saith thy brother Israel”. Edom refused and came out with an army, and Israel turned away (Numbers 20:14–21). The quarrel ran for centuries. The prophet Obadiah condemned Edom “for thy violence against thy brother Jacob” (Obadiah 1:10).

The Jewish historian Josephus tells how, generations later, the high priest Hyrcanus “subdued all the Idumeans”, whom Josephus elsewhere calls “the posterity of Esau”, and let them stay in their land if they would be circumcised and keep the laws of the Jews, so that “they were hereafter no other than Jews”. The most famous Idumean came after that. Jesus was born “in the days of Herod the king” (Matthew 2:1), and Herod’s rival Antigonus, pleading before the Romans, dismissed him, Josephus says, as “an Idumean, i.e. a half Jew”.

Through all of it, the Law of Moses kept a word for Esau’s children. Israel would quarrel with Edom, and Edom with Israel, but the command stood: “Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite; for he is thy brother” (Deuteronomy 23:7).

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