How should the Edomites be treated?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Deuteronomy 23:7 (MT 23:8) sets a fraternal baseline: "You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother (אָחִיךָ)." The kinship logic is genealogical — Edom is Esau (Gen 25:30; 36:1), Jacob's twin — so the Deuteronomic Code grants Edomites near-insider status, pairing them with Egyptians, whose grandchildren may enter the assembly (Deut 23:8). Against this stands a body of texts treating Edom's destruction as righteous divine policy. 2 Kings 14:3, 7 reports that Amaziah, who "did what was right in the sight of YHWH," slew ten thousand Edomites in the Valley of Salt. Ezekiel 25:12-14 has YHWH vow to "cut off man and beast" from Edom and lay it desolate. The whole of Obadiah is an oracle of Edom's annihilation. Psalm 137:7, Lamentations 4:21-22, Isaiah 34, and Malachi 1:2-4 ("Esau have I hated") extend the theme.

The apologetic harmonization is essentially diachronic and covenant-conditional. The brother-clause assumes mutual respect; Edom violated it, so it forfeited protection. The prophetic texts themselves supply a rationale: Ezekiel 25:12 grounds judgment in Edom "taking vengeance" against Judah, and Obadiah 10-14 explicitly indicts Edom for gloating over and plundering Jerusalem at its fall, even handing over fugitives. John Bergsma and Brant Pitre frame the brother-status as conditional and revoked; Iain Provan reads 2 Kings 14 as a bare military notice, not a divine command to exterminate.

This defense has real textual purchase and resolves part of the tension. The prophetic oracles are not arbitrary hatred; they respond to a specific historical betrayal in 586 BCE, attested across multiple post-exilic texts. As a matter of stated motive, Deuteronomy's "don't abhor" and Ezekiel/Obadiah's "because they betrayed you" can be sequenced: an ideal relationship later broken. Hence "partially harmonized."

But the harmonization does not cover 2 Kings 14. Amaziah reigned c. 796-767 BCE, so his slaughter of ten thousand Edomites is dated to the early eighth century BCE, roughly two centuries — on the order of 180 to 210 years — *before* the Babylonian crisis that the prophets cite as Edom's crime, and the Deuteronomistic Historian still frames the king's reign as righteous. There is no betrayal-rationale available at that date; the violence is simply imperial expansion (Amaziah follows it by attacking Israel, 2 Kings 14:8-14). The conditional-covenant reading cannot retroject Edom's later treachery onto an eighth-century massacre. It is worth adding that 2 Chronicles 25:11-12 amplifies the same campaign — ten thousand killed in battle and ten thousand more hurled from a cliff — and immediately censures Amaziah for adopting the captured Edomite gods (2 Chron 25:14-20), so even the parallel tradition treats the slaughter itself as unproblematic while finding fault elsewhere.

The critical read, developed by John Bartlett and Bert Dicou, is that Judah's relationship with Edom shifted repeatedly over centuries and is registered in the canon by texts from different periods with different attitudes. The fraternal Deuteronomic ideal reflects one stratum; the post-586 bitterness of Obadiah, Psalm 137, and Lamentations 4 reflects a later, traumatized stratum; 2 Kings 14 reflects pre-exilic realpolitik. The canon preserves all three without reconciling the underlying ethical posture. Cogan and Tadmor read the Valley of Salt notice as a terse annalistic war-report shorn of the betrayal logic the prophets later supplied; Block and Raabe show how thoroughly the Ezekiel and Obadiah oracles are anchored in the 586 trauma.

Where the critical reading lands: the *prophetic* texts harmonize with Deuteronomy on a betrayal-then-judgment sequence, but the 2 Kings 14 massacre does not — leaving a genuine residual tension about how Edomites "should" be treated.