Albert Barnes Commentary Obadiah 1:8

"Shall I not in that day, saith Jehovah, destroy the wise men out of Edom, and understanding out of the mount of Esau?" — Obadiah 1:8 (ASV)

Shall I not in that day even destroy the wise out of Edom? - It was then no common, no recoverable, loss of wisdom, because God, the Author of wisdom, had destroyed it. The pagan had a proverb, “Whom God wills to destroy, he first dements.” So Isaiah foretells of Judah (Isaiah 29:14), “The wisdom of their wise shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent shall be hid.” Edom was celebrated long ago for its wisdom.

Eliphaz, the chief of Job’s friends, the representative of human wisdom, was a Temanite (Job 4:1). A vestige of the name of the Shuhites, from where another of his friends came, probably still lingers among the mountains of Edom. Edom is doubtless included among the “sons of the East” (1 Kings 4:30) whose wisdom is set as a counterpart to that of Egypt—the highest human wisdom of that period, by which Solomon's wisdom would be measured: “Solomon’s wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the children of the East country and all the wisdom of Egypt.”

In Baruch, they are still mentioned among the chief types of human wisdom : “It (wisdom) has not been heard of in Canaan, neither has it been seen in Teman. The Agarenes that seek wisdom upon earth, the merchants of Meran and of Teman, the authors of fables and searchers-out of understanding, none of these have known the way of wisdom, or remember her paths.”

Therefore, Jeremiah (Jeremiah 49:7), in using these words of Obadiah, says: “Is wisdom no more in Teman? Is counsel perished from the prudent? Is their wisdom vanished?” He speaks as if Edom were a known abode of human wisdom, so that it was strange that it was found there no more. He speaks of the Edomites “as prudent,” discriminating, full of judgment, and wonders that counsel should have “perished” from them.

They had it eminently then, before it perished. They thought themselves wise; they were thought so; but God took it away at their utmost need. So He says of Egypt (Isaiah 19:3, 11-12): “I will destroy the counsel of it. The counsel of the wise counselors of Pharaoh has become brutish. How do you say to Pharaoh, I am the son of the wise, the son of ancient kings? Where are they? Who are your wise? And let them tell you now, and let them know, what the LORD of hosts has purposed upon Egypt.” And of Judah (Jeremiah 19:7): “I will make void the counsel of Judah and Jerusalem in this place.”

The people of the world think that they hold their wisdom and all God’s natural gifts independently of the Giver (God). God, by the events of His natural Providence, as here by His word, shows, through some sudden withdrawal of their wisdom, that it is His, not theirs! People wonder at the sudden failure, the flaw in the well-arranged plan, the one over-confident act which ruins the whole scheme, the over-shrewdness which betrays itself, or the unaccountable oversight. They are amazed that one so shrewd should overlook this or that, and do not consider that He, in whose hands are our powers of thought, did not supply precisely that insight on which the whole depended.