... before any king reigned over the Israelites That is, before the reign of Saul, first king of Israel, through whom the divine promises of kingship for Israel, recorded in 17:6 and 35:11, were first fulfilled. This development was critical for the history of Edom because it was then that the ancient prophecy to Rebekah of 25:23—‘The older shall serve the younger’—and Isaac’s blessing to Esau in 27:40—‘You shall serve your brother’—began to materialize. According to 1 Samuel 14:47, Saul waged war against the Edomites. David reduced Edom to vassaldom, all but wiped out the royal house, and placed Israelite garrisons and governors in the land, as narrated in 2 Samuel 8:13-14 and 1 Kings 11:14-17. ...

... A more challenging case involves the register of Esau’s descendants in Genesis 36, including a list of “the kings who reigned in the land of Edom, before any king reigned over the Children of Israel” (Genesis 36:31). Some medieval exegetes noted the historical implausibility of Moses referring to the much later epoch of the Israelite monarchy and therefore regarded this passage as a post-Mosaic interpolation. Most, however, found alternative strategies to overcome this difficulty—for example, by positing that Moses was granted knowledge of the distant future through the Holy Spirit, as the Byzantine Karaite exegete Jacob ben Reuben explains. ...