Edom

The Story

Edom begins with a brother. When Isaac's twin sons went their separate ways, Esau — the elder, the red-haired hunter who had traded his birthright for a bowl of stew — took his household and his cattle and moved out of Canaan into the rugged country south and east of the Dead Sea. The land was called Seir, a chain of sandstone mountains running about a hundred miles from near the southern end of the Dead Sea down to the Gulf of Aqaba, and it became his. The name Edom means red, for the colour of the sandstone and for the man himself, and the people who came from him were the Edomites. By the time Israel came out of Egypt, Edom was already an old kingdom with a settled line of kings, its capital at the cliff-fortress of Bozrah, high on the King's Highway that carried the caravan trade between Arabia and the north.

The first time the brothers met again as nations, it was at the border. Moses sent messengers from Kadesh to the king of Edom, calling him brother, asking only for passage along the highway — no fields touched, no wells drunk from, water paid for if his cattle drank. The king refused, and came out against Israel with an army, and Israel turned aside and went the long way round. The refusal set the pattern for the centuries that followed.

²⁰And he said, Thou shalt not go through. And Edom came out against him with much people, and with a strong hand. ²¹Thus Edom refused to give Israel passage through his border: wherefore Israel turned away from him.

Numbers 20:20–21·KJV

Under David the pattern broke, at least for a time. David defeated Edom in the Valley of Salt and put garrisons throughout the land, and for a century and more Edom served the throne in Jerusalem. Solomon drew tribute from it and worked the copper of the Arabah in its shadow. But in the days of Jehoram of Judah, Edom rebelled and took back its own king, and from then on the two nations lived in the enmity that would define them — Edom on its high red cliffs, Judah on its ridge to the north, brothers who could not forgive.

The wound Edom gave Israel was not the sword but the presence at the funeral. When Babylon came against Jerusalem in 586 BC, Edom did not fight for its brother, and did not hide its face. The Edomites cheered the Babylonians on, cut off the fugitives who tried to escape south through their passes, and moved in behind the invading army to plunder what was left. The psalms and the prophets never forgot it. It is the memory behind Psalm 137, where the exiles by the rivers of Babylon remember what the children of Edom said in the day Jerusalem fell. It is the whole burden of the little book of Obadiah, the shortest prophecy in the Old Testament, spoken against Edom for what Edom did that day.

¹⁰For thy violence against thy brother Jacob shame shall cover thee, and thou shalt be cut off for ever. ¹¹In the day that thou stoodest on the other side, in the day that the strangers carried away captive his forces, and foreigners entered into his gates, and cast lots upon Jerusalem, even thou wast as one of them. ¹²But thou shouldest not have looked on the day of thy brother in the day that he became a stranger; neither shouldest thou have rejoiced over the children of Judah in the day of their destruction; neither shouldest thou have spoken proudly in the day of distress.

Obadiah 1:10–12·KJV

The judgment Obadiah spoke came, though not in a single blow. Within a generation the Babylonian king Nabonidus swept south through Edom about 553 BC and broke the kingdom that had gloated over Jerusalem's fall, and Edom never rose again as a state. Slowly across the next two centuries an Arab people called the Nabataeans pressed into the mountains, took Bozrah and the rock-city of Sela — the fortress the Greeks would come to call Petra — and pushed the surviving Edomites west and north into the southern country of Judah that had been emptied by the exile. There they lived on, no longer a kingdom but a people, and the Greeks called their new territory Idumea.

Idumea kept the old bloodline into the New Testament, but only just. In the second century BC the Jewish ruler John Hyrcanus subdued the Idumeans and required them to be circumcised and to keep the law, and they were absorbed into Judea. A century later a family from among them rose to the throne of the whole land: Antipater the Idumean and after him his son Herod the Great, the king who ruled in Jerusalem when Jesus was born and who sent soldiers to kill the children of Bethlehem. That a son of Esau sat on the throne of the city of David and tried to kill the promised son of David is one of the strange, dark ironies of the Bible, and it is the last flicker of Edom in Scripture. When Rome burned Jerusalem in AD 70, what remained of the Idumeans went down with it, and the house of Esau disappeared from history.

In God's Story

Edom is the Bible's long lesson in what happens when a brother turns against his brother, and it is not an accident that the lesson is told across the whole of Scripture from Genesis to the last of the prophets. The two boys are already fighting in Rebekah's womb, and the word given to her before they were born — that two nations were in her, and the elder would serve the younger — sets the frame for everything that follows. Every meeting between Israel and Edom in the Old Testament is a chapter of that first oracle working itself out.

What Scripture asks the reader to see in Edom is a picture of the flesh — the man who lives for his appetite and despises what cannot be tasted. Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of stew because he was hungry, and the writer of Hebrews reaches back to that moment centuries later and calls him a profane person for it: a man who could not see beyond the meal in front of him to the covenant blessing behind it. Edom inherited both the land and the temperament. It was a nation that trusted its cliffs and its trade routes, that lived by the sword and the caravan, and that could stand at the edge of its brother's grief and rejoice.

That is why the prophets are so unsparing. Obadiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Isaiah, and finally Malachi all take up the same refrain: pride like Edom's cannot stand, and the God of the covenant will not overlook what was done to his people in the day of their calamity. The verdict falls hardest at the very end of the Old Testament, in the first words the last prophet speaks. Malachi opens the Lord's case against Israel by pointing across the border to the ruins of Edom as proof that God's love for Jacob was real, and his judgment on Esau just as real.

²I have loved you, saith the Lord. Yet ye say, Wherein hast thou loved us? Was not Esau Jacob’s brother? saith the Lord: yet I loved Jacob, ³And I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness. ⁴Whereas Edom saith, We are impoverished, but we will return and build the desolate places; thus saith the Lord of hosts, They shall build, but I will throw down; and they shall call them, The border of wickedness, and, The people against whom the Lord hath indignation for ever.

Malachi 1:2–4·KJV

Yet this is not simply a story of one nation destroyed. The New Testament picks up the same two brothers and lifts the whole matter into a deeper key. Paul in Romans quotes Malachi's line about Jacob and Esau to teach that God's saving choice does not run by human descent or human striving — that from the beginning the covenant was gift, not birthright. And Hebrews turns Esau into a warning to the church: do not be like the man who traded the promise for a moment's comfort, for when he wanted the blessing back he could not find it.

Edom's land carries the same double meaning to the end. The prophets who spoke against Bozrah spoke also of a coming day when a warrior would stride out of Edom with garments stained red, treading the winepress of the wrath of God for his people. Isaiah saw him first from a distance. Revelation shows him plainly. The red land that was the picture of pride and enmity becomes, in the last book of the Bible, the picture of the Lamb who took the wrath into himself and comes to judge and to save.

Edom is gone from the map. Its cliffs are still there, and travellers still climb the passes into Petra, but the people who called themselves the sons of Esau have not been counted for two thousand years. What Scripture keeps of them is the warning — that being near to the covenant is not the same as being in it, and that a brother's grief is not a thing to gloat over — and, folded inside the warning, the promise that the true and better Brother has come and will come again, in garments red not with wine but with his own blood.