Said the Holy One, Blessed is He, “Let Obadiah, who dwelt among two wicked people, Ahab and Jezebel, but did not learn from their bad deeds, come and prophesy about Esau, who dwelt among two righteous people, Isaac and Rebecca, but did not learn from their good deeds” (Sanhedrin 39b).
Obadiah merited prophecy because he hid one hundred prophets in a cave (Sanhedrin 39b).
None of the prophets could foresee what the Holy One, Blessed is He, would ultimately do to Esau, except for Obadiah the prophet, a proselyte who descended from Esau. Obadiah foresaw clearly what would befall Esau (Zohar 1:171a). “And Ahab called Obadiah, who was over the household. Now Obadiah feared the Lord greatly; for it was so, when Jezebel cut off the prophets of the Lord, that Obadiah took a hundred prophets, and hid them fifty in a cave, and fed them with bread and water” (I Kings 18:3-4). Obadiah, “God’s servant,” is credited with a one-chapter book comprised of twenty-one verses. And yet, this prophet of Edom (a nation forever associated with the inimical Esau) has already been fairly limned in the book of Kings. There he applied himself assiduously to his first career, serving as Ahab’s minister of “profit.” The title would change homophonically, after Obadiah, recognizing the evil intention of Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, hid one hundred of Israel’s prophets, feeding and sustaining them with bread and water.
He was righteous even in an evil house, and a faithful disciple of the miracle worker, Elijah. Because of his faithfulness, he was rewarded with the gift of prophecy. Interestingly, as he had once served the evil Ahab, his destiny was to excoriate the kingdom of Edom. The progenitor of this archenemy of Israel was Esau, and since the rabbis view Obadiah as a descendant of Esau as well as a proselyte, this prophet would prove his mettle with an explicit vision of Esau’s future.
That future was doom. Esau would be repaid for the violence enacted against his brother Jacob. In what amounts to a pre-apocalyptic passage Obadiah incants:
And the house of Jacob shall be a fire,
And the house of Joseph a flame,
And the house of Esau for stubble,
And they shall kindle in them, and devour them;
And there shall not be any remaining of the house of Esau (Obadiah 1:18).
It had not been an easy road, but Obadiah’s career change is reminiscent of the transformation of the Israelites rendered in the Maggid (“Narration”) section of the Haggadah: “From slavery to freedom; from degradation to praise; from the kingdom of evil to the kingdom of Heaven.”
Obadiah, who had “seen” evil and overcome it.