Edom, Moab, and Ammon

Edom, Moab, and Ammon occupy a unique position in the biblical story: they are Israel's closest neighbors and, according to the genealogical traditions, its closest relatives. Edom descends from Esau, Jacob's twin brother. Moab and Ammon descend from Lot, Abraham's nephew, through the daughters who conceived children by their father after the destruction of Sodom. These kinship narratives establish the nations as family - related peoples with a shared ancestry - even as the actual historical relationships between Israel and these three kingdoms ranged from tense co-existence to open warfare.

Edom - the territory to the south and southeast of Judah, corresponding roughly to modern southern Jordan - has a particularly complicated relationship with Israel in the biblical texts. The enmity between Esau and Jacob in Genesis, the refusal of Edom to allow Israel passage through its territory during the wilderness period (Numbers 20:14-21), and the prophetic oracles against Edom throughout the Old Testament all reflect a deep and persistent tension. The book of Obadiah, the shortest book in the Old Testament, is entirely devoted to judgment against Edom for its behavior during the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem - gloating over the disaster, cutting off the refugees, and looting the city. The intensity of this condemnation suggests real historical trauma and real historical grievance.

Moab and Ammon appear throughout the Old Testament narrative as peoples with whom Israel had complex but not uniformly hostile relations. Ruth is a Moabite - and not just any Moabite but the great-grandmother of David, one of the most striking examples of the biblical tradition's resistance to simple ethnic boundary-drawing. The book of Ruth is a deliberate counter-narrative to the exclusionary policies of Ezra and Nehemiah: a foreign woman, from a people frequently condemned in the law and the prophets, becomes a model of covenant loyalty and an ancestor of Israel's greatest king. The tension between inclusion and exclusion, between the universal scope of God's purposes and the particular identity of God's people, runs through the entire biblical tradition and is not resolved by it.

All three kingdoms were eventually absorbed into the expanding powers of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia. By the Hellenistic period, the Edomites (called Idumeans in Greek) had been pushed into the Negev and southern Judea, where they were eventually forcibly converted to Judaism by the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus. This forced conversion produced Herod the Great, whose Idumean descent was a source of ongoing controversy about his legitimacy as a Jewish king. The ironies of biblical history rarely resolve cleanly.