IDUMEA, 
HE illustration of prophecy gives a new and powerful interest to all ancient countries 
connected with the Scriptures. And, with the exception of the Holy Land, 
there is, perhaps, no portion of the East which supplies a more striking proof of 
the truth of prophecy than Idumea. If there ever was a region where the skill of 
man exerted all its powers to confer a character of indestructibility on the labours of 
man it was that spot on which stands Petra. The City has not fallen, like Tyre 
and Babylon, into dust, and left its dwellers houseless. Its proudest portion remains 
in its original strength and size, almost in all its original grace and beauty, but the 
population have perished. The noble edifices which once stood in the midst of a 
flood of wealth, and were the creation of superabundant wealth, are- there still, but 
the tide has ebbed away from their feet for ever. Human arts, so long and so 
richly lavished on those magnificent piles, have fled the soil; and through roads, 
once conveying the commerce alike of India and Italy to the storehouses of this superb 
city, no foot now passes but that of the Arab savage, or of the traveller hastening 
along, and regarding every man whom he meets as a robber and a homicide. 
The fall of Edom had been pronounced by the Jewish prophets, while it was 
scarcely more than acquiring the shape of a state. As the restless enemv of Israel, 
it was the subject of Divine denunciation throughout the whole course of prophecy. 
Its punishments were successively proclaimed by Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, 
and Malachi. By Isaiah it seems to have been taken as the emblem of the whole 
heathen world, and to have thus been loaded with accumulated malediction. The 
cruelty and corruption, the reckless vanity and furious arrogance of the national 
temperament, were divinely sentenced, and the general ruin was marked as irretrievable. 
“ Also Edom shall be a desolation: every one that goeth by it shall be astonished, and 
shall hiss at all the plagues thereof. As in the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah and 
the neighbour cities thereof, saith the Lord, no man shall abide there, neither shall 
a son of man dwell in it .” 1 “Thus saith the Lord God, I will stretch out mine 
hand upon Edom, and will cut off man and beast from it; and I will make it desolate 
from Teman .” 2 
“ The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee; thou that dwellest in the clefts of 
Jeremiah, xlix. 17. 
a Ezekiel, xxv. 13. 
