Note 458 — Chapter XIII

Caspari (Der Proph. Ob. ausgelegt 1842), Ewald, Graf, Pusey, Driver, Giesebrecht, Wildeboer and König. Cf. Jer. xlix. 9 with Ob. 5; Jer. xlix. 14 ff. with Ob. 1–4. The opening of Ob. 1 ff. is held to be more in its place than where it occurs in the middle of Jeremiah’s passage. The language of Obadiah is “terser and more forcible. Jeremiah seems to expand Obadiah, and parts of Jeremiah which have no parallel in Obadiah are like Obadiah’s own style” (Driver). This strong argument is enforced in detail by Pusey: “Out of the sixteen verses of which the prophecy of Jeremiah against Edom consists, four are identical with those of Obadiah; a fifth embodies a verse of Obadiah’s; of the eleven which remain ten have some turns of expression or idioms, more or fewer, which occur in Jeremiah, either in these prophecies against foreign nations, or in his prophecies generally. Now it would be wholly improbable that a prophet, selecting verses out of the prophecy of Jeremiah, should have selected precisely those which contain none of Jeremiah’s characteristic expressions; whereas it perfectly fits in with the supposition that Jeremiah interwove verses of Obadiah with his own prophecy, that in verses so interwoven there is not one expression which occurs elsewhere in Jeremiah.” Similarly Nowack, Comm., 1897.