No Refuge Outside the Word

Gad’s land east of the Jordan was emptied when Tiglath-pileser III deported the Transjordan tribes in 733 BC (1 Chronicles 5:26), and Ammon moved in. “Their king” is malkam, which the Greek and Latin read as Milcom, Ammon’s god (1 Kings 11:5). The god, not only the king, has taken the land.

Rabbah of the Ammonites is modern Amman, Jordan’s capital. A “desolate heap” is a tel, a mound of ruins. Her “daughters” are the villages around the city, dependent on it as daughters on a mother. “Heir unto them that were his heirs” turns the verb against Ammon.

This Ai is not Joshua’s Ai near Bethel; it is otherwise unknown, and the name means “ruin”. “Run to and fro by the hedges” pictures people darting between the stone walls of sheepfolds. The last line repeats Amos 1:15 on Ammon: “their king shall go into captivity, he and his princes together”.

“Backsliding daughter” is shovevah, the word Jeremiah used for Israel in 31:22, “O thou backsliding daughter”. Ammon is addressed in Israel’s own vocabulary. “Who shall come unto me?” is the same false confidence Jerusalem voiced in 21:13, “Who shall come down against us?”

“Every man right forth” means straight ahead, headlong, the way Amos 4:3 pictures the women of Samaria driven out through breaches in the wall. “Him that wandereth” is the fugitive, and there is no one to round up the stragglers or bring them home.

Ammon survived as a people. A century and a half later, Tobiah “the Ammonite” was a thorn in Nehemiah’s side (Nehemiah 2:10), and Ammonites are mentioned in the time of the Maccabees (1 Maccabees 5:6). The promise is one of three of its kind in these oracles.

Teman was a district of Edom, and Job’s friend Eliphaz was “the Temanite” (Job 2:11), so Edom’s name for wisdom was proverbial. Obadiah 8 asks the same thing: “shall I not… destroy the wise men out of Edom?” Much of this Edom oracle runs parallel to Obadiah.

Dedan was an Arabian oasis on the caravan route south-east of Edom. Its traders are told to turn back and hide. “The calamity of Esau” uses ed, the word of Obadiah 13, where Edom looked on “in the day of their calamity” when Judah fell. Now the calamity is Edom’s.

The law left gleanings for the poor and the stranger (Leviticus 19:10, Deuteronomy 24:21), and thieves take what they can carry. The verse is nearly word for word Obadiah 5. Both pictures describe some limit to loss, and the next verse says there will be none.

Obadiah 6 has the same thought: “How are the things of Esau searched out!” The closing “and he is not” is the phrase used of Enoch (Genesis 5:24) and of Joseph, whom his brothers believed dead (Genesis 42:13): simply gone.

Care for the fatherless and the widow is a mark of Israel’s God (Deuteronomy 10:18). Here it is extended to the orphans and widows of Edom, Judah’s hostile neighbour. A few interpreters hear bitter irony, leave them, there will be no one else; most take the promise as meant.

The cup is the cup of wrath handed round in 25:15–29, where Edom was already on the list (25:21). Those “whose judgment was not to drink” are probably Judah: 25:29 argued the same way, “I begin to bring evil on the city which is called by my name, and should ye be utterly unpunished?”

“I have sworn by myself” is the oath of Isaiah 45:23. Bozrah, modern Buseirah, was Edom’s capital; Isaiah 63:1 pictures the divine warrior coming “with dyed garments from Bozrah”. Four words of desolation are stacked on it, one after another.

This is Obadiah 1 almost exactly: “We have heard a rumour from the LORD, and an ambassador is sent among the heathen.” The “ambassador” is a tsir, an envoy carrying word between courts, here sent by God to muster a coalition.

Obadiah 2 has it too: “I have made thee small among the heathen.” The word “small” carries a family echo: Esau was the elder twin, and Genesis 25:23 said “the elder shall serve the younger”. The older brother is made small.

“The clefts of the rock” uses sela, which was also the name of an Edomite stronghold (2 Kings 14:7). “Thy terribleness” renders tifletset, found only here; a related word, mifletset, names the shameful idol of Maachah (1 Kings 15:13), so it may mean the dread Edom inspired, or its idol.

To “hiss” is to whistle in shock at a ruin, the reaction Jeremiah predicted over Jerusalem (18:16, 19:8) and 1 Kings 9:8 over a ruined temple. Edom, which looked on Jerusalem’s ruin, becomes the ruin others whistle at.

The “neighbour cities” are Admah and Zeboiim (Deuteronomy 29:23). Edom lay just south of the Dead Sea, near where the cities of the plain were remembered to have stood, so the comparison is geographically close to home. The same sentence is used of Babylon in 50:40.

“The swelling of Jordan” is the dense thicket along the river, a lair for lions, as in 12:5, “how wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan?” A lion coming up out of the jungle into the sheepfold is the image, and the questions that follow are borrowed from the shepherd’s world.

“The least of the flock shall draw them out” is ambiguous: either the smallest lambs will be dragged away by the lion, or the weakest shepherds will drag Edom off. The Hebrew allows both. The “counsel” and “purposes” of the LORD answer the failed counsel of Teman in verse 7.

The “Red sea” is yam suf, the Sea of Reeds, here the Gulf of Aqaba, which Edom’s territory reached: Solomon’s port was at Ezion-geber, “on the shore of the Red sea, in the land of Edom” (1 Kings 9:26). The crash of Edom’s fall is heard at its farthest shore.

The eagle line and the woman in labour are used of Moab in 48:40–41, and here of Bozrah; the two neighbours share one sentence. Edom did not survive as a kingdom. Its people drifted into southern Judah, later called Idumaea, and Herod the Great was an Idumaean.

Hamath on the Orontes and Arpad north of Aleppo were Aramean cities; the Assyrians had once boasted, “Is not Hamath as Arpad? is not Samaria as Damascus?” (Isaiah 10:9). “Sorrow on the sea; it cannot be quiet” may picture restless water, as in Isaiah 57:20.

Damascus had lost its independence to Assyria in 732 BC (2 Kings 16:9), so this oracle addresses a great city more than a kingdom. “Fear hath seized on her” uses retet, trembling, found only here. The city is pictured as a woman turning to run.

“How is the city of praise not left” puzzles translators, since the negative seems to say the opposite of what is meant; the Latin Vulgate drops it, reading “how have they left the city of praise”. Damascus was a garden city, watered by the rivers Naaman preferred to the Jordan (2 Kings 5:12).

Babylon receives these exact words in 50:30: young men fallen in the streets, men of war cut off. The book gives the sentence to Damascus first, then to Babylon, as if to say the empire will meet the fate of the cities it overran.

The second half is quoted from Amos 1:4: “which shall devour the palaces of Ben-hadad”. Ben-hadad, “son of Hadad”, was the throne name of several Aramean kings of Damascus (1 Kings 15:18, 20:1, 2 Kings 13:3).

Kedar was an Arabian tribe descended from Ishmael’s second son (Genesis 25:13). “Hazor” here is probably hatser, unwalled settlements, the “villages that Kedar doth inhabit” (Isaiah 42:11). The Babylonian Chronicle records that Nebuchadnezzar raided the Arabs of the desert in 599 BC, taking their flocks and gods.

“Curtains” are tent-cloths of goat hair: “I am black, but comely… as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon” (Song of Songs 1:5). “Fear is on every side” is Jeremiah’s own phrase, magor missaviv, now shouted by raiders at their victims.

“Dwell deep” repeats the counsel to Dedan in verse 8, go down into hiding in hollows. Nebuchadnezzar “hath taken counsel” against them, the same verb used of the LORD’s counsel against Edom in verse 20: the king’s plan and God’s purpose run along the same line.

“Neither gates nor bars” are the unwalled villages of Ezekiel 38:11. “Which dwell alone” uses badad, as Balaam said of Israel, “the people shall dwell alone” (Numbers 23:9). Isolation, which kept the tribes safe from ordinary enemies, gives no protection from an empire.

“Them that are in the utmost corners” is literally “those with clipped corners”, people who cut the hair at the temples, a desert custom mentioned in 9:26 and 25:23 and noted of Arabs by Herodotus (3.8). The King James read it as remote places.

“A dwelling for dragons” means a haunt of jackals, tannim, as Jerusalem was threatened in 9:11. The closing formula, no man shall abide there, repeats verse 18 on Edom. Oasis settlements vanish quickly once their wells are left untended.

Elam lay east of Babylonia in what is now south-west Iran, with Susa as its chief city. “The beginning of the reign of Zedekiah” is 597 BC. The Babylonian Chronicle records a confrontation between Nebuchadnezzar and a king of Elam in 596 BC, around the time of this word.

Elam’s archers were famous; Isaiah 22:6 pictures Elam bearing the quiver against Jerusalem, and Assyrian palace reliefs show Elamite bowmen. To break Elam’s bow is to break the thing it was known for across the ancient world.

“Outcasts” is niddachim, the word used of scattered Israel in Deuteronomy 30:4, driven “unto the outmost parts of heaven”. Elam is to share the fate the law threatened against Israel: scattered to every nation there is.

“I will send the sword after them, till I have consumed them” is the sentence Jeremiah spoke over Judah in 9:16, word for word. The sword that pursued Judah pursues Elam too.

In 43:10 Nebuchadnezzar’s throne was to be set on stones at Tahpanhes; here God sets his own throne in Elam. The Book of Jeremiah pictures thrones set up in conquered places (1:15), and here the throne is God’s.

The restoration of Elam has a later echo in the Bible itself: Susa, “Shushan the palace”, became a royal capital of the Persian empire, where Nehemiah served and Esther was queen (Nehemiah 1:1, Esther 1:2). Whether the promise refers to that is an inference; the verse gives no date.