Obadiah, also rendered Abdias or Avdiou, is numbered among the Twelve Minor Prophets of the Old Testament and is commemorated by the Orthodox Church on November 19. His name is traditionally understood to mean "servant" or "worshipper of the Lord." The brief book that bears his name is the fourth of the Twelve and the shortest book of the Hebrew Bible, devoted chiefly to a prophecy of judgment against Edom and the eventual deliverance of the people of God.
By the tradition preserved in the synaxarion, Obadiah lived in the ninth century B.C. and came from the village of Betharam, near Sichem, in the land of Palestine. He served as steward in the household of the impious King Ahab of Israel at a time when the kingdom had turned away from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to the worship of Baal. Outwardly an officer of the court, Obadiah remained faithful to the true God in secret. When Ahab's wife Jezebel set about destroying the prophets of the Lord, he sheltered and fed them, an episode the tradition connects to the account in the first book of Kings.
The tradition further relates that King Ahaziah dispatched detachments of soldiers to seize the Prophet Elias, and that Obadiah, placed at the head of one such band, was spared when heavenly fire consumed the others. Following this deliverance he is said to have left military service and become a follower of Elias. Having afterward received the gift of prophecy, he composed the book that carries his name. By the same tradition he was buried in Samaria, and Orthodox iconography depicts him as a grey-haired elder with a rounded beard.
The prophetic book ascribed to him pronounces the downfall of Edom, the neighboring kingdom reckoned as descended from Esau, for its violence against Judah, and looks forward to the restoration of Israel and a wider salvation. Modern biblical scholarship debates the date of the book, with proposals ranging from the ninth century to the period after the fall of Jerusalem in 587 B.C., and notes that little is securely known of the prophet's own life apart from the traditions attached to his name.
