The book’s immediate addressee is Edom. The superscription and opening formula are explicit: לְאֱדוֹם (le‑ʼEdom, “to Edom”) introduces an oracle that addresses the nation as the object of divine speech, and the subsequent feminine pronominal reference (עליה, ’al‑hâ, “upon her”) confirms that the rhetoric is directed at Edom as a political and moral person. In the prophetic corpus such superscriptions are ordinarily not neutral descriptive tags but indicate the intended target of the word; the plain-sense, grammatical reading therefore identifies Edom as the primary audience of the oracle and the nation upon whom judgment is pronounced. The text’s linguistic and rhetorical features, however, show a broader communicative design. The clause צִיר בַּגּוֹיִם שׁלַח (tsîr ba‑gôyyim shâlach, “a messenger he has sent among the nations”) and the imperatives קֻּמוּ וְנָקוּמָה עָלֶיהָ (qumû ve‑nâqûmâ ʿaleyhâ, “Rise up, and let us rise up against her”) envisage the nations as instruments and participants in the announcement and enactment of judgment. The oracular voice thereby stages an international audience—both as the actors God dispatches and as a wider hearing for the pronouncement. Internal address‑forms and taunts directed at Edom’s wise and mighty (cf. the book’s later denunciations of elites) indicate that the oracle is particularly aimed at Edom’s leadership and social elites, whose conduct is under indictment. Canonical and historical context further nuance the audience. The charges against Edom (collusion at Judah’s calamity, violence against “brother” Jacob) imply that the text was preserved within Israel’s prophetic tradition for the instruction and consolation of Judah/Israel; if the oracle belongs to the late‑seventh/early‑sixth century BC horizon commonly defended by evangelical scholarship, the immediate human recipients likely included exilic Judeans who experienced Edom’s betrayal. Thus the book functions on multiple levels: (1) as an addressed oracle against Edom, (2) as a proclamation involving the nations as instruments of God’s justice, and (3) as part of Israel’s corpus of prophetic witness, read and retained by the community of Judah/Israel. Exegetically, therefore, the original audience is best described as primarily Edom (the direct addressee), with a mediated public dimension that includes the nations (as agents and hearers) and the people of Israel/Judah (as the canonical recipients who preserve the oracle). This threefold horizon—target, international stage, and Israelite reception—accounts for both the book’s address and its preservation within Israel’s prophetic canon.

The word בָּזוּי (bāzûy) in Obadiah 1:2 is the Qal passive participle (Masc. Sing. Absolute) of the root בָּזָה (bazah), functioning as a predicate adjective: “despised.” Grammatically it stands in predication with the independent pronoun אַתָּה (attah) and the intensifier מְאֹד (meʾod), yielding the force “you are greatly/exceedingly despised.” The participial form marks a resultant state rather than a finite past action; the people addressed (Edom) are described as presently bearing the condition of contempt among the nations as the prophetic oracle is declared. Lexically the root בָּזָה carries the semantic range of holding in contempt, despising, or treating as worthless. The combination of קָטֹן (qaton, “small”) in v.1 with בָּזוּי אַתָּה מְאֹד produces a twofold portrayal: diminution (political and social abasement) and moral/social contempt (active scorn by other nations). The passive participle implies that the contempt is effected by others (the nations), even as the preceding verb נְתַתִּי־ךָ (nəṯattî-ka, “I have made you”) locates the ultimate causality in the divine act of judgment. Thus the clause attributes both the status (despised) and its origin (God’s sovereign judgment producing national humiliation). Translation choices should reflect both the adjectival/resultant sense and the intensity signaled by מְאֹד: “you are greatly despised” or “you are utterly held in contempt.” The participle’s passive nuance rules against readings that take the form as active (“you despise”) or as a simple absolutive noun (“a despised one”); the context and morphology favor a predicate describing Edom’s condition among the nations as the prophet announces Yahweh’s condemnation.

The word translated “despised” renders the Hebrew בָּז֥וּי (bāzûy), a Qal passive participle (Masc. Sg. absolute) that functions predicatively with the pronoun אַתָּה. As a Qal passive participle it denotes a resulting state: the addressee is to be understood as ‘‘in the condition of being despised’’ rather than as performing an action. The adverb מְאֹד immediately following (מְאֹד) intensifies that state—‘‘very’’ or ‘‘exceedingly’’—so that the clause reads literally, ‘‘despised you are greatly.’' Lexically the root בָּזָה carries the semantic range of contempt, scorn, and treating as worthless; the passive participial form commonly functions adjectivally in the prophets to mark social or cultic humiliation. Syntactically the participle supplies a predicate in a verbless clause (or, with the copular force furnished by the pronoun, a copular clause) and therefore describes the present condition of Edom. No explicit agent is expressed in the participle itself; the immediate context, however, supplies the causal frame: the previous clause (נְתַתִּי) states Yahweh’s action—“I have made you small among the nations”—so the state of being despised is presented as the result or effect of divine judgment. Interpretive options center on whether the passive participle points primarily to the nations’ contempt (an external social reaction) or to the state wrought by Yahweh (divine humiliation accomplished through history). The mainstream reading in confessional evangelical scholarship takes both together: the participle describes Edom’s resultant dishonor—an objective, ongoing status—brought about by Yahweh’s act of reduction among the nations. A minority reading would emphasize the participle as reporting only the nations’ attitude without explicit reference to divine causation, but the close syntactic and semantic link to נְתַתִּי favors the former: בָּז֥וּי here is a stative passive meaning ‘‘held in contempt/exceedingly despised,’' a condition Yahweh has brought upon Edom and which other peoples now manifest.

The name in the superscription, עֹבַדְיָה (ʼOvadyah/Obadiah), literally means “servant of YHWH” (ʻeved‑YHWH); the phrase חֲזוֹן עֹבַדְיָה (ḥazon ʼOvadyah) functions as a standard prophetic superscription, “the vision of Obadiah,” and thus claims the oracle as coming from a prophet so named. In the prophetic books such superscriptions ordinarily identify the prophet who received and proclaimed the word; the simplest and majority reading, therefore, is that the book preserves an oracle given by a prophet named Obadiah. To say that Obadiah is the titular and primary source of the material accords with the canonical form and with the testimony of the text itself (v. 1’s “Thus says the Lord GOD…”). Scholarly discussion has produced several alternative proposals. One minority view identifies the prophet with the Obadiah of 1 Kings 18 (Ahab’s official who sheltered prophets), arguing the rarity of the name and the existence of a known Obadiah in Israel’s history. This identification is, however, unconvincing on internal grounds: the Obadiah of 1 Kings is portrayed as a court official in the ninth century BC (the Omride period), whereas the theological and historical horizon of the Obadiah oracle — Edom’s behavior at the time of Israel/Judah’s calamity (note vv. 10–14) and the vocabulary of “the day of the LORD” and the destruction of Jacob’s house — more readily fits the Babylonian crisis and the fall of Jerusalem in the late-seventh/early-sixth century BC. Moreover, the personal profile and social location implied by the two portraits differ; the onomastic coincidence does not establish identity. A smaller number of commentators have argued for even later dating (exilic or postexilic) and for a later prophetic school or redactor as the final author, citing perceived parallels with postexilic lists of nations and editorial seams. Such views point to the possibility of later compilation or editorial shaping. The balance of linguistic, thematic, and historical indicators in the book, however, favors an early post‑judgment setting (i.e. shortly after Jerusalem’s fall) and a prophetial origin attributed to an individual named Obadiah. Thus the text is most plausibly read as an oracle originally delivered by a prophet called Obadiah and later transmitted in the form preserved in the book; identification with the Obadiah of 1 Kings is not warranted, and while later redactional activity is possible as it is with many prophetic books, the claim of a prophet‑author named Obadiah remains the best-supported conclusion.