1. The two nations were neighbours 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 due chiefly 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 fulness that recked little of the future, and felt no need of the Divine.
From the southern extremity of the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Akaba runs the deep valley of the Arabah. On the eastern side of this valley rises the lofty range of red hills called Mount Seir, stretching about a hundred miles north and south, by twenty miles east and west. Here Esau settled; and his descendants, having driven out the original possessors, the Horites, occupied the whole of the mountain.
The purple mountains, into which the wild sons of Esau chambered, 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 traveller. 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 defence. “Dweller in the clefts of the rock, the height is his habitation, that saith in his heart: Who shall bring me down to earth?”1 [Note: G. A. Smith, The Book of the Twelve Prophets, 178.]
2. A modern writer of romance would find ample material in a study of Edom and its inhabitants. The history of its relationship towards Israel through long centuries is of exceptional interest. From first to last it is a quarrel between brothers-rival brothers. Esau is a “profane person,” with no conscience of a birthright, no faith in the future, no capacity for visions; dead to the unseen, and clamouring 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 deserved 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” 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.2 [Note: Ibid. 181.]
Clever men will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness; every authority rouses their ridicule, every superstition amuses them, every convention moves them to contradiction. Only force finds favour in their eyes, and they have no toleration for anything that is not purely natural and spontaneous. And yet ten clever men are not worth one man of talent, nor ten men of talent worth one man of genius. And in the individual, feeling is more than cleverness, reason is worth as much as feeling, and conscience has it over reason. If, then, the clever man is not mockable, he may at least be neither loved, nor considered, nor esteemed. He may make himself feared, it is true, and force others to respect his independence; but this negative advantage, which is the result of a negative superiority, brings no happiness with it. Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.1 [Note: Amiel's Journal (ed. 1891), 134.]
3. The insults which the Edomites inflicted on Israel were many. When the Israelites came out of Egypt they begged to be permitted to pass through the Edomite territory, but the request was churlishly refused. When Judah was carried captive by Nebuchadnezzar and Jerusalem destroyed, “in the neighbouring heathen tribes,” says Dean Stanley,2 [Note: History of the Jewish Church, ii. 472.] “there was a savage exultation-more bitter to the heart of Judah than the calamity itself-in the thought that the Divine inheritance had now passed into their hands. But deepest of all was the indignation roused by the sight of the nearest of kin, the race of Esau, often allied to Judah, often independent, now bound by the closest union with the power that was truly the common enemy of both. There was an intoxication of delight in the wild Edomite chiefs, as at each successive stroke against the venerable walls they shouted, ‘Down with it! down with it! even to the ground.' They stood in the passes to intercept the escape of those who would have fled down to the Jordan valley; they betrayed the fugitives; they indulged their barbarous revels on the Temple hill. Long and loud has been the wail of execration which has gone up from the Jewish nation against Edom. It is the one imprecation which breaks forth from the Lamentations of Jeremiah; it is the culmination of the fierce threats of Ezekiel; it is the sole purpose of the short sharp cry of Obadiah; it is the bitterest drop in the sad recollections of the Israelite captives by the waters of Babylon; and the one warlike strain of the Evangelical Prophet is inspired by the hope that the Divine Conqueror should come knee-deep in Idumean blood (Isa_63:1-3).”
4. Thus we reach Obadiah, and his “short sharp cry.” The Jews had lost their political independence and military power and could no longer expect to punish foreign insolence by force. But they had not lost their keen sense of justice and their ardent hope that some day Jehovah would set all things right in this world and restore His nation Israel to her former glory. And again a man of patriotic heart and prophetic mind arose and gave utterance to this hope and brought the judgment of Edom into this larger connexion. Formerly the great movements of history as they affected the fate of Israel could be interpreted by the prophets as parts of Jehovah's plan. There were no such movements now, no nation like the Assyrians or Babylonians, no king like Cyrus, that a prophetic mind could regard as Jehovah's special instrument. But Jehovah was living still and controlling the affairs of this world, and He was just, and He was still Israel's God. This our prophet knows and believes with all the intensity of his spirit. And out of the living experience of the reality and truth of these convictions there grows afresh in his heart the hope, which becomes an assurance, that the day is near when Jehovah will put right all the affairs of this world, when He will judge all nations. It will be a terrible day. But only for the other nations, not for the Jews, for they have already received their punishment at the hands of Jehovah. Through this coming awful crisis those who are still left will pass unharmed, and after the catastrophe they will dwell once more safely on Mount Zion, never to be driven out again by foreign invaders. On the contrary, they themselves will then drive out the nations that had dispossessed them and taken their property. Then also Edom's turn will come, then that cruel brother Esau also will receive his reward at the hands of Jacob, who will exterminate him.
5. The rest of the history of the Edomites is soon told. The Maccabees waged successful wars against them. Judas Maccabæus defeated them at Arabattine (1Ma_5:3), recovered the south country, and recaptured Hebron. John Hyrcanus compelled the Edomites who were settled there to accept circumcision and to conform to the law. The Edomites appear for the last time during the great struggle of the Jews with Rome. After the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus their name disappears from history.
It may seem a far cry to this long-since extirpated tribe in the rocky clefts above the Jordan, and yet the worldling temper lives and scorns and exults in the day of the Church's sorrow now as then. That temper is ever with us. Mr. Howells, the shrewd American observer, tells us in his London Films that as he stands at Hyde Park Corner he marks the faces of those who drive out and in. The look on their faces is not simply authoritative, as all ruling races show. It is the look of the authorised. It displays openly a sense of security, through the wealth which has been safely invested, a self-sufficiency, which comes of proud independence of others, and, above all, a remorseless indifference to the needs and sorrows of others. That is the Edomite temper. Behind it there is a sheer unbelief in God, a heart-mockery of the ideals of Christ, a self-assertion against all the claims of religion which makes the word “gospel” a byword and jest. They are the people; for them all else exists; no one will pull them down from their seat. The calamities of a Church, the hardships of its preachers, the anguish of its people, are a theme for their scorn. Now and again one meets this temper in some successful man of the world, whose business has eaten up his humility and his reverence. As often it appears in some man of letters of a cheap and transient popularity. No man of Thackeray's insight or of Matthew Arnold's sympathy could ever play the part of the Edomite, however they might rebuke cant and expose unreality. But the Edomites of literature sit on high, and in their pride the “little ones” of Christ are their scorn.1 [Note: The Church Pulpit Commentary (Jeremiah to Malachi), 319.]
