Edom

Edom and Idumea are two related but distinct terms relating to a historically contiguous population, but two separate, if adjacent, territories occupied at different periods of their history by the Edomites/Idumeans. The Edomites first established a biblical kingdom ("Edom") in the southern area of modern Jordan, and later migrated into southern parts of the Kingdom of Judah ("Idumea") when Judah was first weakened, then destroyed by the Babylonians in the 6th century BC.

Edom is a term used in written sources relating to the late Bronze Age and to the entire Iron Age in the Levant, such as the Hebrew Bible, Egyptian and Mesopotamian records. In classical antiquity the cognate name Idumea was used to refer to a smaller area in the same general region.

Edom (/ˈiːdəm/ or /ˈiː.dʌm/;Hebrew: אֱדוֹם, Modern Edom, Tiberian ʼĔḏôm ; , lit.: "red"; Assyrian: Udumi; Syriac: ܐܕܘܡ) is the name of a country and a people located initially in Transjordan, between Ammon to the north, the Dead Sea and the Arabah to the west, and the Arabian desert to the south and east.

Edomite language

The Edomite language was a Canaanite language spoken by the Edomites in southwestern Jordan and parts of Israel in the first millennium BC. It is known only from a very small corpus. In early times, it seems to have been written with a Phoenician alphabet; like the Moabite language, it retained feminine -t. However, in the 6th century BC, it adopted the Aramaic alphabet. Meanwhile, Aramaic or Arabic features such as whb ("gave") and tgr "merchant" entered the language, with whb becoming especially common in proper names.

According to Glottolog, referencing Huehnergard & Rubin (2011), Edomite was not a distinct language from Hebrew.

References

See also Victor Sasson, "An Edomite Joban Text, with a Biblical Joban Parallel", Zeitschrift fur die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 117 (Berlin, 2006), 601-615.