Certainly there is nothing in the rest of the prophecy (vv. 15-21) to lead us to bring it further down than the years following the destruction of Jerusalem. Everything points to the Jews being still in exile. The verbs which describe the inviolateness of Jerusalem (17), and the reinstatement of Israel in their heritage (17, 19), and their conquest of Edom (18), are all in the future. The prophet himself appears to write in exile (20). The captivity of Jerusalem is in Sepharad (_ib._) and the _saviours_ have to _come up_ to Mount Zion; that is to say, they are still beyond the Holy Land (21).[480] The one difficulty in assigning this date to the prophecy is that nothing is said in the Hebrew of ver. 19 about the re-occupation of the hill-country of Judæa itself, but here the Greek may help us.[481] Certainly every other feature suits the early days of the Exile. The result of our inquiry is that the Book of Obadiah was written at that time by a prophet in exile, who was filled by the same hatred of Edom as filled another exile, who in Babylon wrote Psalm cxxxvii.; and that, like so many of the exilic writers, he started from an earlier prophecy against Edom, already used by Jeremiah.[482] [Nowack (_Comm._, 1897) takes vv. 1-14 (with additions in vv. 1, 5, 6, 8f. and 12) to be from a date not long after the Fall of Jerusalem, alluded to in vv. 11-14; and vv. 15-21 to belong to a later period, which it is impossible to fix exactly.] There is nothing in the language of the book to disturb this conclusion. The Hebrew of Obadiah is pure; unlike its neighbour, the Book of Jonah, it contains neither Aramaisms nor other symptoms of decadence. The text is very sound. The Septuagint Version enables us to correct vv. 7 and 17, offers the true division between vv. 9 and 10, but makes an omission which leaves no sense in ver. 17.[483] It will be best to give all the twenty-one verses together before commenting on their spirit. THE VISION OF OBADIAH. _Thus hath the Lord Jehovah spoken concerning Edom._[484]