Our criticism of this theory may start from the seventh verse of Obadiah: _To the border they have sent thee, all the men of thy covenant have betrayed thee, they have overpowered thee, the men of thy peace._ On our present knowledge of the history of Edom it is impossible to assign the first of these clauses to any period before the Exile. No doubt in earlier days Edom was more than once subjected to Arab _razzias_. But up to the Jewish Exile the Edomites were still in possession of their own land. So the Deuteronomist[475] implies, and so Ezekiel[476] and perhaps the author of Lamentations.[477] Wellhausen’s claim, therefore, that the seventh verse of Obadiah refers to the expulsion of Edomites by Arabs in the sixth or fifth century B.C. may be granted.[478] But does this mean that verses 1-6 belong, as he maintains, to the same period? A negative answer seems required by the following facts. To begin with, the seventh verse is not found in the parallel prophecy in Jeremiah. There is no reason why it should not have been used there, if that prophecy had been compiled at a time when the expulsion of the Edomites was already an accomplished fact. But both by this omission and by all its other features, that prophecy suits the time of Jeremiah, and we may leave it, therefore, where it was left till the appearance of Wellhausen’s theory—namely, with Jeremiah himself.[479] Moreover Jeremiah xlix. 9 seems to have been adapted in Obadiah 5 in order to suit verse 6. But again, Obadiah 1-6, which contains so many parallels to Jeremiah’s prophecy, also seems to imply that the Edomites are still in possession of their land. _The nations_ (we may understand by this the Arab tribes) are risen against Edom, and Edom is already despicable in face of them (vv. 1, 2); but he has not yet fallen, any more than, to the writer of Isaiah xlv.—xlvii., who uses analogous language, Babylon is already fallen. Edom is weak and cannot resist the Arab _razzias_. But he still makes his eyrie on high and says: _Who will bring me down?_ To which challenge Jehovah replies, not ‘I have brought thee down,’ but _I will bring thee down_. The post-exilic portion of Obadiah, then, I take to begin with verse 7; and the author of this prophecy has begun by incorporating in vv. 1-6 a pre-exilic prophecy against Edom, which had been already, and with more freedom, used by Jeremiah. Verses 8-9 form a difficulty. They return to the future tense, as if the Edomites were still to be cut off from Mount Esau. But verse 10, as Wellhausen points out, follows on naturally to verse 7, and, with its successors, clearly points to a period subsequent to Nebuchadrezzar’s overthrow of Jerusalem. The change from the past tense in vv. 10-11 to the imperatives of 12-14 need cause, in spite of what Pusey says, no difficulty, but may be accounted for by the excited feelings of the prophet. The suggestion has been made, and it is plausible, that Obadiah speaks as an eye-witness of that awful time. Certainly there is nothing in the rest of the prophecy (vv. 15-21) to lead us to bring it further down than the years following the destruction of Jerusalem. Everything points to the Jews being still in exile. The verbs which describe the inviolateness of Jerusalem (17), and the reinstatement of Israel in their heritage (17, 19), and their conquest of Edom (18), are all in the future. The prophet himself appears to write in exile (20). The captivity of Jerusalem is in Sepharad (_ib._) and the _saviours_ have to _come up_ to Mount Zion; that is to say, they are still beyond the Holy Land (21).[480]
The one difficulty in assigning this date to the prophecy is that nothing is said in the Hebrew of ver. 19 about the re-occupation of the hill-country of Judæa itself, but here the Greek may help us.[481] Certainly every other feature suits the early days of the Exile.