Edomites and Idumaeans

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the Iron Age land of Edom and its people, the Edomites, and the Hellenistic period Idumaea and its people, the Idumeans. In the Hebrew writings, and in the records of Israel's contemporaries in Assyria and Babylonia, the name Edom seems to have referred, originally at least, to the territory south-east of the Dead Sea, between the Wadi el-Hesa and the scarp of Ras en-Naqb and perhaps also down to the modern Gulf of Aqaba or Elat (barlett 1989, 33-54). When in the third and second centuries before our era the Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible wanted to translate the Hebrew name Edom into a Greek form, they used the name Idoumaia, which we use in Latin form Idumaea. edomites similarly became, in Greek, Idoumaioi (Hatch and Redpath 1906, 77). The apparently straightforward identification of Edom and Idumaea, however is complicated by the fact that from the fourth century B.C. to the first century A.D. historians writng in Greek used the name Idumaea to refer to an area immediately to the south of Judah or Judaea, an area which is not identical geographically with the biblical Edom. Similarly, when they referred to the Idumaeans they were not necessarily referring to the ancient Edomites, who flourished somewhere between the tenth and the sixth centuries B.C., but to people designated by the name Idumaeans between the late fourth century B.C. and the second half of the first century A.D. In short, the Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible and the secular Greek historians of the Hellenistic and early Roman period used the names Idumaea and Idumaeans not only for the land of Edom and the early Edomites south-east of the Dead Sea, but also for the area situated and the people living just south of Judaea. What is the connection between the two places and peoples? The usual, and the simplistic, answer has been for many years that from the sixth to the fourth centuries the ancient Edomites were pushed west