e congregation of the Lord," and we hear of no rival
deity in Edom to Yahveh of Israel. Indeed, in the old poetry of Israel
Yahveh was said to have risen up "from Seir," and the charge brought
against Edom by the prophet Obadiah is not that of idolatry or the
worship of a "strange god," but of standing on the side of the
"foreigners" on the day that Jerusalem was destroyed.

The southern part of Edom was known as Teman; it was to the east of
Teman that the Kadmonites or "children of the East" pitched their tents.
We first hear of them in an Egyptian papyrus of the age of the Twelfth
dynasty (B.C. 2500). Then they received with hospitality a political
fugitive from Egypt; he married one of their princesses and became one
of their chiefs. Their wisdom was celebrated in Palestine like that of
their Edomite neighbours of Teman, and the highest praise that could be
bestowed on Solomon was that his "wisdom excelled all the wisdom of the
children of the East."

Not far from the camping-places of the Kadmonites was the land of Uz,
famous as the home of Job. Uz, in fact, was a province of Edom; Edomite
colonists, so we are told in the Book of Lamentations,[11] inhabited it.
Indeed, it has been suggested that the difficulties presented by the
language of the Book of Job are due to the fact that it is the language
of Edom rather than of the Jews, differing from the latter only as an
English dialect may differ from that of a neighbouring county. At all
events, Job was as much a hero of Hebrew as of Edomite tradition, while
the last chapter of the Book of Proverbs contains the wise sayings of a
king whose territory adjoined the land of Edom. Lemuel, according to the
Hebrew text, which is mistranslated in the Authorised Version, ruled
over Massa, and Massa, the Mash of Genesis, is described in the Assyrian
inscriptions as that part of northern Arabia which spread eastward from
Edom. The Hebrew of Palestine doubtless included it in the country of
"the children of the East."

The larger part of northern Arabia, however, was the home of the
Ishmaelites. They lived, it is said, "from Havilah unto Shur," like the
Amalekites or Bedawin. But whereas the Amalekites were the wild,
untamable natives of the desert, the Ishmaelites came of a cultured
ancestry, half Babylonian, half Egyptian, and the traditions of it were
never forgotten. They lived a settled life in fenced villages and
fortified castles, as their descendants still do to-day. L