Prophet Obadiah the Prophet

Obadiah was a prophet of Judah in the ninth century before Christ (by the dating that places him in the reign of Jehoram of Judah, after the sack of Jerusalem by Edomite-supported raiders) — though some traditions place him later, in the sixth century after the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon. His book is the shortest in the Hebrew Bible, a single chapter of twenty-one verses, devoted entirely to the prophecy of God's judgment upon Edom for its treachery against its brother Israel.

The prophecy is severe: Edom had stood at the crossroads where the Jerusalemites fled their burning city and had handed them over to their enemies; for this betrayal of fraternal duty Edom is told that the kingdom shall be the Lord's. The closing verses look forward to the restoration of Israel and the consummation of God's reign over all the nations — "and the kingdom shall be the Lord's."

The Christian tradition reads the prophecy as a typological condemnation of every later betrayal of one's spiritual kinsman, and a foreshadowing of the universal Kingdom of Christ. Obadiah's feast is kept on November 19. He is buried in the village of Sebaste in Samaria, where his shrine was honored in the patristic period.