The Book of Obadiah

Melozzo da Forlì,“Obadiah” in the Sacristy of St. Mark, ca. 1477, as snaffled without so much as
a how-do-you-do from another guy's Bible blog.

The book of Obadiah is just one chapter long, and is probably – indeed, I have just confirmed it with a quick Google – the shortest book in the entire Bible.  It is a pretty straightforward condemnation of the Edomites and the people of Esau, who God is going to punish but good.  In order for this to make much sense, I had to look up who the Edomites were, and remind myself who Esau was.

Esau, as I recalled when consulting an eminent authority, was the older twin brother of Jacob, son of Issac, son of Abraham, the one who didn’t get to be a patriarch because he was screwed out of his birthright in the famous “mess of pottage” scam.  Well, he didn’t get to be an Israelite patriarch, anyway.  Instead, it turns out that he took off to the southeast, and became a patriarch of the Edomites. 

The Edomites are naturally a weak and sinful people, at least according to these scriptures written by the Israelites.  We’ve seen them quite a bit over throughout the Bible, but if you’re like me you kind of blip over the unfamiliar names of the small neighboring peoples.  Refresher: the Edomites are the ones who wickedly refused to allow the Israelites to route the Exodus through their county, but were later conquered and vassalized by Judah during the age of Kings.  They live south of the Dead Sea, where the roads coming out of Egypt up towards Babylon and Persia have to go through passes in the uplands, and therefore control bottlenecks on the trade routes used by neighbors much, much more powerful than themselves.

So that’s the context.  What the prophet Obadiah is angry about is that when Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem, the Edomites weren’t sad about it. There might even have been snickering.  Indeed, there was probably a fair amount of complicity:

13 You should not march through the gates of my people
    in the day of their disaster,
nor gloat over them in their calamity
    in the day of their disaster,
nor seize their wealth
    in the day of their disaster.
14 You should not wait at the crossroads
    to cut down their fugitives,
nor hand over their survivors
    in the day of their trouble.

So: the Edomites have been conquered and are looked down on by the more powerful Israelites, who define them as the descendants of their own very clever ancestor’s stupid lummox of a brother.  When the Babylonians, hugely more powerful than either, put Judah to the sword, at least some of the Edomites are more than willing to join in on the fun.  This sense of being betrayed by a junior partner, and of being humiliated by those whom one is used to being able to humiliate, is naturally pretty galling to the Israelites.

Hence Obadiah’s rage.  And none of the happy ending business where God will relent after a few years of punishing the Edomites, either. 

18 Jacob will be a fire
    and Joseph a flame;
Esau will be stubble,
    and they will set him on fire and destroy him.
There will be no survivors
    from Esau.”
The LORD has spoken.

Did you follow that?  The people of Jacob (the smart brother) and Joseph (Jacob’s even smarter son, he of the amazing technicolor dreamcoat) will not stand for this shit; they will take on the people of Esau (the dumb brother/uncle) and, well, there will be no survivors.  I guess that last part was pretty straightforward.

Now, it’s worth mentioning that when I was trying to figure out where Edom was, I stumbled on a little knowledge (which is of course a dangerous thing) about the Nabataeans, the Arabian group that would eventually build Petra.  Seems that during the period that Judah was falling, the Nabataeans were expanding northward, into Edomite territory.  This pressure, plus Judah’s weakness when its ruling class was in exile, tempted many Edomite herders to start migrating into the unprotected Israelite lands.  It strikes me that this wouldn’t have been any too pleasing to the likes of Nehemiah and Ezra when they got back to town and set up shop.  The Book of Obadiah, then, is fairly openly serving notice to the Edomites that they should, at best, consider themselves back under the yoke of Jerusalem.