Who was Bashemath's father?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Esau's wives are listed inconsistently across Genesis, and Bashemath sits at the center of the confusion. Genesis 26:34-35 reports that Esau at forty married "Judith daughter of Beeri the Hittite and Basemath daughter of Elon the Hittite." But the genealogical roster in Genesis 36:2-3, organizing Esau's line as the head of Edom, names his wives as "Adah daughter of Elon the Hittite," "Oholibamah daughter of Anah," and "Basemath daughter of Ishmael, sister of Nebaioth." So Bashemath is daughter of Elon the Hittite in chapter 26 but daughter of Ishmael in chapter 36 — two different fathers for one wife-name.

The apologetic standard, run by Gleason Archer and Walter Kaiser, is that Esau had several wives, that Bashemath was a common Semitic name (commonly derived from *bōsem*, "fragrance/balsam"), and that the two passages simply name two different women. The fatal weakness is that the names have not merely been duplicated; they have been transposed. The "daughter of Elon the Hittite" who is called Basemath in 26:34 reappears in 36:2 as Adah — the Elon-the-Hittite description tracks one woman across both lists, but her name changes from Basemath to Adah. Meanwhile the name Basemath is reassigned in 36:3 to a wholly different woman, the daughter of Ishmael. A third complication: Genesis 28:9 records that Esau married "Mahalath daughter of Ishmael, sister of Nebaioth" — the same Ishmaelite-daughter-and-sister-of-Nebaioth described in 36:3, but there called Mahalath rather than Basemath. The lists do not differ by one variable; they shuffle three names (Basemath, Adah, Mahalath) across the same set of fathers, while the descriptive tags ("daughter of Elon the Hittite," "daughter of Ishmael, sister of Nebaioth") stay fixed to the wrong names.

Claus Westermann and Nahum Sarna both treat this as conflicting wife-traditions preserved in distinct strata. Genesis 36 belongs to the Priestly *tôlĕdōt* framework, an Edomite genealogy organized for a later (likely exilic or post-exilic) audience and drawing on its own Edomite king-list source; Genesis 26:34 and 28:9 sit in older narrative material. Friedman's source breakdown places the chapter-36 roster in P and the earlier notices elsewhere, and the editor who compiled Genesis preserved both name-systems without reconciling them. That the descriptive tags remain stable while the names migrate is precisely the signature of two independent lists being harmonized imperfectly: each tradition knew "a daughter of Elon" and "a daughter of Ishmael" married to Esau, but disagreed on what to call them.

The ancient tradents were themselves uneasy. Rabbinic harmonizers (the midrashic and Targumic traditions) proposed that the women bore multiple names — Basemath also called Adah, Mahalath also called Basemath — exactly the device modern apologists revive, and the Genesis Rabbah tradition explicitly offers renaming explanations for the Edomite wives. But invoking systematic re-naming, each switch undocumented in the text and none of it triggered by any narrated event (a renaming in the Bible normally carries theological weight, as with Abram/Abraham or Jacob/Israel), is not reading the evidence; it is supplying missing data to save the inerrancy of both lists. The simpler account is that two genealogical traditions assigned Esau's wives different names and parentages, and the final text carries both.

Where the critical reading lands: a genuine genealogical contradiction arising from conflicting wife-lists, not resolvable without ad hoc multiple-naming assumptions.