Obadiah 18-20

Contemporary English Version

¹⁸Israel^[a] will be a fire,
and Edom will be straw
going up in flames.
The Lord has spoken!

¹⁹The people of Israel
who live in the Southern Desert
    will take the land of Edom.
Those who live in the hills
will capture Philistia,
    Ephraim, and Samaria.
And the tribe of Benjamin
    will conquer Gilead.

²⁰Those who return from captivity
will control Phoenicia
    as far as Zarephath.^[b]
Captives from Jerusalem
    who were taken to Sepharad^[c]
will capture the towns
    of the Southern Desert.

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Footnotes

18 Israel: Hebrew “The descendants of Jacob and of Joseph.”
20 Those who return … Zarephath: One possible meaning for the difficult Hebrew text.
20 Sepharad: Possibly the city of Sardis, the capital of Lydia, a country north and west of Media. This would refer to those captives from Judah who had been taken beyond the kingdom of Babylonia.