_EDOM AND ISRAEL_
OBADIAH 1-21
If the Book of Obadiah presents us with some of the most difficult
questions of criticism, it raises besides one of the hardest ethical
problems in all the vexed history of Israel.
Israel’s fate has been to work out their calling in the world through
antipathies rather than by sympathies, but of all the antipathies which
the nation experienced none was more bitter and more constant than that
towards Edom. The rest of Israel’s enemies rose and fell like waves:
Canaanites were succeeded by Philistines, Philistines by Syrians,
Syrians by Greeks. Tyrant relinquished his grasp of God’s people to
tyrant: Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian; the Seleucids, the
Ptolemies. But Edom was always there, _and fretted his anger for
ever_.[509] From that far back day when their ancestors wrestled in the
womb of Rebekah to the very eve of the Christian era, when a Jewish
king[510] dragged the Idumeans beneath the yoke of the Law, the two
peoples scorned, hated and scourged each other, with a relentlessness
that finds no analogy, between kindred and neighbour nations, anywhere
else in history. About 1030 David, about 130 the Hasmoneans, were
equally at war with Edom; and few are the prophets between those
distant dates who do not cry for vengeance against him or exult in his
overthrow. The Book of Obadiah is singular in this, that it contains
nothing else than such feelings and such cries. It brings no spiritual
message. It speaks no word of sin, or of righteousness, or of mercy,
but only doom upon Edom in bitter resentment at his cruelties, and in
exultation that, as he has helped to disinherit Israel, Israel shall
disinherit him. Such a book among the prophets surprises us. It seems
but a dark surge staining the stream of revelation, as if to exhibit
through what a muddy channel these sacred waters have been poured upon
the world. Is the book only an outbreak of Israel’s selfish patriotism?
This is the question we have to discuss in the present chapter.
Reasons for the hostility of Edom and Israel are not far to seek. The
two nations were neighbours with bitter memories and rival interests.
Each of them was possessed by a strong sense of distinction from
the rest of mankind, which goes far to justify the story of their
common descent. But while in Israel this pride was chiefly due to the
consciousness of a peculiar destiny not yet realised—a pride painful
and hungry—in Edom it took the complacent form of satisfaction in a
territory of remarkable isolation and self-sufficiency, in large
stores of wealth, and in a reputation for worldly wisdom—a fulness that
recked little of the future, and felt no need of the Divine.
The purple mountains, into which the wild sons of Esau clambered,
run out from Syria upon the desert, some hundred miles by twenty of
porphyry and red sandstone. They are said to be the finest rock scenery
in the world. “Salvator Rosa never conceived so savage and so suitable
a haunt for banditti.”[511] From Mount Hor, which is their summit, you
look down upon a maze of mountains, cliffs, chasms, rocky shelves and
strips of valley. On the east the range is but the crested edge of
a high, cold plateau, covered for the most part by stones, but with
stretches of corn land and scattered woods. The western walls, on the
contrary, spring steep and bare, black and red, from the yellow of the
desert ‘Arabah. The interior is reached by defiles, so narrow that two
horsemen may scarcely ride abreast, and the sun is shut out by the
overhanging rocks. Eagles, hawks and other mountain birds fly screaming
round the traveller. Little else than wild-fowls’ nests are the
villages; human eyries perched on high shelves or hidden away in caves
at the ends of the deep gorges. There is abundance of water. The gorges
are filled with tamarisks, oleanders and wild figs. Besides the wheat
lands on the eastern plateau, the wider defiles hold fertile fields
and terraces for the vine. Mount Esau is, therefore, no mere citadel
with supplies for a limited siege, but a well-stocked, well-watered
country, full of food and lusty men, yet lifted so high, and locked
so fast by precipice and slippery mountain, that it calls for little
trouble of defence. _Dweller in the clefts of the rock, the height is
his habitation, that saith in his heart: Who shall bring me down to
earth?_[512]
On this rich fortress-land the Edomites enjoyed a civilisation far
above that of the tribes who swarmed upon the surrounding deserts;
and at the same time they were cut off from the lands of those Syrian
nations who were their equals in culture and descent. When Edom looked
out of himself, he looked _down_ and _across_—down upon the Arabs, whom
his position enabled him to rule with a loose, rough hand, and across
at his brothers in Palestine, forced by their more open territories
to make alliances with and against each other, from all of which he
could afford to hold himself free. That alone was bound to exasperate
them. In Edom himself it appears to have bred a want of sympathy, a
habit of keeping to himself and ignoring the claims both of pity and of
kinship—with which he is charged by all the prophets. _He corrupted his
natural feelings, and watched his passion for ever.[513] Thou stoodest
aloof!_[514]
This self-sufficiency was aggravated by the position of the country
among several of the main routes of ancient trade. The masters of Mount
Se’ir held the harbours of ‘Akaba, into which the gold ships came from
Ophir. They intercepted the Arabian caravans and cut the roads to Gaza
and Damascus. Petra, in the very heart of Edom, was in later times
the capital of the Nabatean kingdom, whose commerce rivalled that of
Phœnicia, scattering its inscriptions from Teyma in Central Arabia up
to the very gates of Rome.[515] The earlier Edomites were also traders,
middlemen between Arabia and the Phœnicians; and they filled their
caverns with the wealth both of East and West.[516] There can be little
doubt that it was this which first drew the envious hand of Israel upon
a land so cut off from their own and so difficult of invasion. Hear the
exultation of the ancient prophet whose words Obadiah has borrowed:
_How searched out is Esau, and his hidden treasures rifled!_[517] But
the same is clear from the history. Solomon, Jehoshaphat, Amaziah,
Uzziah and other Jewish invaders of Edom were all ambitious to command
the Eastern trade through Elath and Ezion-geber. For this it was
necessary to subdue Edom; and the frequent reduction of the country
to a vassal state, with the revolts in which it broke free, were
accompanied by terrible cruelties upon both sides.[518] Every century
increased the tale of bitter memories between the brothers, and added
the horrors of a war of revenge to those of a war for gold.
The deepest springs of their hate, however, bubbled in their blood. In
genius, temper and ambition, the two peoples were of opposite extremes.
It is very singular that we never hear in the Old Testament of the
Edomite gods. Israel fell under the fascination of every neighbouring
idolatry, but does not even mention that Edom had a religion. Such a
silence cannot be accidental, and the inference which it suggests is
confirmed by the picture drawn of Esau himself. Esau is a _profane
person_[519]; with no conscience of a birthright, no faith in the
future, no capacity for visions; dead to the unseen, and clamouring
only for the satisfaction of his appetites. The same was probably the
character of his descendants; who had, of course, their own gods, like
every other people in that Semitic world,[520] but were essentially
irreligious, living for food, spoil and vengeance, with no national
conscience or ideals—a kind of people who deserved even more than the
Philistines to have their name descend to our times as a symbol of
hardness and obscurantism. It is no contradiction to all this that the
one intellectual quality imputed to the Edomites should be that of
shrewdness and a wisdom which was obviously worldly. _The wise men of
Edom, the cleverness of Mount Esau_[521] were notorious. It is the race
which has given to history only the Herods—clever, scheming, ruthless
statesmen, as able as they were false and bitter, as shrewd in policy
as they were destitute of ideals. _That fox_, cried Christ, and crying
stamped the race.
But of such a national character Israel was in all points, save that
of cunning, essentially the reverse. Who had such a passion for the
ideal? Who such a hunger for the future, such hopes or such visions?
Never more than in the day of their prostration, when Jerusalem and the
sanctuary fell in ruins, did they feel and hate the hardness of the
brother, who _stood aloof_ and _made large his mouth_.[522]
It is, therefore, no mere passion for revenge, which inspires these
few, hot verses of Obadiah. No doubt, bitter memories rankle in his
heart. He eagerly repeats[523] the voices of a day when Israel matched
Edom in cruelty and was cruel for the sake of gold, when Judah’s kings
coveted Esau’s treasures and were foiled. No doubt there is exultation
in the news he hears, that these treasures have been rifled by others;
that all the cleverness of this proud people has not availed against
its treacherous allies; and that it has been sent packing to its
borders.[524] But beneath such savage tempers, there beats the heart
which has fought and suffered for the highest things, and now in its
martyrdom sees them baffled and mocked by a people without vision and
without feeling. Justice, mercy and truth; the education of humanity in
the law of God, the establishment of His will upon earth—these things,
it is true, are not mentioned in the Book of Obadiah, but it is for the
sake of some dim instinct of them that its wrath is poured upon foes
whose treachery and malice seek to make them impossible by destroying
the one people on earth who then believed and lived for them. Consider
the situation. It was the darkest hour of Israel’s history. City and
Temple had fallen, the people had been carried away. Up over the empty
land the waves of mocking heathen had flowed, there was none to beat
them back. A Jew who had lived through these things, who had seen[525]
the day of Jerusalem’s fall and passed from her ruins under the mocking
of her foes, dared to cry back into the large mouths they made: Our day
is not spent; we shall return with the things we live for; the land
shall yet be ours, and the kingdom our God’s.
Brave, hot heart! It shall be as thou sayest; it shall be for a brief
season. But in exile thy people and thou have first to learn many more
things about the heathen than you can now feel. Mix with them on that
far-off coast, from which thou criest. Learn what the world is, and
that more beautiful and more possible than the narrow rule which thou
hast promised to Israel over her neighbours shall be that worldwide
service of man, of which, in fifty years, all the best of thy people
shall be dreaming.
The Book of Obadiah at the beginning of the Exile, and the great
prophecy of the Servant at the end of it—how true was his word who
said: _He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall
doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him._
* * * * *
The subsequent history of Israel and Edom may be quickly traced. When
the Jews returned from exile they found the Edomites in possession of
all the Negeb, and of the Mountain of Judah far north of Hebron. The
old warfare was resumed, and not till 130 B.C. (as has been already
said) did a Jewish king bring the old enemies of his people beneath
the Law of Jehovah. The Jewish scribes transferred the name of Edom
to Rome, as if it were the perpetual symbol of that hostility of the
heathen world, against which Israel had to work out her calling as
the peculiar people of God. Yet Israel had not done with the Edomites
themselves. Never did she encounter foes more dangerous to her higher
interests than in her Idumean dynasty of the Herods; while the savage
relentlessness of certain Edomites in the last struggles against Rome
proved that the fire which had scorched her borders for a thousand
years, now burned a still more fatal flame within her. More than
anything else, this Edomite fanaticism provoked the splendid suicide of
Israel, which beginning in Galilee was consummated upon the rocks of
Masada, half-way between Jerusalem and Mount Esau.
FOOTNOTES:
[509] Amos i. 11. See Vol. I., p. 129.
[510] John Hyrcanus, about 130 B.C.
[511] Irby and Mangles’ _Travels_: cf. Burckhardt’s _Travels in Syria_,
and Doughty, _Arabia Deserta_, I.
[512] Obadiah 3.
[513] Amos i.: cf. Ezek. xxxv. 5.
[514] Obadiah 10.
[515] _C. I. S._, II. i. 183 ff.
[516] Obadiah 6.
[517] Verse 6.
[518] See the details in Vol. I., pp. 129 f.
[519] Heb. xii. 16.
[520] We even know the names of some of these deities from the
theophorous names of Edomites: _e.g._ Baal-chanan (Gen. xxxvi. 38),
Hadad (_ib._ 35; 1 Kings xi. 14 ff.); Malikram, Ḳausmalaka, Ḳausgabri
(on Assyrian inscriptions: Schrader, _K.A.T._² 150, 613); Κοσαδαρος,
Κοσβανος, Κοσγηρος, Κοσνατανος (_Rev. archéol._ 1870, I. pp. 109 ff.,
170 ff.), Κοστοβαρος (Jos., XV. _Ant._ vii. 9). See Baethgen, _Beiträge
zur Semit. Rel. Gesch._, pp. 10 ff.
[521] Obadiah 8: cf. Jer. xlix. 7.
[522] Obadiah 11, 12: cf. Ezek. xxxv. 12 f.
[523] 1-5 or 6. See above, pp. 167, 171 f.
[524] Verse 7.
[525] See above, p. 171.
_INTRODUCTION TO THE PROPHETS OF THE PERSIAN PERIOD_
(539—331 B.C.)
“The exiles returned from Babylon to found not a kingdom but a church.”
KIRKPATRICK.
“Israel is no longer a kingdom, but a colony” (p. 189).