Where the Overlap Stops

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Obadiah, Book of,” “Edom,” “Idumea,” “Teman,” “Sela,” “Sepharad.”
• Dictionary of the OT: Prophets (IVP) — “Obadiah, Book of,” “Edom, Edomites,” “Day of the Lord,” “Nations.”
• NIDOTTE — אֱדוֹם, שָׂרִיד, פְּלֵיטָה, יָרַשׁ, יָשַׁע.
• Dictionary of NT Use of the OT (Beale & Carson) — consulted, and it has nothing to give here: no New Testament passage is treated as a use of Obadiah. That silence is itself the stage-4 result on this page.

Obadiah is one of the few books on this shelf where the three columns agree on every verse number, because there is one chapter and twenty-one verses in all three.

This shelf states the offset on every page, including the pages where there is none. Here there is none. Compare the two books of the Twelve where a whole chapter’s worth of numbering has to be converted — Joel, four chapters in Hebrew and three in English, and Malachi, three and four.

One convention only: a one-chapter book is usually cited by bare verse number, so Obadiah 4 and Obadiah 1:4 are the same verse. The CATSS file labels its rows Obad 1 through Obad 21 with no chapter number at all.

Each verse of Obadiah was screened against every verse of Jeremiah 49 for the longest run of consecutive shared consonantal word-forms. The result is not a gradient. It is an edge.

Verse 8’s run of four is a formula and is not evidence of a relationship. Screened against the whole Hebrew Bible rather than against Jeremiah 49 alone, בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא נְאֻם־יְהוָה — on that day, declares the Lord — comes back with a tie band of fifteen verses, five of them in Jeremiah and the rest scattered from Isaiah 22 to Zechariah 13. It is a stock phrase, and a screen that counted it as contact would be counting the shared language of the prophets rather than a link between two books.

So the distinctive overlap is verses 1–5, and it ends there. Two of those verses reach a run of five with a tie band of one — Jeremiah 49:15 and 49:16 are the only verses in the Hebrew Bible that carry those five-word sequences alongside Obadiah 2 and Obadiah 4. From verse 9 to verse 21, the deepest thing Obadiah shares with any verse of Jeremiah 49 is two words, and usually one.

What this does and does not show. It shows where the shared material is. It does not show which book had it first, whether either writer saw the other, or whether both drew on something older — and those are the actual questions in the literature. A measurement of location is not an argument about priority. Two verses of Obadiah, 6 and 10, share no two consecutive words with any other verse in the Hebrew Bible.

Obadiah 11–14 charges Edom with standing by, entering the gates, and cutting off fugitives. It is not the only text that remembers it that way.

1 Esdras is worth pausing on, and worth labelling. It is a Second-Temple Greek book, not Scripture on our shelf, and it is evidence for how the memory was being told by then rather than a report from the event. What it does is go a step further than the prophets do. Obadiah says Edom stood by and came in at the gates; 1 Esdras 4:45 says the Idumeans burned the temple — and 2 Kings 25:9 lays that at the door of Nebuzaradan and the Babylonians. The page notes the escalation and does not adjudicate it.

Two other things happened to Edom between the testaments. The Nabateans came to hold the old Edomite territory, and the population settled in the southern hill country of Judah was known by the Greek name of that region, Idumea. Josephus reports that John Hyrcanus subdued the Idumeans and required them to live by Jewish law (Antiquities 13.257–258). The Herods were an Idumean family. None of this is in Obadiah. It is what the name in Obadiah 1 had come to mean by the first century.

Verses 11–14 are built out of one phrase repeated.

The word יוֹם stands twelve times in the book. Once before this block — בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא, on that day, at verse 8. Ten times inside it. And once after it, at verse 15: יוֹם־יְהוָה, the day of the Lord.

The block is bracketed by the other two, and the movement is from Edom’s day to the Lord’s. The eight commands all take the same form — do not look, do not rejoice, do not boast, do not enter, do not gloat, do not loot, do not stand at the crossroads, do not hand over the survivors — and they concern the person verse 10 has just named: אָחִיךָ יַעֲקֹב, your brother Jacob.

All 21 CATSS rows of Obadiah were screened against all 7,927 verses of the Greek New Testament. The deepest run in the book is four; three rows reach it; and all three are formulas.

The Luke line is the clearest warning on this page about what a run of four is worth. Obadiah 18 is the house of Jacob shall be a fire; Luke 19:46 is my house shall be a house of prayer. Four consecutive Greek words, a tie band of one, and no relationship whatever between the two sentences. Across the 21 rows: all 21 reach two, 18 reach three, 3 reach four, and nothing reaches five.

So the screen finds nothing, and that agrees with the standard answer: no New Testament passage quotes Obadiah. It is not among the books Beale and Carson’s volume treats as cited. The page says so plainly rather than dressing a formula up as a connection.

The Greek row of Obadiah 1 does not address Edom. It addresses τῇ Ιδουμαίᾳ — Idumea. That word occurs exactly once in the New Testament.

…and Jerusalem and Idumea and from beyond the Jordan and from around Tyre and Sidon. When the great crowd heard all that he was doing, they came to him.Mark 3:8 (ESV)

Checked word by word against the whole Greek New Testament: Ἰδουμαίας at Mark 3:8 is the only occurrence. It is a list of the places people were coming from to get to Jesus, and Idumea is on it.

The page draws no conclusion from that, and it would be easy to overdraw one. Mark is naming the regions a crowd came out of; he is not commenting on Obadiah, and nothing in his sentence looks back at this book. What can be said is only what is on the page: the country Obadiah 1 addresses in Greek is named once in the New Testament, and the sentence it is named in is about people coming to Christ.

Acts 15:17 quotes Amos 9:12, and the Greek of that verse does not read the remnant of Edom but οἱ κατάλοιποι τῶν ἀνθρώπων, the remnant of mankind — which is the form James’ argument at the Jerusalem council runs on. The nearest thing to Obadiah’s subject in the New Testament arrives through a different book of the Twelve, and in a form the Hebrew of that book does not have. This shelf has that passage at Amos 9:11–12.

The direction of the Jeremiah 49 relationship is the main question about this book, and the page does not touch it. Whether Obadiah drew on Jeremiah, Jeremiah on Obadiah, or both on an older oracle against Edom is argued at length in the commentary literature, and the arguments turn on grammar, context and redaction rather than on word counts. This page measures where the shared material sits and stops.

The date is not settled here either. Verse 11 is the only internal evidence, and readings of it have placed the book anywhere across several centuries. The page reports what verse 11 says and leaves the date open.

And a run of four is worth nothing on its own. This page carries its own counter-example — Obadiah 18 against Luke 19:46 — and prints it precisely so that the other runs of four are not read as more than they are.

No Hebrew or Greek critical apparatus. No material from the Judaean Desert — Obadiah is present in the Minor Prophets finds, and none of it was consulted. No Targum, Syriac, Vulgate, Aquila, Symmachus or Theodotion. No archaeological reports on Edomite sites, and no Edomite epigraphy.

Two identifications are left open because this page cannot close them. Sepharad in verse 20 is unidentified, and the Greek row does not have the word at all. Verse 7’s מָזוֹר, which the ESV renders trap, is a recognised crux; the row has ἔνεδρα, an ambush, and the page prints both without deciding between them.

• Paul R. Raabe, Obadiah (Anchor Bible 24D).
• Ehud Ben Zvi, A Historical-Critical Study of the Book of Obadiah (BZAW 242).
• John Barton, Joel and Obadiah (Old Testament Library).
• J. R. Bartlett, Edom and the Edomites (JSOT Supplement Series 77).
• None of these were consulted for the measurements on this page, which were run on the text files named in the footer.

Edom lives in the clefts of the rock and asks the question the whole book answers: who will bring me down? God replies with Edom’s own verb — from there I will bring you down — and then the book spends nine verses on why: not the height, but the brother.

Eight times in three verses the command is do not. Do not look, do not rejoice, do not boast, do not enter, do not gloat, do not loot, do not stand at the crossroads, do not hand over the survivors. Ten times in four verses the phrase is in the day of — his day, their ruin, his calamity, distress. The centre of the shortest book in the Old Testament is a list of things you do not do to your brother on the worst day of his life.

And then the last verse turns the direction round. A book that opened with a nation which could not be brought down closes with deliverers going up — and on the one sentence both columns render the same way. The Hebrew sends saviours to judge; the Greek row sends saved men to avenge; and both finish alike: וְהָיְתָה לַיהוָה הַמְּלוּכָה — καὶ ἔσται τῷ κυρίῳ ἡ βασιλεία — and the kingdom shall be the Lord’s.

Ninth whole book of the Twelve on this shelf. Nine complete: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Habakkuk, Haggai, Malachi. Three to go — Nahum, Zephaniah, Zechariah.