- 40-
For further description this is not the place.* It was into the midst of all this wondrous
glory of nature and wealth of man that the Jewish army marched with its ten thousand
captives. There cannot be doubt that the victorious host plundered and laid waste Sela.
This explains how Amos does not mention it, but only Bozrah** (Amos 1:12), which
seems to have become the capital of Edom.
- See it and the plan of Petra in Badeker. We only note that Petra is about halfway
between the southern end of the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Akabah.
** About sixteen miles south-east of the Dead Sea.
Similarly, it is not named by the later prophets, except in Isaiah 16:1 and 42:11; and it
only again emerges into importance in the fourth century before our era. But the most
terrible scene yet remained to be enacted in the conquered city. We can scarcely be
mistaken in supposing that the victors marched or drove their captives through its streets
across to the western bank of the rivulet. There up the western cliffs mounts "a staircase"
of broad steps "hewn out of the rocks." "High up in these cliffs, between two gigantic
walls of cliff, stands a temple." It must be here, or on the cliffs above and around - or
perhaps on the Acropolis somewhat to the south of it that we have to look for "the height
of Sela" (2 Chronicles 25:12* -lit., "the top," or "head"), whence the ten thousand
Edomite captives were hurled, their shattered limbs dashing from cliff and rock, and their
mangled remains strewing the heights and covering the ground beneath. But as they that
long afterwards laid waste Jerusalem changed its name to Aelia Capitolina, so did King
Amaziah change that of Sela into Joktheel, "the subdued of God" (2 Kings 14:7). Yet
neither the one nor the other name, given by man in his pride, did long continue.**
- In the A.V. "top of the rock."
** Even this circumstance seems to betoken a contemporary notice.
It is a horrible, heart-sickening scene of history, so utterly un-Jewish in character that we
can only account for its enactment by the state of moral degradation which the
contemporary prophets Hosea and Amos describe in such vivid language. Yet another
terrible inheritance, besides the guilt of this deed, did Judah bring back from the
campaign against Edom. We can readily imagine how deeply the rock-city had impressed
the mind of the king. But one of its chief features, which still first attracts the traveler, is
the startling appearance and weird location of its temples. An Eastern mind, not religious,
but superstitious, would readily come under the spell of these divinities whose temples
were so weird and grand, so thoroughly in accord with nature around.*
- On the character of Edomite worship, with its human sacrifices, comp. Dollinger,
Heidenth. u. Judenth. p. 405. On Edom generally, comp. Lengerke, Kenaan, i. pp. 296-
- Josephus (Ant. 15:7, 9) speaks of a god Koze, worshipped by the Idumaeans. This
(^)