The second reading is from the book of Obadiah, the shortest and perhaps the most neglected book in the Old Testament.
Obadiah 3-4 talk about the pride that the inhabitants of Edom have in their hearts. They take comfort in their seemingly impenetrable walls of natural rock, thinking themselves secure from their foes. "Who will bring me down to the ground?" they ask. God answers, "I will bring you down." Sometimes we allow our own pride to obscure the fact that everything we have and everything we are comes from God. When we begin to survey our accomplishments and think to ourselves, "Just look what I've been able to achieve! I must be something special!" God reminds us of the reality of the situation. The talents, the spiritual gifts, the health, the financial resources, whatever we've used to attain success in life comes from God. Our success is really God's success. When we look at our lives through God's eyes, we'll realize that we have no reason to take pride in our accomplishments, as though they were our own exclusively. If we are proud, a fall may be just around the corner.
Despite its position in the Hebrew Bible between Amos and Micah, two eighth-century prophets (Jonah is a special case, a narrative with no prophetic oracles), Obadiah should be dated to early in the exilic period, just after the Babylonians have destroyed the city of Jerusalem and carried its leading inhabitants away to Babylonia. The Edomites, whom the people of Judah considered distant relatives, had collaborated with the Babylonians in the conquest of Judah, probably in exchange for territorial considerations. The freshness of the disaster of the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple weighed heavily on the mind of the prophet, and he eagerly desired to see the punishment that God would mete out on Edom. From a historical perspective, it is highly doubtful that an alliance between Judah and Edom would have stopped the Babylonian onslaught against King Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, and the king of Edom probably believed that he was acting in the best interest of his own people in siding with Babylonia over Judah. Nevertheless, the prophet calls down God's judgment on Israel's errant brother, who, from the prophet's perspective, valued easy profits over familial loyalty.
The book of Obadiah may be read in the contemporary context of the 2004 overthrow of Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the democratically elected former leader of Haiti. Although the United States restored Aristide to power after a previous coup in 1994, it refused Aristide's calls for assistance in early 2004 as he faced an armed rebellion led by former members of the political opposition and supporters of the Duvalier dictatorships that crippled Haiti for years. Edom stood by and watched as Babylonia looted and destroyed Jerusalem, not because they preferred the Babylonians, but because it was in their own best interest. But is that the proper criterion a nation should use in determining whether to act internationally? The universal prophetic cry for justice suggests that narrow, national self-interest is less important than establishing peaceful and just living conditions for all, especially those least able to provide it for themselves, such as the inhabitants of Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. When faced with future threats to democracy in neighboring countries, our nation can do better.
Preaching against the enemies of your own country is an easy sell, because you know you will have a receptive audience. The tendency to divide humanity into "us" and "them" is universal and encompasses all time periods. The book of Obadiah contains a single oracle against the nation of Edom, an adversary of Judah, from whence the prophet hailed. Oracles against foreign nations are common in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible. Nahum is another book whose message is directed exclusively against a foreign power (Assyria). All the major prophets--Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel--contain sections containing numerous oracles against a variety of foreign states. Despite this observation, it is important to remember that the first duty of a prophet is to speak to his or her own people. Denouncing the sins of foreigners while not at the same time denouncing the sins of your own nation is false prophecy pure and simple. Amos got rave reviews when he proclaimed God's judgment on Israel's enemies, but when he saved God's greatest judgment for Israel itself, the adulation quickly turned to scorn. Jeremiah got himself into serious trouble for saying that the Babylonians would take Judah into exile. He was called a traitor and a false prophet, but his prophecy turned out to be true, and he saw his message of judgment as the last hope for his beloved people. Because we only have this one oracle of Obadiah preserved in the canon, we don't know what other messages he might have preached. It is certainly legitimate for prophets of both yesterday and today to subject the actions of foreign nations to scrutiny and to proclaim God's judgment if they fail to live up to God's standards, but those prophets' words will rightly be ignored if they do not hold their own nation to the same standard of behavior.
The movie The Man Who Would Be King is based on a short story by Rudyard Kipling of the same name. Sean Connery and Michael Caine play two British rogues, Daniel and Peachy, who set out on an adventure to steal a fortune from the priests of a remote Afghan village. They are caught in a battle, and by sheer luck, an arrow that appears to strike Daniel in the chest in fact hits a medallion that he wears, and he is saved. The inhabitants of the village take him for a god, the reincarnation of Alexander the Great, and they set him up as king. Although Daniel and Peachy are well-positioned to steal the money they came for and leave, Daniel enjoys his new-found status as a divine being too much to leave. Ultimately, his mortality is demonstrated convincingly to everyone, and the townspeople set upon the two, killing Daniel and leaving Peachy for dead, although he manages to escape and tell the tale. Daniel was a man who believed his own press. He knew in his heart that he was no god, yet he allowed others to treat him like one, and eventually he began to believe it himself. The result of his pride was his own destruction. The nation of Edom was proud of its ingenuity in avoiding the same fate as Judah, and it felt secure in its mountain fortresses. However, its very pride was proof for Obadiah that the nation would surely fall, and fall hard. As Daniel found out in Kipling's story, and as Edom was shortly to discover, "pride comes before the fall."
Previous: Ways of Reading the Bible: Sample 1 (Judges 11:29-40) - Next: Ways of Reading the Bible: Sample 3 (Psalm 22)
© 2011, James R. Adair, Jr.