Edom, is referred to here as Seir and Dumah. Dumah is a word with a double meaning. Dumah was a region of Idumea, also called Edom, near the mountain of Seir. Today this region is Southern Jordan. The root letters of the Hebrew word, Dumah means “silence,” so Dumah means “a place of silence.” Dumah therefore symbolizes the destiny of Edom, the hereditary enemy of Israel. It will one day become a silent, and forgotten place. The prophet hears a voice coming from Seir with the anxious query: how far is the night spent? When will morning come? The watchman, who is the prophet himself, then answers the rhetorical questions he has just asked: “The morning will come, but then night will fall again.” The prophet uses two words which are not Hebrew but Aramaic. The first is atha to come (as in Maran-atha—The Lord come), and Thibayun, to inquire. It is related to the Hebrew shuv to return. The sense of the prophet’s answer is: The night of your present will end, and a new day will follow, but soon another night will come filled with fear and anxiety. If you seek a comforting answer to your anxious inquiries, you first “return,” a word which also means “to repent.” Only then will the answer you hoped for; the night of your suffering will come an end, and a new bright morning of deliverance will dawn upon. The Edomite inquirer voices man’s eternally agonizing question: How long will the night of suffering, evil and violence last; how soon will come?” It has a universal significance. It is the cry of mankind in the midst of a nightmare of mutuality inflicted for sin apart from God.
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