Identification of Esau-Edom with Rome and the Treatment of the Brotherhood of Yaakov and Esau Among the Tannaim

Abstract

Despite the defeat in the struggle against Rome and the Roman conquest of Judea, Jewish authors in the II century began to associate the Roman Empire with the rejected brother of Jacob-Israel – Esau. Being politically weaker, they tried to defeat the conquerors ideologically, to turn the established situation around and show that it was not the Jews, but the Roman Empire that was defeated. The article reviews the literature on the problem of identifying the early-Rabbinic authors of the modern Roman Empire with the already developed biblical image of Edom.