edom

אֱדוֹם denotes Esau under his secondary name (Genesis 25:30; 36:1, 8, 19), the people descended from him, and their territory south and east of the Dead Sea. BDB and HALOT (s.v. אֱדוֹם) register the personal, collective, and geographic uses under a single entry; STEPBible's TBESH likewise distinguishes only the person (H0123H, cross-referenced to עֵשָׂו) from the land and nation (H0123G). The association with אָדֹם, "red," is transparent in Genesis 25:30 and is generally treated as etiological paronomasia rather than a secure derivation: Bartlett (Edom and the Edomites) observes that the toponym is attested in Egyptian sources well before the narrative that explains it, and the reddish Nubian sandstone of the region has often been proposed as the background. Dicou (Edom, Israel's Brother and Antagonist) traces the fraternal framing that governs the prophetic material (Amos 1:11; Obadiah; Jeremiah 49:7-22; Ezekiel 25:12-14; 35), where the referent regularly fuses population and territory, so that a syntactic signal (a spatial preposition, אֶרֶץ or גְּבוּל in the bound phrase, versus a finite verb of which אֱדוֹם is subject) is the practical basis for assigning an oracle occurrence to land or nation. Two textual matters bear on reading the lemma. At Amos 9:12 אֱדוֹם differs from אָדָם, "humanity," only by a vowel letter; the Septuagint read the latter, which underlies the citation in Acts 15:17, and Paul (Amos, Hermeneia) defends the Masoretic reading. Outside this lemma, the graphic similarity of דּ and רּ produces a recurring אֲרָם / אֱדוֹם variation in the manuscript tradition (e.g. 2 Kings 16:6), which is why parallel passages and translation footnotes sometimes disagree about which nation a verse names.