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Introduction
to Obadiah
This summary of the book of Obadiah provides information about the
title, author(s), date of writing, chronology, theme, theology, outline, a
brief overview, and the chapters of the Book of Obadiah.
The author's name is Obadiah, which means "servant (or
worshiper) of the Lord." His was a common name (see 1Ki 18:3-16; 1Ch 3:21; 7:3; 8:38; 9:16; 12:9; 27:19; 2Ch 17:7; 34:12; Ezr
8:9; Ne 10:5; 12:25). Neither his father's name nor the place
of his birth is given.
The date and place of composition are disputed. Dating the
prophecy is mainly a matter of relating vv. 11-14 to one of two specific events
in Israel's history:
The striking parallels between Ob 1-6 and Jer 49:9-10,14-16 have caused many to suggest
some kind of interdependence between Obadiah and Jeremiah, but it may be that
both prophets were drawing on a common source not otherwise known to us.
There is no compelling reason to doubt the unity of this brief
prophecy, the shortest book in the OT. Its theme is that Edom, proud over her
own security, has gloated over Israel's devastation by foreign powers. However,
Edom's participation in that disaster will bring on God's wrath. She herself
will be destroyed, but Mount Zion and Israel will be delivered, and God's
kingdom will triumph.
Edom's hostile activities have spanned the centuries of Israel's
existence. The following Biblical references are helpful in understanding the
relation of Israel and Edom: Ge 27:41-45; 32:1-21; 33;
36; Ex 15:15; Nu 20:14-21; Dt 2:1-6; 23:7-8; 1Sa
22 with Ps 52; 2Sa 8:13-14; 2Ki 8:20-22; 14:7; Ps 83; Eze
35; Joel 3:18-19; Am 1:11-12; 9:11-12.
Since the Edomites are related to the Israelites (v. 10),
their hostility is all the more reprehensible. Edom is fully responsible for
her failure to assist Israel and for her open aggression. The fact that God
rejected Esau (Ge 25:23; Mal
1:3; Ro 9:13) in no way exonerates the Edomites.
Edom, smug in its mountain strongholds, will be dislodged and sacked. But
Israel will prosper because God is with her.
I.
Title and Introduction (1)
A.
Edom's Destruction Announced (2-7)
B.
Edom's Destruction Reaffirmed (8-14)
III. The Day of the
Lord (15-21)
──《New
International Version》
Introduction to Obadiah
The first part denounces the destruction of
Edom, dwelling upon the injuries they inflicted upon the Jews. The second
foretells the restoration of the Jews, and the latter glories of the church.
── Matthew Henry《Concise Commentary on Obadiah》
00 Overview
OBADIAH
INTRODUCTION
It is very noticeable and worthy of remark how very little God’s
prophets have to tell us about themselves. When their own history is in
question they are the most reserved and silent of men. This self-restraint is
indeed quite unprecedented in literature. It is an unparalleled thing that an
author should be so self-forgetful as those old prophets were. It is a thing,
too, which other men do not greatly like. We love to know as much as possible
about the face and form, the manners
and the experiences of those whose books we read. No one of the prophets is
more reticent than Obadiah. His name is all that we learn from him about
himself. But with no one in the high and holy company have expositors busied
themselves more anxiously. Some have hoped that he might prove to have been the
godly chamberlain of Ahab in the time of Elijah, who shielded so many of the
servants of Jehovah from the wrath of the wicked king (1 Kings 18:3-16); and others have
identified him with the teacher whom Jehoshaphat sent to instruct the cities of
Judah in Divine things (2 Chronicles 17:7); and others still
have fancied that he might be the overseer who was appointed to superintend the restoration of the
temple in the days of the good Josiah (2 Chronicles 34:12). These all bore
the same title; might not one of them, it has been suggested, be the speaker of
this prophecy? None of them suits exactly the circumstances of the case.
I. Perhaps,
however, we may gleam a little about his inner character and his outer history
from the prophecy itself. He was a man of genuine and deep piety. He records only
his name, before he passes on to tell out the message which has been intrusted
to him. But that name is a very significant one, and one which was much loved
by Old Testament believers. Obadiah means “the servant of Jehovah,” or “the
worshipper of the Lord.” When Obadiah makes known to us his name and stops
short there, it is as if he said, “I do not care to disclose anything further;
I am content and glad to be thought of simply as one of God’s true worshippers;
that is the only honour which I covet, the sole crown which I can consent to
wear.” We may rest confident that his was a very thorough and a very unaffected
piety. Unquestionably, too, he was a man of fervid patriotism. The love which
he cherished for his country went hand in hand with the love which he cherished
for his God. He lived in a dark and distressing time. Judah and Jerusalem were
passing through deep floods of trial. Powerful enemies had come against them;
and in the day of their calamity those to whom they might have looked for help--whom
they expected at least to refrain from adding to their sorrow and shame--had
acted the unkindest and most cruel part. Lover and acquaintance and friend had
turned against them in the hour of need; their bitterest foes had been men who
were closely allied with themselves by blood and kinship; where they ought to
have found succour--or if not active succour, then certainly neutrality and
non-interference--they had discovered hatred and malice and blood-thirstiness.
They were gloomy and terrible days for Judah, and Obadiah’s heart was sore
pained within him as he looked on and saw the violence which prevailed. The
present miseries of Jerusalem, and its ultimate greatness; the present triumph
of its adversaries, and their ultimate overthrow--these are his only themes.
“Upon Mount Zion shall be deliverance,” he says, “and there be holiness; and
the house of Jacob shall possess their possessions.” It is his country first
and last, and midst and without end. He prefers Jerusalem above his chiefest
joy. And so this book helps us to understand the truth which other parts of the
Bible confirm, that the love of one’s native land is a feeling not only deeply
rooted in our human nature, but acknowledged and commended by God. True
patriotism and true religion go together; and men are not likely to love their
heavenly King less strongly, or to care for the wide world less ardently,
because they feel a great and masterful regard for the country whose sons they
are. It only remains to be said about Obadiah himself--what has been hinted at
already--that probably he spoke of what his own eyes had looked upon, of
sufferings and indignities which he had witnessed and experienced. It is not
likely that the wrongs under which he beheld his country labouring were all in
the future, and were presented to him only in picture and imagination. We may
believe that the iron had entered his soul. He testified what he had seen. It
may be that he was one of the many inhabitants of Judah who fled before the
inroads of their enemies, and were scattered homeless and forlorn through the
cities of Palestine and Phoenicia. £ Of this we need feel little doubt, that
the miseries and results he depicted were not remote from him, but were to be
found in his own time and about his very doors. Out of the abundance of his
heart his mouth spoke. With this portrait of the man--a portrait which is not
destitute of attractiveness, although it is so shadowy and vague--we must rest content.
II. It may increase
our understanding of the book, even if it do not make us better acquainted with
its author, to pass now to the consideration of its date. At what time in the
history of Judah was it written? The question has received many different
answers. Putting aside many of the ideas which have been broached, for the Book
of Obadiah has been pronounced at once the earliest and the latest of the
prophetic writings, we are left with two distinct periods, at either of which
it might have been composed. One of them is the reign of Jehoram, the son of
Jehoshaphat--a brief and inglorious reign. During it the Philistines and the
Arabians, joining their forces, made an incursion into Judea (2 Chronicles 21:16-17). They
captured Jerusalem, and slew most of the royal family, and retreated to their
homes laden with spoil. This might be the sacking of the city, it has been
said, which the prophet paints. This might be the occasion when Edom took that
malicious pleasure in the downfall of his brother Jacob which Obadiah
castigates and condemns in those sharp and stern sentences of his. If that were
so, he would be the very first in the order of time among God’s seers and
messengers, the predecessor of Joel by some twenty years, and of Amos and Hosea
by more than seventy. But it is scarcely likely that this is the true date. An
invasion of freebooters like those Arabs of Jehoram’s day would not involve so
complete and methodical a subjugation of the Jews as the prophet describes.
They came for plunder, and they would retire as soon as they had secured it.
They had no wish--probably they had not the power--to make an entire conquest
of the land and the people. It was a sadder, larger, more devastating calamity
which Obadiah had in view. And therefore the other period which has been fixed
upon by many students of the book seems to be the more suitable--the period of
Nebuchadnezzar’s capture and destruction of the Holy City, the dark and dreary
days when the Chaldean was in the land. We may reckon it probable that Obadiah
saw the irresistible advance and the too complete success of the Babylonian
army--saw his country lying abject and bleeding at the feet of the
conqueror--saw the beginnings of the long exile. And that inexcusable glorying
of the Edomites over the shame and ruin of Jerusalem, which roused his
indignation more than anything else, may well have been one feature of so
sorrowful a time. Indeed, it must have been so; for although the historical
books make no mention of it, one allusion after another to this bitterest
ingredient in the cup of Zion’s humiliation and distress is to be found in the
prophets. In their pages the cry for vengeance on Edom is heard again and
again. Everything points to the conclusion, as most deserving of belief, that
Obadiah’s work as a prophet was performed in that woeful year--588 b.c.--when
God’s city fell a prey to the soldiers of Chaldea and the brigands of Mount
Seir. It does not really tell against this conclusion that Jeremiah, who was an
eye-witness also of these heart-breaking scenes, borrows in one passage some of
the expressions of Obadiah, as though he were quoting from one who had long
preceded him. For the brief and keen denunciations of our prophet may have been
poured forth during the very days in which the wrongs that kindled his anger
were being done; he may have spoken out of the midst of this furnace heated
seven times; and then his greater contemporary may have taken up and elaborated
his words shortly afterwards, when the acuteness of the pain had passed in some
measure, but while the memory of the sharp anguish--the sorrow even unto
death--was still fresh and clear. Following immediately in the footsteps of
Obadiah, the weeping prophet caught and echoed the notes which his less famous
brother had sounded out with such resolution and vigour. £
III. Let us think
now, a little more particularly, of the contents of his prophecy. It presents
two pictures to our gaze, the one dark and terrible to see, the other bright
and beautiful in the extreme. The dark picture is that of the sin and
destruction of Edom. Edom felt no fear, the prophet says, and anticipated no
doom. Its people were proud and confident and undreaming of disaster. They
relied partly on the inaccessible position and the impregnable strength of
their capital Petra, the famous rock-city high up among the cliffs, the town
which was one of the wonders of the world, excavated as it was out of the
mountain-side. Had they not exalted themselves as the eagle? they exclaimed in
triumph. Had they not made their nest among the stars? Did they not live in “a
peaceable habitation, and a sure dwelling, and a quiet resting-place”--live “on
the hills, like gods together, careless of mankind”? And they leaned, too, on
the wisdom of their sages and teachers--a wisdom, the report of which bad gone
out far and near. “The mount of Esau,” with its curious and stable rock-houses,
was known to be the home of “understanding.” If danger were to arise--if the
improbable should happen, and days of trouble dawn for Petra and its citizens--the
ominous and threatening cloud would hang over it only for a little; the enemy
would soon be compelled to depart; the skill of the wise men of Teman--men like
Eliphaz, the leader of Job’s friends--would not be long in devising a way of
escape from defeat and disgrace, a safe and sure path to victory and honour and
peace. So Edom dwelt secure, dreading no peril, imagining that to-morrow would
be as this day, and much more abundant. But it was the mission of Obadiah to
foretell the entire ruin and desolation of the haughty empire. God was to bring
it down, he declared, from its home among the munitions of rocks. He was to
bane all its advisers, and to make their prudence and resource of no account.
There was a reason for a doom so fearful--an ample reason. Edom deserved to the
full all that it was by and by to receive. Obadiah details its sin in strong
and burning words. He sees Jerusalem sacked by the heathen king, his own home
spoiled and laid in the dust, the house of his God destroyed. Strangers carry
away captive the young and the old; foreigners enter the gates and tread the
streets of the city dear to his heart. And there, not only refusing to help,
but triumphing with malicious joy, uttering words of scornful contempt, doing
deeds of robbery and violence, were the Edomites. The prophet gives a vivid
narrative of their cruelty and unbrotherliness; his eye could hardly turn away
from the contemplation of the strange and piteous sight. He beholds them
rejoicing in the gate of Jerusalem, and intercepting the escape of those who
would have fled down to the Jordan valley, and betraying the fugitives to the
Babylonian conqueror. These are the things which make the cry for vengeance
break from his heart--vengeance on the false kindred who had become the proud
oppressors of his race. Edom was conquered soon afterwards by Nebuchadnezzar,
whom it had helped to destroy Jerusalem; the inhabitants of Petra were expelled
from the clefts of the rock; and a colony from Chaldea took their place. And,
further on in the stream of history, the Jews themselves were permitted to
triumph over their former enemies. Judas Maccabaeus attacked and defeated the
Edomites who had settled in the towns of Southern Palestine after Petra was
wrested from them. He recovered the cities which they had taken away. He drove
them forth homeless and helpless, as they had done to their kinsfolk four
centuries before. So sin finds the sinner out, even after many days. But
Obadiah’s second picture is a bright and pleasing one. It is the picture of the
restoration of Israel. God’s banished, the prophet saw, were to regain their
former possessions, and to overcome their ancient foes, and to spread abroad in
all directions. They were to prosper and advance, until the grand
consummation--“the far-off Divine event” to which the whole creation moves--was
reached, and the empire of God was set up over the entire earth. “The kingdom
shall be the Lord’s”--that is Obadiah’s last word. (Original Secession
Magazine.)
OBADIAH
INTRODUCTION
It is very noticeable and worthy of remark how very little God’s
prophets have to tell us about themselves. When their own history is in
question they are the most reserved and silent of men. This self-restraint is
indeed quite unprecedented in literature. It is an unparalleled thing that an
author should be so self-forgetful as those old prophets were. It is a thing,
too, which other men do not greatly like. We love to know as much as possible
about the face and form, the manners
and the experiences of those whose books we read. No one of the prophets is
more reticent than Obadiah. His name is all that we learn from him about
himself. But with no one in the high and holy company have expositors busied
themselves more anxiously. Some have hoped that he might prove to have been the
godly chamberlain of Ahab in the time of Elijah, who shielded so many of the
servants of Jehovah from the wrath of the wicked king (1 Kings 18:3-16); and others have
identified him with the teacher whom Jehoshaphat sent to instruct the cities of
Judah in Divine things (2 Chronicles 17:7); and others still
have fancied that he might be the overseer who was appointed to superintend the restoration of the
temple in the days of the good Josiah (2 Chronicles 34:12). These all bore
the same title; might not one of them, it has been suggested, be the speaker of
this prophecy? None of them suits exactly the circumstances of the case.
I. Perhaps,
however, we may gleam a little about his inner character and his outer history
from the prophecy itself. He was a man of genuine and deep piety. He records
only his name, before he passes on to tell out the message which has been
intrusted to him. But that name is a very significant one, and one which was
much loved by Old Testament believers. Obadiah means “the servant of Jehovah,”
or “the worshipper of the Lord.” When Obadiah makes known to us his name and
stops short there, it is as if he said, “I do not care to disclose anything
further; I am content and glad to be thought of simply as one of God’s true
worshippers; that is the only honour which I covet, the sole crown which I can
consent to wear.” We may rest confident that his was a very thorough and a very
unaffected piety. Unquestionably, too, he was a man of fervid patriotism. The
love which he cherished for his country went hand in hand with the love which
he cherished for his God. He lived in a dark and distressing time. Judah and
Jerusalem were passing through deep floods of trial. Powerful enemies had come
against them; and in the day of their calamity those to whom they might have
looked for help--whom they expected at least to refrain from adding to their
sorrow and shame--had acted the unkindest and most cruel part. Lover and
acquaintance and friend had turned against them in the hour of need; their
bitterest foes had been men who were closely allied with themselves by blood
and kinship; where they ought to have found succour--or if not active succour,
then certainly neutrality and non-interference--they had discovered hatred and
malice and blood-thirstiness. They were gloomy and terrible days for Judah, and
Obadiah’s heart was sore pained within him as he looked on and saw the violence
which prevailed. The present miseries of Jerusalem, and its ultimate greatness;
the present triumph of its adversaries, and their ultimate overthrow--these are
his only themes. “Upon Mount Zion shall be deliverance,” he says, “and there be
holiness; and the house of Jacob shall possess their possessions.” It is his
country first and last, and midst and without end. He prefers Jerusalem above
his chiefest joy. And so this book helps us to understand the truth which other
parts of the Bible confirm, that the love of one’s native land is a feeling not
only deeply rooted in our human nature, but acknowledged and commended by God.
True patriotism and true religion go together; and men are not likely to love
their heavenly King less strongly, or to care for the wide world less ardently,
because they feel a great and masterful regard for the country whose sons they
are. It only remains to be said about Obadiah himself--what has been hinted at
already--that probably he spoke of what his own eyes had looked upon, of
sufferings and indignities which he had witnessed and experienced. It is not
likely that the wrongs under which he beheld his country labouring were all in
the future, and were presented to him only in picture and imagination. We may
believe that the iron had entered his soul. He testified what he had seen. It
may be that he was one of the many inhabitants of Judah who fled before the
inroads of their enemies, and were scattered homeless and forlorn through the
cities of Palestine and Phoenicia. £ Of this we need feel little doubt, that
the miseries and results he depicted were not remote from him, but were to be
found in his own time and about his very doors. Out of the abundance of his
heart his mouth spoke. With this portrait of the man--a portrait which is not
destitute of attractiveness, although it is so shadowy and vague--we must rest content.
II. It may increase
our understanding of the book, even if it do not make us better acquainted with
its author, to pass now to the consideration of its date. At what time in the
history of Judah was it written? The question has received many different
answers. Putting aside many of the ideas which have been broached, for the Book
of Obadiah has been pronounced at once the earliest and the latest of the
prophetic writings, we are left with two distinct periods, at either of which
it might have been composed. One of them is the reign of Jehoram, the son of
Jehoshaphat--a brief and inglorious reign. During it the Philistines and the
Arabians, joining their forces, made an incursion into Judea (2 Chronicles 21:16-17). They
captured Jerusalem, and slew most of the royal family, and retreated to their
homes laden with spoil. This might be the sacking of the city, it has been
said, which the prophet paints. This might be the occasion when Edom took that
malicious pleasure in the downfall of his brother Jacob which Obadiah
castigates and condemns in those sharp and stern sentences of his. If that were
so, he would be the very first in the order of time among God’s seers and
messengers, the predecessor of Joel by some twenty years, and of Amos and Hosea
by more than seventy. But it is scarcely likely that this is the true date. An
invasion of freebooters like those Arabs of Jehoram’s day would not involve so
complete and methodical a subjugation of the Jews as the prophet describes.
They came for plunder, and they would retire as soon as they had secured it.
They had no wish--probably they had not the power--to make an entire conquest
of the land and the people. It was a sadder, larger, more devastating calamity
which Obadiah had in view. And therefore the other period which has been fixed
upon by many students of the book seems to be the more suitable--the period of
Nebuchadnezzar’s capture and destruction of the Holy City, the dark and dreary
days when the Chaldean was in the land. We may reckon it probable that Obadiah
saw the irresistible advance and the too complete success of the Babylonian
army--saw his country lying abject and bleeding at the feet of the
conqueror--saw the beginnings of the long exile. And that inexcusable glorying
of the Edomites over the shame and ruin of Jerusalem, which roused his
indignation more than anything else, may well have been one feature of so
sorrowful a time. Indeed, it must have been so; for although the historical
books make no mention of it, one allusion after another to this bitterest
ingredient in the cup of Zion’s humiliation and distress is to be found in the
prophets. In their pages the cry for vengeance on Edom is heard again and
again. Everything points to the conclusion, as most deserving of belief, that
Obadiah’s work as a prophet was performed in that woeful year--588 b.c.--when
God’s city fell a prey to the soldiers of Chaldea and the brigands of Mount
Seir. It does not really tell against this conclusion that Jeremiah, who was an
eye-witness also of these heart-breaking scenes, borrows in one passage some of
the expressions of Obadiah, as though he were quoting from one who had long
preceded him. For the brief and keen denunciations of our prophet may have been
poured forth during the very days in which the wrongs that kindled his anger
were being done; he may have spoken out of the midst of this furnace heated
seven times; and then his greater contemporary may have taken up and elaborated
his words shortly afterwards, when the acuteness of the pain had passed in some
measure, but while the memory of the sharp anguish--the sorrow even unto
death--was still fresh and clear. Following immediately in the footsteps of
Obadiah, the weeping prophet caught and echoed the notes which his less famous
brother had sounded out with such resolution and vigour. £
III. Let us think
now, a little more particularly, of the contents of his prophecy. It presents
two pictures to our gaze, the one dark and terrible to see, the other bright
and beautiful in the extreme. The dark picture is that of the sin and
destruction of Edom. Edom felt no fear, the prophet says, and anticipated no
doom. Its people were proud and confident and undreaming of disaster. They
relied partly on the inaccessible position and the impregnable strength of their
capital Petra, the famous rock-city high up among the cliffs, the town which
was one of the wonders of the world, excavated as it was out of the
mountain-side. Had they not exalted themselves as the eagle? they exclaimed in
triumph. Had they not made their nest among the stars? Did they not live in “a
peaceable habitation, and a sure dwelling, and a quiet resting-place”--live “on
the hills, like gods together, careless of mankind”? And they leaned, too, on
the wisdom of their sages and teachers--a wisdom, the report of which bad gone
out far and near. “The mount of Esau,” with its curious and stable rock-houses,
was known to be the home of “understanding.” If danger were to arise--if the
improbable should happen, and days of trouble dawn for Petra and its
citizens--the ominous and threatening cloud would hang over it only for a
little; the enemy would soon be compelled to depart; the skill of the wise men
of Teman--men like Eliphaz, the leader of Job’s friends--would not be long in
devising a way of escape from defeat and disgrace, a safe and sure path to
victory and honour and peace. So Edom dwelt secure, dreading no peril,
imagining that to-morrow would be as this day, and much more abundant. But it
was the mission of Obadiah to foretell the entire ruin and desolation of the
haughty empire. God was to bring it down, he declared, from its home among the
munitions of rocks. He was to bane all its advisers, and to make their prudence
and resource of no account. There was a reason for a doom so fearful--an ample
reason. Edom deserved to the full all that it was by and by to receive. Obadiah
details its sin in strong and burning words. He sees Jerusalem sacked by the
heathen king, his own home spoiled and laid in the dust, the house of his God
destroyed. Strangers carry away captive the young and the old; foreigners enter
the gates and tread the streets of the city dear to his heart. And there, not
only refusing to help, but triumphing with malicious joy, uttering words of
scornful contempt, doing deeds of robbery and violence, were the Edomites. The
prophet gives a vivid narrative of their cruelty and unbrotherliness; his eye
could hardly turn away from the contemplation of the strange and piteous sight.
He beholds them rejoicing in the gate of Jerusalem, and intercepting the escape
of those who would have fled down to the Jordan valley, and betraying the
fugitives to the Babylonian conqueror. These are the things which make the cry
for vengeance break from his heart--vengeance on the false kindred who had become
the proud oppressors of his race. Edom was conquered soon afterwards by
Nebuchadnezzar, whom it had helped to destroy Jerusalem; the inhabitants of
Petra were expelled from the clefts of the rock; and a colony from Chaldea took
their place. And, further on in the stream of history, the Jews themselves were
permitted to triumph over their former enemies. Judas Maccabaeus attacked and
defeated the Edomites who had settled in the towns of Southern Palestine after
Petra was wrested from them. He recovered the cities which they had taken away.
He drove them forth homeless and helpless, as they had done to their kinsfolk
four centuries before. So sin finds the sinner out, even after many days. But
Obadiah’s second picture is a bright and pleasing one. It is the picture of the
restoration of Israel. God’s banished, the prophet saw, were to regain their
former possessions, and to overcome their ancient foes, and to spread abroad in
all directions. They were to prosper and advance, until the grand
consummation--“the far-off Divine event” to which the whole creation moves--was
reached, and the empire of God was set up over the entire earth. “The kingdom
shall be the Lord’s”--that is Obadiah’s last word. (Original Secession
Magazine.)
──《The Biblical Illustrator》