No wonder the Hittites were “hit and miss.” They believed their gods were as uncertain as the weather, as uncaring as nature.
At the end of Genesis 26, we see that Esau, the man enslaved by his own appetites, has set for himself a downward path. He has already sold his birthright for a bowl of soup. Now here he is, a grandson of Abraham the man of faith, at 40 years of age, marrying two Hittite women. Who were the Hittites, and why were they “a grief of mind to Isaac and Rebekah” (v 35)? Descended from Heth, the great-grandson of Noah (Gen 10:15), they were not ignorant primitives but a people who, knowing God’s judgment in the days of the Flood, had rejected the light and embraced the darkness. At first, only the Bible spoke of their existence, and many mocked the biblical record as mere myth. Keep digging, boys! Sure enough, between 1822 and 1902, archaeologists discovered that the Hittites were a powerful empire based in eastern Turkey and Syria and spreading into Canaan. Recall that Abraham bought the burial cave of Machpelah from a Hittite (ch 23). The Hittites believed that the world was controlled by the personified forces of nature, and this led to the most depraved practices in the names of their monstrous gods. This was the reason God called Abraham out of Ur in the first place, and delivered Canaan to the Israelites (Ex 23:28-33), the Hittites being the first-named enemies of God in the Land (Deut 20:17). The Lord’s message was clear: there is a personal Creator in control in the universe, not mindless forces at war with each other. Thus Esau both despised the relationship the true God offered him in the birthright and embraced a worldview increasingly held today by those who have “exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom 1:25).