Suggest an Edit — Obadiah

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Biography

Short Description

Obadiah is the prophet to whom the Book of Obadiah in the Hebrew Bible is attributed. The work, a single chapter of twenty-one verses, is the shortest book in the Old Testament and belongs to the Twelve Minor Prophets (the Book of the Twelve). The Hebrew name ʿŌḇaḏyāh, rendered in Greek as Abdias or Obdias, means servant of Yahweh or worshiper of the Lord. The biblical superscription states only 'The vision of Obadiah' and supplies neither a patronymic, a place of origin, nor a reigning king by which the prophet might be dated. Almost nothing about his life can therefore be established from contemporary historical sources. Later Jewish, Christian, and related traditions filled that silence with identifications and legends that historians treat as pious expansions rather than as verified biography.

The date of the oracle remains a matter of scholarly debate. An early dating locates Obadiah in the ninth century BCE, connecting the condemnation of Edom with Edom's revolt against Judah in the reign of Jehoram son of Jehoshaphat and with contemporaneous raids on Judah mentioned in the books of Kings and Chronicles. A later dating, favored by many modern critics, places the prophecy after the Babylonian capture of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, when Edomites were remembered as having joined in or exploited Judah's disaster—an accusation also found in Psalm 137, Lamentations, and Ezekiel's oracles against Edom. Other proposals situate the book in the Persian period of the fifth or fourth century BCE. No external inscription or archaeological find has confirmed any of these reconstructions, and the prophet's century cannot be regarded as settled.

Rabbinic tradition, recorded in the Babylonian Talmud (tractate Sanhedrin), identifies the literary prophet with the Obadiah who was overseer of the palace of King Ahab of the northern kingdom of Israel in the ninth century BCE. That official is portrayed in 1 Kings 18 as a God-fearing man who concealed one hundred prophets in two caves and supplied them with bread and water during Jezebel's persecution. The same tradition holds that he was an Edomite convert to the worship of Israel's God, offered as an explanation for both his knowledge of Edom and the severity of his judgment upon it. Early Christian hagiography, especially the Greek Lives of the Prophets (a work of uncertain date, often assigned to the first centuries of the Common Era), states that Obadiah came from the district of Shechem, from Beth-haccerem, that he became a disciple of Elijah, and that he was buried with his ancestors. These notices, while influential in liturgy and iconography, lack independent historical corroboration.

In the Christian churches Obadiah is honored as a saint among the Old Testament prophets. The Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Martyrology of the Catholic Church both assign his feast to 19 November; other Oriental churches keep related commemorations of the Twelve Prophets. Medieval and later pilgrims were shown a tomb said to be his at Sebastia (ancient Samaria) in the Holy Land, sometimes grouped with tombs attributed to Elisha and John the Baptist, but such localizations belong to pious geography rather than to verifiable biography. The prophecy itself is a tightly constructed oracle of judgment: Edom is indicted for violence against 'your brother Jacob,' for standing aloof or assisting when strangers carried off Jerusalem's wealth and when fugitives were cut down at the crossroads. The book closes with a vision of the Day of the Lord, the repossession of Israel's inheritance, and the assertion that the kingdom shall be the Lord's. Because the historical person remains almost entirely unknown, Obadiah's enduring place in Jewish and Christian memory rests on this brief, theologically concentrated text and on the later traditions that gathered around his name.

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