The Lessons of Jesus

Old Testament · Part Five: The Twelve · Chapter 31

Obadiah: The Brother Who Stood and Watched

The king who tried to kill me as a baby came from the people this book condemns.

About 6 minutes2 deeper sections

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Obadiah, which means servant of the LORD. Nothing else is known about him.

When: Most likely soon after Jerusalem fell in 586 BC.

Where it fits: Most likely just after the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BC (2 Kings 25:1–21), when Judah’s neighbor Edom joined in the plunder.

Where I quote it: Never.

If you only read three chapters: It has one chapter of twenty-one verses, the shortest book in your Old Testament. Read it.

Words to Know

Edom — the kingdom south of the Dead Sea, descended in my scriptures from Esau, Jacob’s twin brother.

Idumea — the Greek name for the land of the Edomites in my time, in the south of Judea.

The Book in Brief

Obadiah is a single chapter of twenty-one verses, a vision about the nation of Edom.

It opens with news that the nations are rising up to fight Edom. Edom lives high among the rocks and thinks no one can bring it down, but God will. Even its own allies will turn on it.

In the middle comes the reason. When strangers carried off Jerusalem’s wealth and cast lots for the city, Edom, the brother of Jacob, stood by like one of them. It gloated, joined the looting and handed over those who escaped.

The last part looks to the day of the LORD for all the nations. What Edom has done will be done to it. The people of Jacob will burn up Esau like stubble, the exiles will come home and take back the land, and the kingdom will be the LORD’s.

Obadiah is twenty-one verses long. It is a single furious poem against Edom.

In my scriptures, the Edomites were family. They descended from Esau, the twin brother of Jacob, who was Israel. So when Obadiah condemns Edom, he calls Israel your brother Jacob (Obadiah 10).

What Edom did

When the Babylonians broke into Jerusalem in 586 BC, Edom did not fight. Edom watched, and then joined in.

In the day that you stood on the other side, in the day that strangers carried away his substance, and foreigners entered into his gates, and cast lots for Jerusalem, even you were like one of them (Obadiah 11).

Then Obadiah lists, one by one, what the brother should not have done. Don’t look down on your brother in the day of his disaster … neither seize their wealth on the day of their calamity. Don’t stand in the crossroads to cut off those of his who escape. Don’t deliver up those of his who remain in the day of distress (Obadiah 12–14).

People running for their lives from a burning city reached the crossroads, and their own kin were waiting there to catch them and hand them over.

The psalm of the exiles remembers it too: Remember, LORD, against the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem, who said, “Raze it! Raze it even to its foundation!” (Psalm 137:7).

As you have done

Obadiah’s judgment has one rule: As you have done, it will be done to you. Your deeds will return upon your own head (Obadiah 15).

I said something like it in the Sermon on the Mount: For with whatever judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with whatever measure you measure, it will be measured to you (Matthew 7:2). But I used it to warn people against judging their brother, not to call down judgment on him.

What became of Edom

After the exile, Arab peoples pushed the Edomites out of their old land, and they moved west into the south of Judea. In my time that region was called Idumea. About a century before I was born, a Jewish ruler, the high priest John Hyrcanus, conquered Idumea and forced its people to be circumcised and follow the Law.1

The family of Herod the Great came from Idumea. His father was an Idumean.2

Herod was king when I was born. Matthew says he tried to kill me as a baby. His son Herod Antipas beheaded my kinsman John, and later mocked me in a robe before sending me back to Pilate (Luke 23:11).

Obadiah wrote against the brother who stood at the crossroads and handed over the fugitives. Six centuries later, that brother’s descendants were sitting on the throne.

Go deeperEdom’s god, from the desert to Herod’s court

The move of the Edomites into Judah’s south had begun even before Jerusalem fell. The ground shows it.

In the 1960s, archaeologists digging the fortress of Arad, on Judah’s southern frontier, found more than a hundred Hebrew letters and notes written in ink on broken pottery. Many were addressed to an official there named Eliashib, around 600 BC, in the last years of the kingdom. One orders men sent to strengthen a post in the Negev desert, “lest Edom should come there.”3

In 1984 an Israeli archaeologist, Itzhaq Beit-Arieh, began to dig a small hilltop shrine at a place now called Horvat Qitmit, inside Judah’s eastern Negev. It turned out to be Edomite: Edomite pottery, clay figures of people and animals, and an inscription bearing the name of Qos, the national god of Edom. The shrine was in use in the late 600s and early 500s BC, the very years Obadiah describes. At a fortress nearby, Horvat Uza, a letter in Edomite script blesses its reader by Qos.4

The god outlived the kingdom. Josephus tells of an Idumean noble named Costobarus, whose ancestors had been priests of Koze, a god the Idumeans had once worshiped. Koze is Qos, spelled in Greek. Herod made Costobarus governor of Idumea and gave him his own sister Salome as a wife. Years later Herod had him put to death.5

The family of the brother who stood at the crossroads had married into Herod’s house.

The kingdom will be the LORD’s

The last line of Obadiah is the last line worth keeping from any book of anger: and the kingdom will be the LORD’s (Obadiah 21).

Not Edom’s. Not Herod’s. Not even Israel’s. The LORD’s.

Go deeperSepharad, and the Jews of Spain

Near the end, Obadiah promises that the captives of Jerusalem, who are in Sepharad, will possess the cities of the Negev (Obadiah 20). The verse does not say where Sepharad was, and nothing else in my scriptures mentions it.

Most scholars now think it was Sardis, a great city in what is now western Turkey. It had been the capital of the kingdom of Lydia and then a seat of Persian rule. Early in the twentieth century, American archaeologists digging at Sardis found an inscription written in two languages, Lydian and Aramaic. In the Aramaic part, the city is called Sepharad.6 If that is right, the verse speaks of people from Jerusalem living far to the west, across Asia Minor.

The Jewish translators who put the Prophets into Aramaic had another idea. Their version, called the Targum, gives Sepharad as Spain, and the old Syriac translation does the same. By the end of the 700s AD, Sepharad had become the usual Hebrew name for Spain.7

That is why the Jews of Spain and Portugal, and their descendants, are called Sephardim, the people of Sepharad. When Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, they carried the name with them to North Africa, to the lands of the Ottoman Turks, to the Netherlands and later to the Americas. One word in the shortest book of my scriptures became the name of a whole people.7

Check It Yourself

Look up: Obadiah 10–15.

You will find: the list of what a brother should not do on the day of his brother’s disaster.

Then read Psalm 137:7.

The Short Version

  • Obadiah is the shortest book in your Old Testament, twenty-one verses against Edom.
  • Edom was Israel’s brother, and it gloated, looted and handed over fugitives when Jerusalem fell.
  • Its rule is “As you have done, it will be done to you.”
  • The Edomites became the Idumeans, and Herod’s family came from them.
  • It ends with “the kingdom will be the LORD’s.”

Sources for this chapter

Every numbered note in the text points here, so nothing has to be taken on trust.

  1. Josephus, Antiquities 13.257–258, says John Hyrcanus conquered Idumea and required the Idumeans to be circumcised and to observe Jewish law. The conquest is usually dated about 125 BC; some date it as late as 112 BC. ↩
  2. Josephus, Antiquities 14.8–10 and Jewish War 1.123, describes Herod’s father Antipater as an Idumean. Herod’s mother, Cypros, was from a Nabatean Arab family. ↩
  3. Arad ostracon 24, from the archive of letters to Eliashib, about 600 BC. Yohanan Aharoni, Arad Inscriptions (1981; Hebrew original 1975). ↩
  4. Itzhaq Beit-Arieh, Horvat Qitmit: An Edomite Shrine in the Biblical Negev (1995); excavations by Tel Aviv University began in 1984. On the Horvat Uza ostracon (“I bless you by Qos”) and the Edomite advance into the Negev, see Itzhaq Beit-Arieh, “Edomites Advance into Judah,” Biblical Archaeology Review 22, no. 6 (1996). ↩
  5. Josephus, Antiquities 15.253–266, and Jewish War 1.486. Herod appointed Costobarus governor of Idumea and Gaza and married him to Salome; he was executed about 25 BC. ↩
  6. The Lydian–Aramaic bilingual inscription from the American excavations at Sardis: Stanley A. Cook, “A Lydian-Aramaic Bilingual,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 37 (1917). Old Persian inscriptions call the region Sparda. Some scholars have proposed other places for Sepharad. ↩
  7. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Sepharad”: Targum Jonathan renders Sepharad as Ispamia and the Peshitta as Ispania, and from the end of the eighth century AD Sepharad became the usual Hebrew name for the Iberian Peninsula. The expulsion from Spain was decreed in 1492; Portugal followed in 1496–1497. ↩