Dead Men Tell Tales

by Harry Rimmer

So also Amos, in chapter one and verse eleven utters this fateful sentence:

“Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Edom, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because he did pursue his brother with the sword, and did cast off all pity, and his anger did tear perpetually, and he kept his wrath forever.”

Thus the prophet is moved of God to list the continued transgressions of Edom, and the consequent and subsequent judgment.

So literally were these words of the prophets fulfilled that Edom was not only overthrown and its people vanquished, but for a great deal more than a thousand years the very name of their city and people dropped out of the memory of men. Here is one more case where a great people catastrophically disappeared from the stage of history, leaving no secular record of the part that they had played in the drama of human life.

Needless to say, this was the critics’ great occasion! With a vociferous unanimity they argued and wrote that there had been no city called Edom, and no people called Edomites. Since the word “Edom” literally means “red,” the critics erected a fanciful demonstration purporting to show that the Edomites would be any people with a red complexion. According to their fanciful theory, any race or group of people whose skin or hair was red would be poetically called Edomites.

When the defenders of the text pointed to the denunciations in the prophets, the critics laughed them out of the picture. These utterances were listed as pure, poetic fancy and figurative diatribes. The critics pointed out that all such outbursts were found in the prophecies! As a stated principle of higher criticism, all prophecies are repudiated. They are held to be purely fanciful, and any fulfillment is entirely coincidental. This attitude is the proper one for criticism to assume. The supernatural fulfillment of prophecy is one of the strongest evidences of the Divine origin of the Scriptures. Such demonstrations cannot be reconciled with the critical basis of humanism. Therefore, it is only logical that it be ignored or denied in a critical approach to the text.

The enemies of orthodoxy had one strong argument that in the early day seemed to be unanswerable. Their constant cry was “Where is Edom?” Admittedly, this was a question that the orthodox believer could not answer. The city had disappeared, the people were forgotten, and no relic nor remnant of this race remained. It was not until the nineteenth century of the Christian era that the resurrection of Edom began.

The first and earliest archeological reference to Edom which was discovered, was a statement from the record of Ramses the Third, who proudly boasted that in his great campaign he smote the people of Seir. The next discovery came when the record of Tiglath-pileser was read. In his story he told of the campaign against Rezin, king of Syria. He recounted that among other vassals who yielded to his yoke, he received homage from Quaus-Malaka of Edom. This Rezin, with whom we shall later deal in Tiglath-pileser’s voluminous records, is the king of Syria who is warned in the seventh chapter of Isaiah as allied with Israel against Judah.

Following this, we have the monument of Esar-haddon. He also tells how among his Assyrian conquests he overthrew the Edomites and forced their king to render homage and allegiance to his power. Again, the records of Nebuchadnezzar tell us that in his final battle with Judah, the Edomites were among his allied forces.

Gradually, as this people began to rise from the silence and obscurity of forgotten antiquity, something of their customs and beliefs began to be recovered. At least three of their deities are known today. These are Hadad, Quaus and Kozé. About 300 B. C., Edom fell into the hands of a people who were called the Nabataeans. Their inscription claims that they captured Edom, exterminated its then numerous population and occupied its capital, which was Petra.