BRIEF PROLOGUE TO BOOK OF OBADIAH.
Obadiah the prophet to Edom, where the inhabitant descendants of Esau had settled in and around Mt. Seir, decries the wicked past of Edom’s enmity towards Israel. From earliest times the animosity had grown from year to year.
We think of the initial wilderness wanderers journeying at last to their long promised Land of milk and honey after forty long years wherein a generation had died in the wilderness. When merely seeking permission to walk through the adjacent region en route to Pisgah’s Peak and Mt. Nebo before crossing the Jordan River, Israel was treated with open hostility instead of hospitably allowing their brethren, the children of Jacob, to drink from their wells of water.
That hostility had become endemic and now the prophet warns that judgment by the wrath of God, according to the curse of Genesis 12:3, was imminent. Ironically God used hostile neighbour nations to chastise and discipline wayward Jerusalem, he then as a sequel poured out his vengeance upon the same instruments that had brought so much tribulation to the Jews. This is a mystery wherein Jehovah God never forgets to repay those who have cursed his people Israel.
FOREWORD TO OBADIAH 1.
The Prophet Obadiah’s Vision of the descendants of Esau within the Palestinian territory of Mount Seir. They were commonly called Edomites as the region they occupied was named Edom. Confusing to the reader is the interchangeable use of Esau, Edom and Seir to poetically describe the Edomites. Under poetic licence Obadiah alternates between each of the three names when indicting Esau’s descendants. In the same way he calls Mount Seir the ‘Mount of Esau.
The prophet takes Edom to task for its long standing hatred of their brethren the Israelites, called: “brother Jacob” because he was the patriarch of Israel once the angel had changed his name from Jacob to Israel when he prevailed in prayer wrestling with the angel to protect him from Esau’s murderous intent on Mt. Peniel.
God had told Abram in Genesis 12.3 that all those who will bless his descendants will be blessed, but all those who oppose (curse) them will be cursed. The children of Esau, who became Bedouin Arabs in league with Ishmael’s children, had joined with other nations and tribes hostile to Jerusalem’s people during the past.
As things went from bad to worse in the tribe of Judah after King Manasseh’s abhorrently wicked reign Edom and others had gone to Jerusalem to pillage and add to the already existing mayhem from Assyrians, and later the Chaldeans. Sadly, the ten rebel tribes of the now divided kingdom of Israel had also attacked, kidnapped, and killed hundreds of thousands of their fellow Jews in Judah and Jerusalem to the south.
As a result of these atrocities and their idolatrous worship of the golden calf in Dan and Bethel, they had been all (but a handful of the poor) taken away captive by Tiglath Pileser to Assyria’s city of Babylon about 600 miles to the North West
.
Yet whether it was the Jews in Samaria or the Jewish cousins in Edom (Idumea) the vengeance of God was severe for their treasonous acts against the tribe of Judah and its eternal city of Jerusalem.
The rebel ten northern tribes were massively depopulated and deported while a Stalin-like forced immigration of Assyrians replaced the wayward children of Israel. Thus the wrath of God upon Esau’s children was unrelenting without any measure of mercy offered to others at enmity with Jerusalem.