Obadiah 1:1

The vision of Obadiah.

The Divine purpose in relation to humanity
A voice thundering at midnight is the voice of Obadiah. It was the voice of a
stranger. His age, his country, his parents, his cradle, his grave, are all
unknown. Yet his was a prophet’s voice,—deep as the boom of thunder, and
penetrating as the lightning it fell upon the fortressed host of Idumea, and
destruction was in every shivering note. He had been standing on some high
pinnacle, on which he hoard a “rumour from the Lord,” and with the fidelity
of incorruptible righteousness he breathed that fiery rumour across the
doomed nation,—the sword was bared against Edom, and whoso sought to
turn it aside was cleft by the gleaming blade. The prophecy is short but
terrible in its fulness. It is a single shout, but the cry rends the rocks of
Edom. The Edomites were famed for sagacity, prudence, and general mental
skill, but God here comes forth (Oba_1:8) as the monarch of mind, and says
He will destroy their wisdom and understanding. The high priests of wisdom
come together to take counsel against the Lord, and the Lord blows upon
their brain, and their counsels are confounded; the Lord touches their
tongue and they babble the jargon of insanity. Looking at this vision as
affording a glimpse of Divine purpose in relation to humanity, we may take
our stand on two distinct facts.
1. Divine superintendence of human history. He is a shallow historian
who records only the undulations of the social, political, and
ecclesiastical surface. As a student of the universe, I wish to know not
only the stupendous, palpable existences—the sun, moon, stars, seas,
mountains,—but I wish to know their birth-forces. He who takes me to
the earliest germ of national life is to me the true historian; but he who
finds that earliest germ in anything short of Divine volition is unfit to
guide me through the black ravines, or the temple corridors, or the
mountain grandeurs of the world’s entrancing story. In all Bible history
we find God upon the circle.
2. Divine sanctification of human history. This vision of Obadiah is
summed up in words which might well form the concluding sentence of
the history of the whole world. These words are: “And the kingdom shall
be the Lord’s.” As we look at this as the ultimate object of Divine
government we see that a great sanctifying process is in reality
continually operating in human history. God is working in the midst of
her moral gloom, and He will work until the last shadow has for ever
departed. We see but a scattered and struggling light; we hear but a
voice here and there; we wonder how the heavens can become flooded
with splendour, and how the air can be filled with one glad and undying
 song; and we should despair could we not lay our trembling hand upon
the recorded oath of Omnipotence, and see in the van the “dyed
garments,” and hear at midnight the war-shout of Immanuel. This leads
us to the inspiring truth, that all our hopes are founded in Jesus, and all
our energies sustained by the mighty power of the Holy Spirit. (Joseph
Parker, D. D.)

The tragedy of Edom

In later times Edom came to he the supreme antipathy and the typical
enemy of Jewry. So when the actual Edomites ceased to be, the name was
transferred, first to tyrant Rome, and then to persecuting Christendom, and
the impassioned words of Obadiah became a favourite vehicle for the
expression of the national and religious hatred. That is a misunderstanding
and a misuse of the book. The prophecy is, indeed, instigated by indignation
against Edom, and the retributive destruction of that people is its theme. But
the subject is worked out in a large fashion that precludes the suspicion of
petty vengefulness, and justifies the book’s place in the record of revelation.
The motive is not the gratification of national spite, nor is the aim to either
warn or edify the Edomites. The seer speaks out of the need of his own
heart, and to the hearts of the people. What creates his vision and compels
his utterance is an indestructible sense of the eternal justice and fidelity, and
of the Divine destiny of Israel in building up the kingdom of God on earth.
The tragedy of Edom is but a part in the great drama. It is therefore
presented on a vast stage, and has the world’s history for its background.
Very real and concrete to the prophet, no doubt, are the antagonisms of
Israel, and his enemies, but none the less really and consciously, even if in a
fashion grand beyond his conceptions, it is the collision of universal forces
and everlasting principles that is embodied in them. Limited and material the
presentment of those issues may be, but they carry in their bosom the
consummation of the ages. Within the rivalry of Edom and Israel there was
wrapped the eternal anithesis of truth and falsehood, good and evil; and the
vision of an earthly kingdom on Mount Zion is finding its fulfilment in the
silent, slow, but sure advent of the kingdom of God and of our Christ. (W. S.
Elmslie, D. D.)

God and bad men

I. That God makes a revelation concerning bad men. Here is a revelation
concerning Edom, the enemy of God and His people. Isaac had two sons by
Rebecca, Esau and Jacob; Esau was called Edom, because he robbed his
brother of his birthright (Gen_25:1-34.).
 1. The forms of the revelation.
(1) As a vision. “The vision of Obadiah.” The prophet was a seer.
The Eternal revealed Himself to the eyes of his soul. He who would
be a true minister of God must see the thing before he speaks it
—“That which we have seen and handled,” man has a faculty for
seeing the invisible.
(2) As a report. “We have heard a rumour from the Lord.” He heard
as well as saw. The soul has ears to catch the echoes of eternal
thought.
2. The character of this revelation, a message. “An ambassador is sent
among the heathen.” God sends His messages to the nations in many
ways and by many agents.
3. The subject of the revelation. “Arise ye, and let us rise up against her
in battle.” The object of the message was to stir up the Assyrians and
afterwards the Chaldeans against Edom. But our proposition is, that God
makes a revelation concerning bad men; and the subject of that
revelation embraces at least two things.
(1) That their sins will ruin them. “The wages of sin is death.”
(2) That evangelical repentance will save them. “Let the wicked
forsake his way,” etc.
II. That God punishes bad men by bad men. He now sent a messenger
amongst the nations,—what for? To stir up the Assyrians and Chaldeans—
both bad people—to wreak vengeance on corrupt Edom. Why does He
employ bad men for this awful work of retribution?
1. He reveals in the most powerful way to the victim the enormity of his
sin.
2. He reveals His own absolute power over the workings of the human
heart. Thus “He maketh the wrath of men to praise Him,” etc. (Homilist.)

Call to the battle against Edom

The stream of prophecy may be compared to the stream of a river. At its
fountain it is inconsiderable, and reveals none of its future greatness. There
is nothing in Scripture more clearly revealed than the ultimate triumph of
the religion we profess.
1. What persons were originally represented by “Edom,” and the cause
of the Lord’s enmity against this people. The Edomites were the
descendants of Esau, who sold his birthright for a momentary
 gratification. The Edomites seem to have assisted the Chaldeans in their
work of devastating Jerusalem, and to have instigated their utmost fury
against Israel, the chosen of God.
2. What is to be understood by “the heathen”—showing that we are
called upon to rise up against Edom, and that we have nationally
responded to that call.
3. To adduce some reasons that we should continue to propagate the
Gospel, notwithstanding the objections which are urged against that
duty.
4. Make the inquiry of each individual-To which of the two parties will you join yourself? Shall it be
Edom or Israel? Shall it be Baal or Christ? (G. G. Tomlinson.)
 Obadiah 1:1-21
EDOM AND ISRAEL
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 forever." 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 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 neighbor 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 neighbors 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 realized-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 fullness 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." 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 traveler. 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 defense. "Dweller in the clefts of the rock, the
height is his habitation, that saith in his heart: Who shall bring me down to
earth?" (Oba_1:3)
On this rich fortress-land the Edomites enjoyed a civilization 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 forever. (Amo_1:1-
15 : cf. Eze_35:5) Thou stoodest aloof!" (Oba_1:10)
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 rivaled that of Phoenicia, scattering its
inscriptions from Teyma in Central Arabia up to the very gates of Rome. The
earlier Edomites were also traders, middlemen between Arabia and the
Phoenicians; and they filled their caverns with the wealth both of East and
West. (Oba_1:6) 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!" 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. 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 neighboring 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"; (Heb_12:16) with no
conscience of a birthright, no faith in the future, no capacity for visions;
dead to the unseen, and clamoring 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, but
were essentially irreligious, living for food, spoil, and vengeance, with no
national conscience or ideals-a kind of people who deserve 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" (Oba_1:8 cf. Jer_49:7) 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." (Oba_1:11-12; cf. Eze_35:12 f.)
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 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. 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 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
neighbors 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.