The book of Obadiah has a chilling relevance to a country like South Africa with regard to the relationship between victim and perpetrator. In various ways, a large group of white people just stood by and allowed racism to flourish with the introduction of laws that took away the humanity of their black compatriots. Israel, in turn, accuses Edom of standing aside and allowing the misfortune befalling on Jerusalem without lifting a finger, or, in fact, profiting from Jerusalem’s misfortune, cutting off those who fled and sending them promptly into the hands of the Babylonian invaders. In terms of complicity, Edom and South African whiteness can indeed be called ‘implicated subjects’ as proposed by Rothberg (2019:12).

In 2016 (Snyman 2016:63), I said the following about Edom in my conclusion on a reading of vulnerability in the book of Obadiah: ‘Seeing such aloofness and brutality in one’s own country makes one understand the shamefulness of Edom and why such perpetrators of violence are despised’. This observation originated from an incident reported in the news media whereby a Mozambican national was hacked to death by four men while bystanders were incapacitated for some reason to intervene (cf. Tromp & Oatway 2015). As I continued to reflect on this incident, I remembered how I remained (as a product of apartheid and sometimes remain) silent at the experience of racist incidents. Books, such as Moffie (Van der Merwe 2006), Apartheid. Britain’s Bastard Child (Opperman Lewis 2016); Emily Hobhouse: Beloved Traitor (Brits 2016), Jansen’s Like Family: Domestic Workers in South African History and Literature (2019), the film Kanarie (Olwagen 2018), and the closed Facebook group Forum against Injustice and Racism brought with more and more urgency the issue of complicity and silence forward, especially when confronted by the victims’ experience.

All of these rendered my own position precariously vulnerable, setting me off on a road to study vulnerability, arriving now, with the help of the book of Obadiah, yet again Snyman (2016), at the subject of perpetrator and trauma. In the book of Obadiah, the reader encounters Judah as well as Edom in their respective vulnerabilities, with Edom being accused of causing the vulnerability of the former. In the book, there appears to be no redemption for Edom, and Edom is rendered vulnerable to the point of near annihilation. I have proposed elsewhere (Snyman 2011) that a hermeneutic of vulnerability may enable a perpetrator to achieve some kind of redemption in the face of the victim. It is a positive vulnerability that creates an openness and affectivity (Snyman 2017a:192). It is an openness to not know, to be wrong and to alter beliefs. The book of Obadiah practically wipes Edom off the face of the earth and denies them a voice. The reader asks whether there is any redemption for Edom as the perpetrator. Can they be rehabilitated? As perpetrator, Edom comes to the reader with nothing: the book renders them completely vulnerable, and Edom is dependent on what the reader is told. It is not an equal dialogue, and the book of Obadiah has no intention of making it equal either (cf. Snyman 2016:63). The task of Edom as perpetrator is to hear and internalise his brother’s critique and confront his own embarrassment of having been found out. But we do not know, as Edom does not respond. If I put myself in their shoes as perpetrator, I can imagine the way Perkinson (2004:3) formulated it: an example of the perpetrator looking into the eyes of the victim, not denying the reflection of the embarrassment of having been found out. But Edom is the intended reader or audience, and they are not physically present to become conscious of the marks they supposedly left on Judah, nor can we, as later readers, see whether they internalised the critique of Obadiah.

What we see as readers is how the intended audience is silenced and rendered vulnerable: Edom is simply delivered to the audience as perpetrators in their nakedness and destituteness, stripped of everything, even their dignity and integrity – they are totally dependent on the reader’s image of them in the book. It is in that position of vulnerability that I imagine myself to be vis-à-vis apartheid. Let it be said and acknowledged: listening to the ordinary apartheid victims’ experience of racism, of being confronted with one’s most frightening other, of being found out, so to speak, is hugely uncomfortable and deeply traumatic. To properly understand this kind of vulnerability, it is necessary to take a closer look at the perpetrator in general, and more specifically, a very recently developed field of study, namely perpetrator studies.

However, when one tries to appropriate the results of perpetrator studies for the book of Obadiah, certain problems arise. Firstly, the biblical text does not always present Edom as a perpetrator. Secondly, the book of Obadiah chose to present readers with Judah’s trauma at the loss of Jerusalem, but one wonders whether Edom did not experience trauma as the Babylonian military advance proceeded. Thirdly, the model of chosen trauma with which the book of Obadiah is approached may explain for readers in a South African context, perhaps the current focus on apartheid itself as a chosen trauma to work through a traumatic, racist and colonial past.

This studay will endeavour to utilise some of the results of perpetrator studies to elucidate Edom’s vulnerability in the book of Obadiah. It will start with explaining the role of Edom in some biblical texts and how Obadiah exploits Edom as his chosen trauma before the argument moves to the concept of chosen trauma itself. The study then proceeds to discuss the notion of perpetrator within the relatively newly created field of perpetrator studies. The discussion necessarily leads to Primo Levi’s grey zone and whether one can proclaim Jerusalem at the time as such a grey zone. Given the negative portrayal of Edom in Obadiah, the way perpetrators are portrayed will be discussed, especially the multiple-layered nature of the representation of perpetrators and the possibility of reckoning with their own trauma, which is perhaps more ethical than psychological, yet rendering them vulnerable in some way or the other.

In the Old Testament, the perpetrator loses his or her voice. In fact, most of the time they are physically removed: Cain leaves his tribe, the Canaanites are supposed to be annihilated, Saul’s kin, as adversaries of David, lose their lives one by one, the nation is sent into exile, and Haman is hanged. In the prophecies against the nations, the nations are quiet. Edom remains exceptionally quiet in Obadiah. In the biblical text, they are all the antagonists, the characters against whom the authors needed to justify their ideological perspectives and theologies.

In the prophets, a reader gets a sense of Edom’s speechlessness within a depiction of betrayal, evil and wickedness. Without mentioning the fall of Jerusalem, the prophets appeared quite vindictive towards Edom. Isaiah 34:1–17 describes in detail the calamity that will befall Edom – a bloody and fiery holocaust that will be visited upon them, turning Edom into a wasteland filled with thorns, thistles and jackals. Yhwh trampled them down in his wrath, staining his clothes with their blood like juice spattered on garments, pouring out their lifeblood on the earth (Is 63:1–6). Jeremiah (49:7–22) links Edom with Esau, who is stripped bare, and whose offspring, kinsfolk, as well as neighbours, are killed. Edom, turned into the least of any nation and despised by humankind, is completely humiliated. The wrath and vengeance of Yhwh will cut off Edom from its neighbours, emptied of any human or animal, turned into a desolate wasteland (Ezk 25:12–14). Edom will experience bloodshed by the sword, with which they lived, its mountains and valleys filled with its people killed by the sword (Ezk 35:1–15). Joel 3:19–21 repeats the bloodshed and desolation that will befall Edom because of their own violence against Judah. Amos gives their land to Israel, who will repossess Edom (9:11–12). In Malachi, Yhwh is said to hate Esau, and he will turn the country of Edom into a wilderness and a hiding place for jackals. Everything the Edomites built up will be torn down. Edom’s iniquity will be punished (Lm 4:22). Edom is rendered vulnerable in a very negative way. Here, vulnerability implies a negative state of harm, injury, affliction and suffering. It is a position no one wants to be in, as it manifests weakness, powerlessness and exploitation (cf. Snyman 2017a:191).

Edom as destroyers of Jerusalem only appears in Psalms 137 and Obadiah, making Ben Zvi (2020:12)¹ think the theme is not quite central to what preoccupied the minds of the learned society of the time. Ben Zvi (2020:9) argues that the book of Obadiah is not the most influential book in the repertoire of the educated of Israel in the Persian Period, especially not when it concerns the aftermath of the fall of Jerusalem. He thinks there were certainly other memories that kept their attention that are far more important than Obadiah’s depiction of Edom as destroyers of Jerusalem.

But he does not deny the existence of a tradition that singled out Edom in the context of the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE and ascribed to it the role of a ‘chosen trauma’ within the Yehud literati in the Persian Period (2020:12) to the exclusion of an identity based on innocent victimhood. It is the notion of a chosen trauma and the depiction of the perpetrator who caused that trauma that is of interest to this study. Chosen trauma and the choice of perpetrator are not mere historical issues, but within the current socio-historical and political context at the end of the second decade of the third millennium, or the start of the third decade of the third millennium, both issues seem to prevail currently.

It is clear in the Book of Obadiah that Edom is portrayed as the perpetrator par excellence and that it concerns Israel’s chosen trauma of the loss of Jerusalem from the perspective of a prophet called Obadiah. What is Edom accused of that turned them into vulnerable yet despicable perpetrators of sorts?

Verse 3 refers to Edom’s pride, most often a reason for punishment in the prophetic books (Is 14:13; 16:6; 23:9; Jr 48:29; 49:4; Ezk 28:1 and 31:10) and in verse 4 Edom’s vanity is compared to the way an eagle soars into the air in a majestic flight. They will be brought down and shamed for the slaughter and violence of Israel in Judah. Verses 11–14 provide the reasons for their fall and annihilation by Yhwh: they stood by when Jerusalem was attacked and looted, making them vulnerable in negative terms. Moreover, they gloated over the misfortune of Jerusalem, and they were filled with glee over Judah’s distress. They ultimately also entered the city and participated in the looting of its treasures. As if that was not enough, they stopped those who fled and handed them over to the invaders. If there was a treaty between Judah and Edom, Edom broke every aspect of it and became treacherous and unreliable (Snyman 2016:57).

Edom is clearly depicted in terms of violations of the prohibitions one would find in a treaty in the ancient Near East (see Sweeney 2000). The word perpetrator is never used in Obadiah, and the question is whether we, as readers, should label Edom as a perpetrator. In labelling them as such, the readers call what Edom did, depraved. Straus has two objections to labelling someone as a perpetrator: firstly, he (2017:29) argues that the term ‘perpetrator’ provides a sense of false stability because the act that is regarded as a perpetration is but one act in a broader spectrum of actions people do. Secondly, he (2017:30) is of the opinion that the term contributes to a ‘bifurcated, ultimately false representation of the history of violence’. Atrocities committed at grass roots level tells one more about survival, self-preservation, fear, pressure and other situational considerations at a time of intense upheaval and disruption (2017:34): people with no burning hatred in them made decisions and acted in ways that caused damages to other people (2017:35), while they are unable to name or comprehend their acts. Straus even questions the use of the label ‘perpetrator’, asking if one kind of violence is not privileged over against other types of violence (2017:36). If Obadiah’s depiction is true, is the question then not whether Edom acted in self-preservation at a time of upheaval caused by the Babylonian invasion? Did they guard against their own vulnerability in negative terms? What do we know about the situational circumstances of Edom at the time? Who were those Edomites who went into Jerusalem or tried to cut off the fugitives? Ordinary people or soldiers?

Verses 10–14 are usually interpreted in such strong terms that Edom becomes essentialised to certain evil traits. For example, Renkema (2003:159) sees in Edom a strong and invincible group that ravaged a weaker group with brutal and physical violence. Their acts were based on greed and hatred. Krause (2008:479) links Edom’s actions to the bitterness of Esau in Genesis, who now furiously puts a stop to Jacob’s privilege. But can one say this about Edom during the fall of Jerusalem? Did they commit an evil of a special kind? Straus (2017:35) uses the term ‘compartmentalization’ whereby prejudice and hatred compel people to murder while they themselves are unable to know or put into words what they are doing. Was Edom driven by such prejudice and hatred? From Judah’s point of view, definitely.

The study of perpetrators is problematical and only took off the last few years in an effort to understand the expression of violence in particular societies, such as in Nazi Germany (especially Hannah Arendt’s reporting on the Eichmann trial), the Khmer Rouge regime, and the atrocities committed under the apartheid regime in South Africa as it became known in the Truth and Reconciliation commission’s work.

What Hannah Arendt’s book (Arendt 1963) on the Eichmann trial did was to underscore what she called the banality of evil, or its ordinariness. Arendt (1963:49) saw Eichmann in the end as just an ordinary person without any real imagination. The evil he committed was not sufficient to turn him into someone of a special kind. His ordinariness made Critchell et al. (2017:6) ask how far one should separate perpetrators from society as a whole if perpetrators are ordinary people. Perpetration is not to be understood in terms of ‘personality, agency, sadism, and other dispositions’ (2017:5), but rather in terms of the circumstances that generated the perpetrated evil, in the words of Critchell et al. (2017):

For this reason, the study of perpetrators has moved beyond the question of essence and the binary opposition between victim and perpetrator,⁴ for example, from faceless sadism to questions of personal biographical and sociological context (Critchell et al. 2017:14). In Morag’s (2012:1245) discussion of the film Waltz with Bashir, what he calls ‘the ecology of perpetrator trauma’ is clearly illustrated by the trauma an Israeli soldier experienced during the Christian phalanxes’ attack on Palestinian refugee camps and his own complicity in these attacks. The ecology of perpetrator trauma shapes and gives meaning to representations made by perpetrators. Such an ecology enables empathy to enter the scene that, in turn, facilitates mourning. In other words, it enables vulnerability in positive terms of affect and openness. Köthe, Cater and Dyroff (2017) ask the following questions:

One of the problems of the evidence against Edom’s intervention in the invasion of Jerusalem and destruction of the temple is that the evidence is from Judah, who portrays themselves as the victim here. Tebes (2011:232) argues that this intervention is not based on history, but on a perception of the Edomites’ behaviour during the invasion and in later periods. He (2011:238) refers to a ‘stab-in-the-back’ tradition one also finds in modern defeated nations, where the defeat is ascribed to conspiracies with other societies committing treason.

The ordinariness of perpetrators is also affirmed by Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (2001), especially chapter 18. Here, the perpetrators were not particularly known for their dedication to the Nazi cause, but the brutalisation of war, peer pressure mixed with ideology, racism, careerism and obedience to authority, turned them into a killing machine. In other words, the perpetrator is not a figure on the margins nor the other of society. To quote Browning (2001):

Perpetrators like these operate in what Primo Levi called a ‘grey zone’. Let us look further into this concept.

Judah was rendered extremely vulnerable by the Babylonian invasion. They became unprotected in any way by becoming unfortified and thus defenceless. In Obadiah, they accuse Edom of exploiting their shelterless disposition, of throwing a malicious gaze on their disintegration and devastation, leaving their fraternity or brotherhood in rendering them despised, poor and vulnerable. There was no longer solidarity between Judah and Edom, with the latter discarding any moral imperative to come to Judah’s aid.

I have no real clue as to the position of Edom at the time of the Babylonian invasion, but they would not have been unaffected by the intrusion of such a powerful army. Morag (2017:17) introduces the term ‘the trauma of the perpetrator’, which is an ethical trauma and not to be confused with the psychological trauma of the victim. Browning (2001:187) underscores the difference between victim and perpetrator as being not mirror images of each other. Perpetrators do not become victims in the same way victims turn into accomplices. It is not a symmetrical relationship.

What is of concern here is the ethical dilemma of the soldier doing horrible things when put into a horrible situation.⁵ It has become a grey zone. In other words, in evaluating Edom’s behaviour, the reader has to recognise the possible presence of a grey zone.

The grey zone is a term coined by Levi (1988:36–69) in a chapter with a similar title. His point of departure is the urge to define the world in terms of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’; the we inside and the enemy outside with a ‘sharply defined geographic frontier’ (1988:38). But that is not the world any Jew entered into in the concentration camp during World War II. The enemy was inside too, the ‘we’ has lost its limits, the frontiers innumerable and indistinguishable (1988):

To Levi, this kind of entering the concentration camp was backed up by those prisoners already there for a time and the privileged prisoners, all contributing to a life of regression that led back to primitive behaviour (1988:39). They all constituted the grey zone by compromising and collaborating with the camp hierarchy in exchange for preferential treatment (1988):

The concentration camp was a replica of the hierarchical structure of a totalitarian state where power was invested from above and very little resistance could have been mustered from below (1989:47). Within weeks of deprivation, everyone was catapulted into a mode of survival with very few surviving the test. Even those in the Sonderkommandos did not survive, as they were killed after a while, so that they would not speak out. On the grey zone, Levi expresses impotentia judicandi (1988:60).

To neutralise the concept of the grey zone, Edom’s behaviour towards Judah during the Babylonian campaigns in 597 and 587 must have a historical base. Na’aman (2016:30) asserts that Obadiah was written 25 years after the event, while it was still vivid in their memories. He argues that Edom started their campaign against Judah a while before the destruction of Jerusalem, when they began moving into and settled in the Negev. It was possible that they assisted the Babylonians in the siege and looting of Jerusalem. Na’aman (2016) deems the details in Obadiah accurate:

The only witness to Edom’s actions is the victim, Judah, in whose memory Edom later became the epitome of wickedness and evil, ultimately becoming a symbol for all the nations’ deserving of Yhwh’s wrath and punishment.

Julia O’Brien (2016:124) renders the assumption of a brotherly link between Judah and Edom suspect. Not only did she fail to find any Edomite literature on the issue, but she also questions whether Edom shared that perspective even when Israel or Judah was of the opinion that they were brothers. Not all the biblical materials recognise a brotherly bond between Judah and Edom, and when they refer to a brotherly bond, Edom is not always implied (2016:125). O’Brien (2016:125–127) also questions the veracity of Obadiah’s reference to Edom’s actions in the 6th century. She says the language is very generic and can fit several historical scenarios. The biblical passages that do refer to Edom do not list the wrongdoings that Obadiah listed. O’Brien (2016:128) also does not see strong enough evidence to back up the claim that Edom moved into Judahite territory. In the end, O’Brien (2016:128–130) concludes that Obadiah’s view that Edom is Judah’s brother is driven by a specific ideology that is not supported by all the biblical references to Edom. Secondly, it is clear that Obadiah links Edom to Judah as brother to underscore certain obligations he thought Edom had towards Judah and which they did not sustain. Thirdly, the references to Edom as brother and the charges laid against Edom reflect a particular self-interest, namely, certain claims on territories Edom seems to have possessed.

Na’aman (2016:27) bases his thinking about the wicked nature of Edom on two ostraca found at Arad published by Aharoni (1981). Letter 24 is understood to be from a commander of one of the forts in the south of the Negev asking for military aid ‘lest Edom should come there’. It is understood that an Edomite attack was about to happen before the fall of Jerusalem; the latter being requested to send aid. Aharoni (1981:16) understands the aid as soldiers but Guillaume (2013:100) is more cautious and regards Aharoni’s suggestion purely conjectural.

In letter 40, Aharoni uses this interpretation to interpret a reference to Edom as a threat. Guillaume (2013) argues that, given that the Arad letters are all about provisions, with letter 40 about shepherding issues, and not military aid, he finds it:

Guillaume (2013) attributes Aharoni’s reading of a war or invasion in the text to the Six-Day War in 1967. The excavations of the letters took place barely 2 months after this war. He concludes:

In other words, the interpretation of these two letters was equally driven by an ideology of Israel’s self-definition of national space and the fruit of Israel’s own fears at the time (Guillaume 2013:106). Would Obadiah constitute a case that Straus (2017:29) refers to when someone is labelled a perpetrator, namely ‘a case that we do not think about as one in which someone did something bad, as doing something bad?’

The representation of perpetrators is not easy. The question of who the perpetrators are is not always evident, because ‘an unselfconscious notion of “perpetrator” could lead to relative silence surrounding other cases otherwise worthy of inclusion’, say Critchell et al. (2017:9).⁶ One such example is the issue of colonialism and its mass violence, despite colonial metropoles claiming for themselves tolerance and human rights in the face of a forgetfulness about their acts of violence during colonisation as a process of mass violence against indigenous populations. Decoloniality shows that the effects of colonialism have not yet disappeared. Would Obadiah then, in writing 25 years after the fall of Jerusalem, be indicative of the after-effects of the fall of Jerusalem and subsequent exile by claiming as victim the scale and brutality of what happened against Edom as the suggested perpetrator? In Obadiah’s understanding of the social and systemic conditions of what happened during the fall of Jerusalem, it is crucial to identify a perpetrator and deal with their legacy. But this would suggest that there is still a dynamic of victim-perpetrator (cf. Critchell et al. 2017:19) in Obadiah’s social context, a suggestion in which the perpetrator is not so much Edom itself, but Edom as a representative of the nations under the wrath of Yhwh.

Verdaja (2017:10) thinks that any research on perpetrators should not be conceptually separated from other actors, for example, victims, bystanders, resisters, rescuers and the like (2017:9). However, perpetrator studies cannot ignore the moral imperative. A perpetrator is someone who performed appalling deeds and should be held responsible. In presenting perpetrators, the following issues are important: guilt, responsibility, complicity, collaboration, as well as in what way the victim-perpetrator dynamics are still present in the society (cf. Critchell et al. 2017:19). Of importance is not so much what is being represented but how. Critchell et al. (2017) refer to the representation of Eichmann in which they see multiple layers:

These layers cannot be understood independently of each other: each contributes to the presentation of what Eichmann embodied. It is a complicated process, and each representation might disrupt what one perceives as fiction or fact, or the real world or the created fictional or narrated world. Moreover, the perpetrator might be over-represented with the victim under-represented or vice-versa.

Given the moral imperative of agency that is implied in the word perpetrator, it stands to reason that a perpetrator would try to avoid being depicted as such by minimising agency even to the point of a self-presentation as victim (Williams 2017:40). Perpetrator testimony is problematic and testimony is explicitly or implicitly reserved for victims and witnesses (Schmidt 2017:87). Victims speak from first-hand experience whereas a third-party witness speaks from a position of impartiality and distance (2017:87). Both exclude the testimony of the perpetrator, which is disquieting for the simple reason that it is thought impossible for a perpetrator to be capable of telling the story of perpetration while voicing his or her own transgression.⁷

In a way, Obadiah’s reference to Edom puts the bible reader in a precarious position: Is Obadiah’s evidence accepted because of the power assumed behind his words as a prophet and as part of a sacred text? Or should the evidence be treated with more circumspection? Rosenfeld (2005:247) refers to alternate histories of the Holocaust that challenge the necessity of memory as a path to salvation. He (2005:241) refers to ‘allohistorical depictions’ of the Holocaust that appear to normalise the Nazi past in Western memory. These are depictions that portray the success of the Nazis, all of them in contrast to the motto ‘Never forget’, being sceptical of the utility of remembrance. Rosenfeld (2005:248) calls them an extreme form of vicarious memory, depicting events that were never experienced or never happened at all.

I have referred above to Zvi’s remark that the position on Edom is not part of the master-narrative in the Hebrew Bible, as there are positive references to Edom elsewhere. Smelser (2005:271) argues that it took about 35 years for the Holocaust master-narrative to emerge, yet within the context of the Cold War, it was challenged by a counter-narrative in the United States that romanticised the German army (Wehrmacht) in the face of the power of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). In this counter-narrative, the Wehrmacht is portrayed as the saviours of Western civilisation from communism, with Russia in the role of the barbarians (2005:273). In Germany itself, the victim narrative remained in the shadows, only to appear now after unification in looking at the firebombing of Germany by the Allied forces and expulsion of millions of Germans from Eastern Europe (Smelser 2005:283). It creates a moral equivalency between the Holocaust and the German national experience, the latter not displacing the former. But it is problematic, as Smelser (2005) concludes:

Edom is silent. The reader of Obadiah does not hear Edom’s side of the story and cannot give authority or accreditation to any Edomite testimony, because there is nothing. However, Schmidt (2017:99) acknowledges that ‘[t]here is something disquieting about the accreditation of perpetrators, about giving them the opportunity to articulate their version of history and, above all, about accepting their epistemic authority’. The listener then ends up with a troubling responsibility (2017:101), but one needs to read ‘between the lines for what is covered up, blocked out, obscured, and denied’ (2017:102). It is for this reason that Rosenfeld and Smelser distrust the allohistorical and counter-narratives, and probably why Obadiah voices an anti-Edomite tirade.

The problem with perpetrator testimony is that it is designed to keep intact the sense of self (Williams 2017:57). The sense of self refers to a particular integrity of the perpetrator to cope with what happened.⁸ A binary concept of victim and perpetrator simplifies the historical complexities within which both operated. In these terms, a perpetrator would particularise his or her actions in order to negate a wider responsibility, reduce agency and enhance passivity (cf. Williams 2017:51–57).⁹

Nonetheless, a perpetrator needs to frame his or her actions in such a way that the moral self remains intact so that they can continue to view themselves as good people of moral upstanding character (Anderson 2017:46). The reasoning with which morality is neutralised may be factually false, but emotionally true (2017:40). The question is whether the perpetrator’s self-representation minimises moral guilt and shame or whether it renders him or her vulnerable in order to enable affect and openness (cf. Snyman 2017a). To pass the blame means a lack of vulnerability, but it does not exclude the experience of trauma itself by the perpetrator.

In common parlance, trauma refers to harm and injury inflicted on the innocent, and not on the one causing the harm. But research has shown that people who participate in killing during military combat can become afflicted with a more intense form of PTSD (Blackie, Hitchcott & Joseph 2017:71). That a perpetrator can be afflicted with perpetration-induced traumatic stress runs against the morality of war. But the experience of guilt and shame may trigger such traumatic stress, especially given the fact that ordinary and law-abiding citizens may become perpetrators of violence in certain circumstances without being inherently cruel, sadistic or mentally ill. Guilt and shame relate to post-traumatic growth, with which a person can experience a transformation in particular patterns of thought, feelings and behaviour (2017:77), vulnerability in a positive sense.

The animation film, Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman 2008), focuses on the trauma of the Israeli perpetrator of atrocities against the Palestinians after the end of the second Intifada (Morag 2012:94).¹⁰ One gets a sense of some correspondence with the accusations Obadiah levelled against Edom. The main character and director of the film, Ari Folman, tries to remember the massacres of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila by seeking out other Israeli participants (they were all young soldiers of 19 years old at the time in 1982) to listen to their memories because his memory is failing him regarding these events. As the film proceeds, his memory returns until he realises he was shooting flares for the Christian phalanxes during the night of the massacre and encountering the trapped, wailing Palestinian women as they fled the camps that morning. As an Israeli soldier, he was complicit in the killing of able-bodied Palestinian men, very similar to Obadiah’s accusations towards Edom. His film is a way to construct his vulnerability and come to terms with his complicity in the killings.

In Obadiah, Edom is accused of standing idly by with Judah as the innocent victim of the Babylonian Kingdom’s imperial expansion. Within South Africa, whites are accused of standing idly by with the passing of the apartheid laws, allowing the creation of separateness in social structures. Obviously, this caused trauma in the midst of the black victims so that apartheid became, after its own fall, the chosen trauma with which whiteness is currently confronted with still 31 years after the fact. Obadiah wrote his prophecy supposedly 25 years after the fall of Jerusalem. The Judaic victims could be first and second-generation captives, but it seems that transgenerational transmission of trauma was well underway. The fall of Jerusalem is called up, as it seems that the generation is still unable to reverse the aftereffects of the Babylonian invasion. In South Africa, the millennials turn 30, and they ask uncomfortable questions to their parents and to whites, as they feel impotent to reverse the injury caused by the system of apartheid. Even more disturbing, it appears now that whites are unable to mourn the loss of power of 1994 because they never mourned the losses caused by the Anglo-Boer War 120 years earlier. But now they are confronted with a new trauma: the trauma of humiliation and shame of an immoral political system. Their good character is shattered and their integrity lost – the two most important things a perpetrator tries to maintain in the face of acknowledging wrongdoing.

In Obadiah, the reader only has the representation by the victim. We know the context of the latter was one of invasion by a foreign army, but was Edom also immediately in danger of being invaded? If so, the atrocities Judah accuses them of took place in a context of survival and major social upheaval with the presence of the Babylonian army. Could one then ascribe their action as one of self-preservation and not reduce it to the essence of evil, namely prejudice and hatred, as Obadiah seems to do? Ecology of the perpetrator is of utmost importance, especially when no one talks for them in the biblical text.

Given the ecology of the perpetrators, it becomes important to know who they are. In history, it seems perpetrators can be soldiers as killing machines, or simply ordinary men and women thrown into a particular context that turns them into perpetrators doing things they would never do in normal circumstances. To what kind of Edomite is Obadiah then referring? Soldiers whose task it is to defend and to kill if necessary, or simply ordinary people? Furthermore, was the danger posed by the invading Babylonian army so pervasive that its fear stretched into the Edomite population, causing them to strike pre-emptively? Was the invasion and subsequent fear so dominant that it pushed the Edomite people into a grey zone, causing moral injury among them from which they started to act in immoral ways, of which Judah now accused them in Obadiah? This too would suggest a trauma, but its effect is different and not symmetrical to that of the Judahite victims. Their perpetration would be ethical in nature and not physical or psychological, as was the case with the fall of Jerusalem. After all, Edom had a choice to participate or not.

In conclusion, our concept of Edom is not as multilayered as perpetrator studies assume perpetrators to be, because in the case of Obadiah, Edom remains silent and its representation is one-dimensional from the victim’s side. Perpetrator testimony is a complex issue and fraught with pitfalls in terms of justifications for the inequities committed. But nonetheless, looking at the perpetrator, and being sided with wrongdoing as in the case of whiteness in South Africa, how does a perpetrator maintain his or her integrity and sense of goodness? Is it possible, even advisable, especially when the ecology of the perpetrator is taken into account and the binary essentialisation dismissed? Is the perpetrator an unwanted ghost, perceived as unimaginable and not worthy of research?