The Kings of Edom

The Kings of Edom

By Tommy Eriksson 

In the Hebrew Bible, the kings of Edom first appear as a note about a neighboring people to Israel, but in the Kabbalistic and later esoteric history of interpretation they are transformed into symbols of primordial worlds that perished, forces of unbalanced strength, and the structures that in modern terminology are called the qliphoth.

The biblical starting point is found in Genesis 36:31–39 and the parallel in 1 Chronicles 1:43–51, where a series of kings is listed who reigned in Edom “before any king reigned over the children of Israel.” The names are given without longer narratives: Bela ben Beor, Jobab ben Zerah, Husham, Hadad ben Bedad, Samla, Shaul, Baal-Hanan ben Achbor, and Hadad (or Hadar). In the same chapter (Genesis 36:40–43), eleven chiefs or princes are also mentioned: Timna, Alvah, Jetheth, Oholibamah, Elah, Pinon, Kenaz, Teman, Mibzar, Magdiel, and Iram. In their original context these lists function as genealogical and political tradition, of the same type as ancient king lists from Mesopotamia, where history, memory, and legitimization are woven together.

In Jewish mysticism, however, these figures acquire an entirely different scope. Already in early aggadic and mystical tradition there are ideas about worlds that existed before the present creation and that perished. A Talmudic tradition speaks of generations that were created before the ordered world and were annihilated; in later Kabbalistic symbolism such motifs are connected with the idea of primordial states of imbalance. Edom here comes to represent a reality marked by one-sided severity. In Zoharic symbolism, Edom is associated with a harsh and merciless force, often related to the severe side of the divinity, gevurah, when it is not balanced by mercy.

It is, however, in the Lurianic Kabbalah of the sixteenth century, above all in the teachings of Isaac Luria and his disciple Chaim Vital, that the kings of Edom receive their most influential cosmic interpretation.

There they are identified with the so-called “kings who died” (melakhim she-metu), a term referring to the fact that in Genesis it is repeated that each king died and was replaced by another. This is not read historically but metaphysically. The kings represent early emanations of divine light that could not bear the intense force and therefore shattered. This is the doctrine of the breaking of the vessels, shevirat ha-kelim. From this rupture arise the fallen sparks and the husks or “shells” that in later terminology are called the qliphoth.

These are the result of imbalance in the process of emanation — remnants of force that have separated from the harmonious whole. Within Kabbalistic demonology, Edom and its kings also begin to be connected with figures from the dark side. In later traditions, Samael is often identified as a ruler over the severe side and associated with Edom. Lilith appears as his counterpart, and other demonic figures such as Ashmedai (Asmodeus) are integrated into genealogical and power structures that mirror the biblical genealogies. Names such as Mehetabel, daughter of Matred, who is a queenly figure in the list of the kings of Edom, acquire demonological resonances in this literature by being incorporated into symbolic family lines on the “other side.”

Here, therefore, biblical names are linked together with demonological systems in a symbolic network that places Edom within the left, severe, and dark domain of the emanations.

The number eleven, which corresponds to the eleven Edomite chiefs in Genesis 36:40–43, gains particular significance in this context. In biblical and Kabbalistic symbolism, ten often stands for completed order — the ten sefirot.

Eleven therefore represents an excess, a transgression, or an imbalance in relation to the harmonious structure. In later esoteric systems this number comes to be associated with the qliphothic powers as a parallel or inverted system to the Tree of Life. When Kabbalistic ideas are taken up in Western esotericism from the Renaissance onward, and especially during the occult currents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the image of the qliphoth as a “dark side” of the cosmic structure is reinforced.

Primarily,  Dragon Rouge works with these correspondences to the number eleven and the Qliphothic Tree. But a closed group known as C.A.O.S. (Cao Ab Ordine Satanae follow link) a chaosgnostic group also touches on this subject, though on a much smaller scale.

In modern qliphothic magic, including within the dark magical order Dragon Rouge (follow link), these forces are interpreted explicitly as an initiatory system. There the qliphothic spheres are presented as stages in a conscious descent or confrontation with the forces that precede and challenge the ordered creation. In this context, the kings of Edom and the eleven chiefs are symbolically connected to an elevenfold structure on the dark side. Thomas Karlsson discusses this in detail in "Kabbalah, Qliphoth and the Goetic Magic", where the Lurianic myth of the shattered vessels is placed in relation to a practical and initiatory work with the qliphoth as living forces.

In this esoteric and chaos-gnostic understanding, the kings of Edom appear as rulers over worlds that could not endure because their power was too one-sided, too intense, too unbound by the balance that later characterizes the sefirotic order. Their “death” then becomes not merely a failure but the trace of a primordial force that cannot be confined by form. They represent the memory of a cosmic stage in which the light had not yet been shaped into harmony, where strength had not yet been tamed into law.