Ezekiel 35:15

The clause "as thou didst … do unto thee" is wanting in LXX.

As Edom had been active in the destruction of Judah, their own desolation must follow. The author of the Lamentations has a presentiment that the next great act of divine judgment will be on Edom (Lamentations 4:22; cf. Isaiah 34; Isaiah 63:1-6). The great empires which brought destruction upon Jerusalem were acting under commission from Jehovah and the work was according to his will. But in the first place there is a difference between the work itself and the spirit in which it is done. Jehu received commendation for his act in cutting off the seed of Ahab, but later his house was extirpated for the guilt of this same "blood of Jezreel" (Hosea 1:4). The Assyrian was entrusted with a commission against the ungodly nation; but he meant not so, it was in his heart to cut off nations not a few (Isaiah 10:7), and the decree that he should be broken upon the mountains of Israel went out against him (Isaiah 14:25). Nebuchadnezzar was the "servant" of the Lord, but because Babylon laid her yoke heavily on the aged of the people, not considering the issue of such things, bereavement and widowhood shall come upon her in one day (Isaiah 47:6-8). Here the prophet reprobates both the actions and the spirit of Edom, and threatens that Jehovah will recompense it into their bosom. In ancient modes of thought the people and their god were one. The people were but the reflection of the god, they were the people of Chemosh or Milcom or Jehovah. All wars were religious wars, wars against a god who animated and gave strength to his people (Exodus 12:12). Edom's despite was to some extent in the strict sense directed against Jehovah. In truth they knew Jehovah only as the God of Israel, but it was he whom they knew, though they might not have such knowledge of him as Ezek. had attained to. But it is possible to be guilty of great sins against God, even though they are done unwittingly and without full knowledge of that which he is.

And in the second place, Edom received no commission from Jehovah against his people. Their place in history and among the nations of the earth gave them no significance in relation to Israel, or in Jehovah's providence embracing all the world. The contact of Israel with the nations exercising universal empire over the earth, if it did not suggest conceptions of Jehovah's universal power and dominion to the prophets, at least gave them occasion for expressing to the people and to all time such conceptions; and this period of Israel's history lent a breadth and elevation to prophecy to which in political conditions such as existed in earlier times it could never have attained. The transportation of colonies of Israelites also into the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, besides purifying the religion of the people from its dependence on ritual observance and making it more inward among those who continued to adhere to it, leavened the populations of these heathen nations with truer conceptions of Deity and religion. The writers of this age often refer to the strangers joining themselves to the covenant of the Lord (Isaiah 14:1-2; Isaiah 56:1-8), and no doubt the same influence was exerted by Israel, if not to the same extent, in Babylon and the countries of the East, as we are familiar with in later times in Rome and the empire of the West. In such respects Edom had no importance, and hardly entered into the larger designs of Jehovah with respect to his people and mankind.