Obadiah and Jeremiah 49: who copied whom?

What the text is doing

Obadiah's twenty-one verses fall into three movements. Verses 1-9 are the announcement of Edom's coming downfall, with the famous lines about pride: 'Though you mount up on high like the eagle, though you set your nest among the stars, from there I will bring you down, declares the LORD.' Verses 10-14 turn to indictment, describing what Edom did on 'the day of your brother' (verse 10) and 'the day of distress' (verse 12). They stood aloof. They looted. They cut off the escapees at the crossroads. They handed over survivors. Verses 15-21 widen out to the day of the LORD against all the nations and the restoration of Mount Zion's possession.

Jeremiah 49:7-22 is a self-contained oracle against Edom embedded in Jeremiah's larger oracles against the foreign nations (chapters 46-51). It shares with Obadiah the same set of charges (pride, false security in mountain hideouts, coming complete reversal) and the same vocabulary. Roughly Obadiah verses 1-9 line up directly with Jeremiah 49:7-22, though Jeremiah includes additional material that Obadiah does not have, and Obadiah's text is more compact and tightly structured.

Edom itself is the territory southeast of Judah, from the Dead Sea down to the Gulf of Aqaba. Edomite kings reigned from Bozrah (modern Buseirah) and Sela. The kingdom's biblical history starts as Jacob's twin brother Esau's descendants, runs through the period of Israel's kings, and ends with Edom's gradual displacement by Arab tribes (eventually the Nabateans) through the sixth to third centuries BCE. The Edomite population that was pushed westward into the southern Judean Negev became the Idumeans of the Hellenistic period.

The shared block, verse by verse

The parallel block is the heart of the case. Below are the verses set side by side. Translations follow the ESV, with Hebrew word order preserved where the two texts diverge. The exact correspondence is most visible in Obadiah 1-4 / Jeremiah 49:14-16 and in Obadiah 5-6 / Jeremiah 49:9-10. The other verses in the block also overlap but with more variation.

Edom in the sixth century: what historians can reconstruct

The dating question for Obadiah rides on what role Edom actually played in 587 BCE. The biblical witnesses across multiple books are united that Edom collaborated with Babylon in some way at the fall of Jerusalem. Psalm 137:7 invokes God against the Edomites who said 'Lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations!' on the day of Jerusalem. Lamentations 4:21-22 addresses Edom directly: 'Rejoice and be glad, O daughter of Edom, you who dwell in the land of Uz; but to you also the cup shall pass; you shall become drunk and strip yourself bare.' Ezekiel 25:12-14 names Edom for taking vengeance on Judah. Ezekiel 35:1-15 charges Edom with planning to inherit Judah's land.

The Babylonian Chronicle and other cuneiform records do not specifically name Edom in the 587 BCE campaign, but they do not name many of the smaller participants on either side. Archaeological work at Tell el-Kheleifeh, Buseirah (Bozrah), and Tel Aroer shows that Edomite material culture continued through the sixth century, with some sites showing expanded Edomite presence in the southern Judean Negev during exactly the period when Judean cities there were destroyed. The Edomites appear to have moved into vacated Judean territory, which fits the indictment in Ezekiel 35.

How the dating tracks the borrowing direction

The direction-of-borrowing question and the dating question are linked. If Obadiah is earlier and Jeremiah borrowed, Obadiah could be from any period in the eighth or seventh century BCE, and the middle verses (10-14) would have to describe an earlier disaster (often the Jehoram-era raid). If Jeremiah is earlier and Obadiah borrowed, Obadiah is post-587 BCE, and the middle verses describe the Babylonian destruction. If both draw on a common source, the dating of Obadiah is open and depends on other internal evidence.

Most modern commentaries land on a post-587 BCE date for Obadiah, on the strength of the parallels with the curse-Edom psalm, Lamentations, and Ezekiel's Edom oracles. The minority for an earlier date is built around the Jehoram-era reading of the middle verses, the priority of Obadiah's tighter Hebrew, and the Septuagint placement of Obadiah after Amos and before Jonah (which on a chronological reading by the early translators may have implied an earlier Obadiah).

Reading Obadiah with the question open

Most readers will not resolve which way the borrowing ran. What they can do is read both passages alongside the cluster of Edom oracles in Psalms, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Joel, and Malachi, and notice that the prophetic tradition treats Edom as a special case. The brother who stood by and watched. The cousin nation that profited from Judah's disaster. Whether Obadiah's twenty-one verses came before Jeremiah's longer oracle, or after, or whether both drew on a third source now lost, the book remains the most concentrated expression of a charge that the rest of the prophetic tradition also makes: that the day of the LORD coming on the nations begins with the brother who stood at the crossroads.