Edom and Christianity

In Talmudic and Rabbinic Literature both Rome and Christianity are often identified with Edom.  The popular assumption is Rome was identified with Edom first then it was applied to Christianity after it became the dominant religion of Rome.  However both these identifications seem to start in the Fourth Century with Rhetoric from the Jewish Revolt against Constantius Gallus, so the identification going the other way is just as plausible.

There is a poetry to associating Christianity with Edom from a Jewish POV that I think many overlook.  Christianity is an Abrahamic Religion but one that unlike Islam identifies itself with Isaac over Ishmael in Romans 9:7-9 and Galatian 4:28.  

The relationship between Edom and Israel in The Hebrew Bible is complicated, they are often enemies yet their shared kinship is never forgotten.  In Deuteronomy 23:7 God tells Israel to always welcome Edomites even though the then contemporary King of Edom refused to let the Israelites pass through their territory back in Numbers 20:14-21.  Esau himself was not ultimately a bad person and in fact plenty of Rabbis will acknowledge that he was partly in the right in his conflicts with Jacob.  And sometimes the worst aspects of Edom’s legacy is entirely placed on Amalek.  

One of the very few direct references to Esau in the New Testament is in Romans 9:10-13 where Paul quotes Malachi’s opening verses.  What Calvinists ignore is the role this plays in the greater context of this part of Romans going into chapter 10 and 11 where now those God “hated” before are being blessed and Israel is under temporary spiritual blindness.  So Paul himself is arguably poetically identifying Gentile Christianity with Edom, and doing so to specifically a Roman audience.  There’s also the interesting case of how James in Acts 15:15-17 quotes Amos 9:11-12.

I’m a Leftist, but one common opinion among Breadtubers I don’t like is the notion that "Judeo-Christian" is a problematic term that shouldn’t be used.  They say it from two angles, one of “how dare you suggest Jews and Christians ever have common ground”, but the other angle is that it’s offensive to exclude Muslims.  However this fact that Jews see Christianity as Edom itself proves that they do see the common Isaac based heritage and thus see Christianity as closer to them then Islam is in some senses at least.  However the name of Isaac does not phonetically lend itself to making a derivative term like “Abrahamic”.  I’m not one of those Christians who wants to deny Islam is Abrahamic, for better and for worse they are the true heirs of Ishmael, but there are contexts where it’s necessary to be more specific.

But now let’s also look specifically at the Fourth Century Context of Jews in The Roman Empire.  

The Empire was claiming to now worship the same God yet was still enforcing Hadrian’s ban on them entering their Holy City of Jerusalem.  Hadrian didn’t just forbid Jews entering Jerusalem but even living anywhere Jerusalem was visible from, Jerusalem is visible from as far away as Bethlehem.  Hadrian didn’t resettle the area primarily with expats from Italy, Rome didn't quite do Colonialism like that, no most of it was moving around nearby Gentiles.  

The Idumeans seemingly disappeared from history after AD 70.  I imagine some Christians want to interpret Bible Prophecy so this is when they were wiped out, fulfilling many Hebrew Bible prophecies about Edom, but if The Jews survived this then the Idumeans who were even less centered around Jerusalem certainly did.  What I do think happened was that they mostly stopped practicing Judaism (which they were forcibly converted to by the Hasmoneans in the first place) and either reverted to Paganism or started becoming Christians, and during the Fourth Century those that were Pagan gradually converted to Christianity.  I suspect it was to a large extent Idumeans who made up the new population of Aelia Capitolina and its surrounding villages, and that the modern Palestinian Christian communities in this same region are their descendants.

But some Idumeans may have remained where they were before.  The city of Eleutheropolis is an interesting case, also known as Bayt Jibrin and Baitogabra.  In Josephus it seems like the Idumeans of this town were completely wiped out or expelled in AD 68, but its references in the Midrash Rabba (Genesis Rabba, section 67) show Jews still saw it as Edomite well past that point.  The Roman Emperor Septimius Severus gave it the status of ius italicum meaning its citizens were all legally considered Roman Citizens.

Whether or not this city actually had a Pre Fourth Century Christian Community is hard to determine, tradition says Joseph Barsabas Justus of Acts 1:23 was its first Bishop but there are no historically confirmed Bishops till Macrinus who was at The Council of Nicaea, that could be just because they didn’t practice Episcopal Polity till Nicaea.  In the Fourth Century Eleutheropolis is said to have the largest territory of any Bishopric in Palestina which is shocking considering that Province includes the very important Early Christian Bishoprics of Caesarea and Jerusalem.

Christian Rome also refused to let Jews live in Hebron, a city important in The Pentateuch but that had also become Idumean after the Babylonian Exile.

The Bishop of the Christian Community in Rome when the Edict of Milan was issued was named Militades, a Greek name that comes from a Greek word for Red that more specifically means “Red Earth”.  Edom is a Hebrew word for the color Red deliberately spelled the same as Adam which means Earth.  

So the logic behind seeing Christianity as the symbolic heirs of Edom in the Fourth Century both locally in Palestine and in the heart of the Empire is sound.

Maybe this Jewish Identification of Christianity with Edom even influenced the early development of Islam.  Esa/Isa the name for Jesus in the Qurran is famously not a logical Arabic form of Yeshua or Yehoshua or Iesous.  But I’m not the first to notice that it oddly does work as an Arabic form of Esau.