On this rich fortress-land the Edomites enjoyed a civilisation far above that of the tribes who swarmed upon the surrounding deserts; and at the same time they were cut off from the lands of those Syrian nations who were their equals in culture and descent. When Edom looked out of himself, he looked _down_ and _across_—down upon the Arabs, whom his position enabled him to rule with a loose, rough hand, and across at his brothers in Palestine, forced by their more open territories to make alliances with and against each other, from all of which he could afford to hold himself free. That alone was bound to exasperate them. In Edom himself it appears to have bred a want of sympathy, a habit of keeping to himself and ignoring the claims both of pity and of kinship—with which he is charged by all the prophets. _He corrupted his natural feelings, and watched his passion for ever.[513] Thou stoodest aloof!_[514]
This self-sufficiency was aggravated by the position of the country among several of the main routes of ancient trade. The masters of Mount Se’ir held the harbours of ‘Akaba, into which the gold ships came from Ophir. They intercepted the Arabian caravans and cut the roads to Gaza and Damascus. Petra, in the very heart of Edom, was in later times the capital of the Nabatean kingdom, whose commerce rivalled that of Phœnicia, scattering its inscriptions from Teyma in Central Arabia up to the very gates of Rome.[515] The earlier Edomites were also traders, middlemen between Arabia and the Phœnicians; and they filled their caverns with the wealth both of East and West.[516] There can be little doubt that it was this which first drew the envious hand of Israel upon a land so cut off from their own and so difficult of invasion. Hear the exultation of the ancient prophet whose words Obadiah has borrowed: _How searched out is Esau, and his hidden treasures rifled!_[517] But the same is clear from the history. Solomon, Jehoshaphat, Amaziah, Uzziah and other Jewish invaders of Edom were all ambitious to command the Eastern trade through Elath and Ezion-geber. For this it was necessary to subdue Edom; and the frequent reduction of the country to a vassal state, with the revolts in which it broke free, were accompanied by terrible cruelties upon both sides.[518] Every century increased the tale of bitter memories between the brothers, and added the horrors of a war of revenge to those of a war for gold.
The deepest springs of their hate, however, bubbled in their blood. In genius, temper and ambition, the two peoples were of opposite extremes. It is very singular that we never hear in the Old Testament of the Edomite gods. Israel fell under the fascination of every neighbouring idolatry, but does not even mention that Edom had a religion. Such a silence cannot be accidental, and the inference which it suggests is confirmed by the picture drawn of Esau himself. Esau is a _profane person_[519]; 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,[520] 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_[521] 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.